Killing cinema

Today's obit in the Times for Bruno Ganz made me ponder the state of the cinema today. It listed so many films I had never heard of, by directors I know. There was a time that I stayed on top of this kind of thing, but that time is long, long past, having been superceded by the earning of dollars and the raising of rugrats.

But I wonder if we have perhaps failed these very rugrats by not letting them know that we care about cinema. Mary and I used to go to a lot of movies, even films. Our very first real conversation, after all, was anchored by sharing our love for Dushan Makaveyev's work (and Wikipedia now tells me that Makaveyev died a few weeks ago).

So there is this very broad corpus of great work to which we haven't exposed our kids at all. Yes, we have shown them Monty Python, and Peter Sellers's best work (including The Mouse That Roared), and Airplane. When they were young, I had a copy of Mr Hulot's Holiday and I tried to get them involved in it, with a little success. I think we've shown them a little Hitchcock.

But mostly not. Mostly we watch whatever we can get them to watch, which has been a lot of sitcoms for Natalie and an awful lot of adventure for Graham. A lot of Star Trek, which has been good for me.

And I guess they are just at the age at which the great and slow stuff might even begin to appeal to them. To get to that stage myself, I basically had to consume such a huge volume of genre stuff that I was exhausted by its conventions -- that I basically already knew what was likely to come next.

I think Graham is getting there. We're in the middle of season 3 of The Wire now. Barksdale just got out of prison, and has reentered the world of his criminal enterprise, which has been nurtured by Stringer Bell in his absence, who has substantially corporatized and defanged it, making it more profitable and less deadly, but something Barksdale can't understand. Graham looked at Stringer and Barksdale and said: "I think within three episodes one of those two will have killed the other one." I agree.