In case you haven’t noticed recently, the movie industry is in a bit of a slump.

The celebrities are off stuffing themselves with carbon-neutral soy turkey and suchlike, and the rest of us are still in a shallow coma from eating Grandma’s cooking for like three straight days since Thursday.  News is in a bit of a slump, so I’m gonna wax philosophical.  Because it may be a holiday, but the blogging got to go on, baby.

So I’m looking for some background noise whilst playing flash games and trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to write about since all my news haunts are deader than disco thanks to Thanksgiving.  It’s a great holiday–unlike a lot of people I don’t really have any problems with my family and a big free meal that lasts two days AND involves leftovers to which all I have to contribute is a seven-dollar pie from the local grocery is welcome any time of the year.  The pie, in case you wondered, was blueberry.  And it was AWESOME.  But anyway.

I finally manage to stumble onto an old showing of the eighties musical Annie.  And I’m watching this girl stumble through Radio City Music Hall just absolutely ENTHRALLED at watching Garbo in “Camille”, and I’m thinking, damn, when did that stop being us?

And then I realize, about the time the video store came into being.  When that movie came out, and Annie ran into the huge-ass music hall to watch this show, this was in a time when movie theatres were more accurately called movie PALACES, and the architecture was almost as enthralling as the show itself.  Back then, of course, a new movie might come out every week, or maybe every OTHER week.  There’d be newsreels and cartoons and such–what you got for a nickel back then makes what you get for your eight to ten bucks today look SICK–but more than fifty movies in a year was a banner year.

Now we’ve got Netflix. You realize that Netflix has over SEVENTY THOUSAND TITLES?  Now, let’s stop and consider that for a second.  Figure that a movie runs, on average, ninety minutes.  I know, Netflix has TV box sets and such too, so this’ll be a little inaccurate, but still.  Okay, seventy thousand titles at ninety minutes on average per title is a whopping six point three million minutes.  That works out to be a hundred and five thousand hours, four thousand three hundred seventy five days, and here’s the kicker, kids—only a heartbeat shy of TWELVE YEARS.

If you sat down tomorrow and did absolutely nothing with the rest of your life but watch the Netflix inventory–and I mean nothing–you would come out on the other side around about December of 2020.  And by then you’d have a dozen years’ worth of movies to watch, which would probably take you ANOTHER few years to grind through.

Now think back to Annie.  A movie back then…was a rarity.  Today they’re commodities.

But are they really just commodities?  Despite the massive amount of them out there, are we still an integral part of the show, with our memories making the movies special?  How can we get excited about something that’s so deeply a part of our lives, like a car or the grocery store or the toothbrush?

How many of you had a first date revolve around the movies?  Who here remembers making out in a theatre or on the couch at home whilst a movie played in the background?  Who remembers the day they went to a movie with a group of friends and it was one of the best days of their LIFE??  Who remembers that one great Halloween party made even better by gathering around the flickering box and watching, say, Children of the Corn?  Or maybe Night of the Living Dead?  And then, maybe, making fun of it in the grandest Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style?

I hope it’s not just me, man.  I really hope it’s not just me.

For the sake of the movies I hope it’s not just me.

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