MR. VAN CLEEF DOES NOT “TEXT”

It’s a little bit cool out and I am on the front porch, and it is pleasant enough. I watched Escape From New York yesterday in the afternoon—it was really nice to hang out in my office space and chill with a classic while waiting for a thunderstorm that never showed. Lee Van Cleef  is so great in that – he has incredible presence.  He could lift one eyebrow and make Chuck Norris run home.

It’s wonderful to watch a film without cell phones as main characters. There is all sorts of goofy prescient tech in Escape From New York, but no one is on screen looking at their phone. It would be easy to get fuddy-duddy about this – don’t want to be that guy. Technology becomes part of stories—ships, cars, nuclear arsenals, phones, smart phones. Soon it will be implanted tech, robotic tech, virtual projections—not sci-fi, but actually how people live and relate to each other. And that will be a new milieu required to tell a story we recognize as our own.  And then that will change. 

Still—damn I like a pre-smart phone movie. 🎞☎️🎥