Ah, I must've known that The Rock and Armageddon got Criterion treatment and blocked it out of my memory. Maybe they were just being ironic?

And that Salon article about the rowing sequence was enough to convince me to see The Social Network. (Although it's also a scene with no dialogue, so no guarantees I'll be able to make it through).

Definitely excellent points about the economics of episodic vs features, points you'd think I would've picked up on. I was just wondering why all the standout TV-are-as-good-as-movies-now examples were series instead of feature-length, without even remember three years spent trying to think of how to reuse sets without its seeming like reusing sets. And it's the built-in marketing, too: part of the economics that makes episodic appealing is the potential for building up buzz the longer the series goes on.

Plus after seeing a couple of made-for-TV movies (like Temple Grandin and that one about Jack Kevorkian) get so much critical praise but not a ton of buzz otherwise, I'm skeptical that Social Network could've recouped its investment.

And I definitely agree that spectacular movies could stand to be smarter. That's kind of the point I keep trying and failing to make: the notion that "thrill ride" and "story" are mutually exclusive is just lazy false cynicism. Harris's article is full of it. It's the conventional wisdom: Hollywood execs only interested in the bottom line, complaining that all these great ideas are too smart for the lasers-and-robots crowd and insisting on dumbing the movies down in favor of more spectacle, and audiences just lap it up. I'm skeptical.

I'm not naive enough to believe that no Hollywood exec has ever complained about a screenplay that reads over a 4th-grade level is too high-brow. There are lazy execs just like there are lazy filmmakers, and lazy film industry observers. And the easiest thing to do is mis-read an audience who says (either with box office or focus testing) that they liked the lasers and explosions and interpret that to mean they're too dumb to appreciate anything else. And when you've written a scene that's dull and talky, the easiest thing to do is to complain that the audience just doesn't get it.

But I don't see how that has anything to do with Top Gun, or how movies like Transformers are keeping better movies from getting made. I really believe it's just that making a profitable movie is easier, and therefore more common, than making a good one. People see the correlation between spectacle and crap, and they assume that means causation. But there's plenty of contrary evidence: all three of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were hugely expensive and marketing-driven, but one of the three was actually good.

I'd still like to believe there's a viable venue for feature-length movies outside of theaters. Maybe not if a movie about Facebook costs 40 million dollars to make, though.