Going to see a movie in a theater, even

Sinners
1. Is it a good movie or is it just on a big screen?
I have seen four movies for adults in the theater since Covid: Tár, Decision to Leave, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, and Sinners. I loved all of them. Sometimes I think it's just the throwback element to it: these are the four movies I have seen without even the possibility of distraction. But there's also a selection effect in place: I will not waste precious alone time on something that I expect to be less than amazing. (None of them are my favorite movies I've seen in the last few years, so even if there's an effect, it does not swamp everything else.)

Arguing against a general movie effect: I have seen some truly forgettable kids' movies in the theater: Inside Out 2, which I did not like, and another whose name I cannot even conjure up out of the depths. Dog Man I did like, but it would've been just as good at home.

2. What is a movie, anyway?
There is "the scene" of music and dancing that reminded me, in a good way, of MGM musicals and is pretty out of step with how music is filmed nowadays. The best recent uses of dance and music in movies that I've seen are "It's Too Late to Turn Back Now" in BlacKKKlansman and "Silly Games" in Lover's Rock, but even these are more concerned with the sensuous effects of the music itself; there aren't really ideas there, except that to dance and listen to music and be young are all joyful things to be celebrated. The music in Sinners has Ideas, that playing true, good music is a connection to what it means to be human and what it means to be divine, and that there can be a kind of transcendence of space and time in the right moment, and--as someone who has played and listened to music avidly for pretty much his entire life--that seems right to me. In playing music you can, on purpose or inadvertently, produce something much more powerful than you expect. It does, at the right moment, feel like nothing and everything happening at the same time, maybe everything in the world happening, maybe everything that has ever happened or will happen. But then, I freely admit, music does have that power over me--I am already prepared to believe the thing proposed.

But what the scene does is expand, or re-inflate, the vocabulary of what a movie can be, how practical and computer-generated effects can coexist: the music clearly goes hybrid at various points, but the dancers on the floor do have to get out of the way of the people who appear and then disappear. The camera makes some impossible moves but the "oh wait there's more?!" feeling is evoked by camera placement and movement.

And this leads me back to what a movie is. A long time ago, my ideal movie was two people talking at each other for 90 minutes (i.e., My Dinner With Andre). And then in the midst of watching Singin' in the Rain for 600 times (not an exaggerated number) I had to make peace with the "Broadway Melody" section being my favorite: it adds nothing to the plot, changes the movie in no way, and stops everything else happening for 15 minutes. And yet: it increases the emotional range of a movie that is mostly trying to be funny and a little mean. (I saw this movie 600 times and no matter how tired I was of it, the early line "they've been together for two weeks but they're still as happy as newlyweds" would always make me cackle.) So also in An American in Paris, so also those musical numbers listed above, so also many elements in movies that do nothing to move the story along.

All of that is to say that I'm now, as often as not, looking for something in a movie that can only be in a movie: not a video game or a tv show or a book.