Hmm speaking of going to the movies. How many people here are still going to the theater to see a movie? I don't even remember the last time I went. I suspect a combination of (I became too lazy | I became too snobby and selective | Movies have gotten worse | Theater prices got too expensive) happened.
I and my wife go there once in a while. Thing is - we have have nor TV, nor Netflix/Hulu/etc. As a result, after careful research we really enjoy movie (well, almost always) and after movie we go to restaurant. This is really nice to have it once in a while. It is not about movie itself, but about going to movie theater with someone.
I said it somewhere already, but will repeat myself - "Treat yourself, not bloat". This is a secret to good experience with movie theaters (and with most things in life, actually :))
Anthony Lane takes on this question (why do/should people still go to the theater for a movie) in this week's New Yorker:
"There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended."
I think it's interesting even if you don't agree with him (he's as much a part of the "old guard" as anyone I guess, as a grumpy snobbish Brit writing for the NYer, and therefore is has something invested in the nostalgia of going to the theater, even if not a monetary investment).
I'm 100% unsure of what you mean here. What peers?