"I’m an African-American man, so I speak plainly. It was a Black theater. You yelled at the screen, and folks would talk."

"A major component of Black existence is forced comportment in white spaces. There is a comfort derived from taking off the disguise, if just for a few minutes in the cinema." 

Said Cyrus McQueen, a stand-up comedian, quoted in "The ‘Shouting Back’ Theater Abruptly Closes, and Brooklyn Mourns/A rowdy movie house suddenly goes dark, inspiring an outpouring of dismay and reminiscences" (NYT).

The theater closed last Sunday, taking regulars by surprise.... Dean Fleischer-Camp, a filmmaker, said that his favorite movie experience ever involved people “screaming, laughing, singing” and “throwing popcorn” during a 6 p.m. screening of “Drag Me to Hell.” Lincoln Restler, the newly elected councilman whose district includes Downtown Brooklyn, shared a picture of a moving van parked outside. “For the shouting-back-at-action-movie experience,” he wrote, “there was no place better!”

"And studios are loath to send out screening links because they... can see how we watch the movies via the links they send us."

"They can see where we pause, how many times we rewind, how often we start again altogether. Most tellingly, they know when a critic checks out completely: said critic lets the movie play all the way through the credits. No one watches a (non-Marvel) movie all the way through the credits.Watching at home just encourages bad habits. It introduces kids, laptops, pets, phones, doorbells, Twitter, bathroom breaks, endless distractions.... But studios and filmmakers are correct to counter writers’ desire for greater convenience with the fact that watching films at home is simply inferior to doing so safely in a theater."

From "No more home screeners. Critics should watch movies in theaters like everyone else" by Sonny Bunch (WaPo).

The most depressing part of that was "(non-Marvel)."

Top-rated comment: "Any movie worth a damn can withstand the slightly 'atomized' experience of a home theater. This is 'old man yells at cloud'-level nonsense." What about all the old men who can't sit through a whole movie without going to the bathroom? 

"Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?"

That's from the intro to "Why Are People So Mad About Don’t Look Up? Climate change is a tough subject for any film, let alone a satire."

It's a podcast — audio and transcript at the link — with various Atlantic staff people (Kevin Townsend, Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber). I have seen the movie, by the way.

I think the quote I put in the post title is trite and foolish. The difference between the present and the past is the present is where you're living now. It's self-involved to believe that in the past, you could do parody and satire, but now — now! — things are already so absurd that there's nothing to add, no way to exaggerate, and we're suffering in some extreme new way that makes comedy impossible.

But let's see what these people have to say:

Sims: You could make a more straight-ahead blockbuster movie.... But... this flirts with being... more like a Dr. Strangelove kind of movie. A pure anarchic satire that is set in the real world, but every character is cartoonish, and there’s no sense of humanity whatsoever. But Don’t Look Up tries to retain this core of humanity... 

Gilbert: [T]here was the idea that Trump defied satire, because he was bigger than it could ever manage to be in its wildest imagination. I also think it’s really hard to satirize things when you’re in the middle of them.....

Kornhaber: I think this quest for movies to deliver a message that changes people’s minds is maybe quixotic. There aren’t a ton of works in history like that.... True, you can’t really satirize Trump. He’s kind of beyond parody. But you can call attention to the dynamics of the way that people relate to him and the effect he has on the world around him—and on the viewers themselves.

Comedy is hard! It's not enough to sign up a lot of stars and spend a ton of money and pick an important topic. Why would you expect it to be good in the first place? Dr. Strangelove is great, but you have to make some choices and exercise discipline. Sims reveals, based on an interview with the director....

DiCaprio was obviously interested in the project and the message but was not going to commit until they’d figured out his character. He clearly did not want to be in a cartoony pastiche movie.

That precluded the Strangelove approach. I'd like to see a comedy about making "Dr. Strangelove" in which all the actors are divas insisting on their character's humanity. 

Are any of you trying to watch "Don't Look Up"?

I'm trying to watch it, but what I've been doing is watching maybe 20 or 30 minutes and stopping, then starting again on another day. I think I've had 4 bites of it on a sequence of days, but I'm still far from the end.

I'm interested, but I get annoyed. I think it's badly written and badly directed. The timing is wrong. I don't know. I'm fascinated by the character who talks like Jordan Peterson — Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell. I think Jennifer Lawrence is good as the "We're all gonna die!" girl. Leonardo DiCaprio's character is interesting enough, and Meryl Streep is reasonably funny as the ditzy President.

Here's some of what Mark Rylance does:

UPDATE: I finally got to the end. The end was handled well. Spoiler alert: The meaning of life is to sit down to dinner with your family, say grace, and show the love.