TV shows—such as The Sopranos—are more riveting than most of the overrated offerings found at the multiplex. Photo illustration by Jacques Del Conte.

In the 1960s (many of you weren’t around for that decade, but trust me—it was wild), one of the countercultural articles of faith was that you didn’t so much watch a movie as lean back and “let it wash over you.” It was still possible then to believe in the pore-cleansing powers of sensory overload and oceanic bliss, no matter how many Elvis Presley musicals gunked up the drive-ins. The movie screen was sacramental, the wide horizon on which Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean played God. Compared with the puny portal of the television box, the movie screen bespoke a cool blank inscrutable mystique—a billboard-size tabula rasa ready to burst into tapestry. So much expectation hinged on that tingling moment in the theater when the lights dimmed and the curtains parted, revealing the screen staring back at us, virgin with possibility. “Let us pray,” Pauline Kael would sometimes mutter, not in a religious spirit (she was not a religious person) but in the hope that something wonderful was about to unveil, something that would make up for the lousy film the day before.

Today our prayers fly in different directions. We pray for the movie to finally get started after a face-blasting bombardment of ads and previews cranked up at full volume and, later, much later, after we’ve forgotten our reason for existence, pray for the film to finish already. Please, Mommy, make it stop. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was longer than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a callow affront to all that is holy. And as the film takes forever to burn off its budget, the fidgets in the audience flip their cell phones on to check for messages, gray lights going on and off like little refrigerator doors being opened and shut by obsessive-compulsives, or, worse, take an incoming call and start narrating what’s happening on-screen to the idiot at the other end. For me, the ideal time to go to the movies used to be the dead of the afternoon, when the empty seats outnumbered the lonely wayfarers. Now the ideal time to go to the movies is almost never. With home theaters going big, wide, and hi-def with digital cable, plasma screens, and sound systems, the aesthetic gap between multiplexing and couch-potatoing has never been narrower, but that doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t happen to have a wall-size plasma screen that hypnotizes. It’s content that provides the killer edge, that makes the choice between what’s at the movies and what’s on TV nearly no contest. Strip away the glitter and grandiosity and the truth is that most of what’s on the movie screen runs a ragged second to what’s available on television at a fraction of the aggravation.

TV promises so much less, yet gives so much more.

This is one of those articles that I read where I did a lot of head bobbing, “Yes, EXACTLY”, and fist pumping. It was embarrassing for all those on the plane with me. Finish the article here.