Peter O’Toole in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. — AP pic NEW YORK, Nov 21 — Movies are increasingly creeping online, as video sites like YouTube and Hulu are adding feature films to their extensive libraries.
At the Google-owned YouTube, there is the YouTube Screening Room, which every two weeks adds four new films — mostly independent works — to the site. Hulu, the joint creation of NBC Universal and News Corp, has hundreds of films available for stream, from “Basic Instinct” to “Wuthering Heights”.
Of course, many people download films illegally on BitTorrent sites, but movies are nevertheless becoming more populated — legally — online.
Hulu recently added 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, which begs the question: Should anyone watch a nearly four-hour-long epic of sweeping grandeur on their laptop? Or, heaven forbid, their cell phone?
Here are the top 10 films that should never be brought down to size:
1. “Lawrence of Arabia”: David Lean’s film, which won seven Oscars including best picture, was made for the big screen — particularly as projected in all of its 70mm glory. Though Hulu (like YouTube) streams films in high quality, the enormity of the Arabian desert loses something when dwarfed to a 4-inch by 6-inch screen.
2. “Last of the Mohicans”: Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel pulses with the raw nature of early America so much that film critic David Thomson has written that he expects William Wordsworth to pop up at any moment. You won’t get that rugged feeling on a computer.
3. “Jaws”: Really, how scary can that shark be if he’s two inches tall?
4. “North By Northwest”: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic is just too big for your computer. It’s almost too big for a movie screen. The film, after all, includes a chase seen with an airplane, Bernard Herrmann’s robust score, Mount Rushmore and, well, Cary Grant in sunglasses.
5. “Star Wars”: It’s true, a hologram of Princess Leia on your computer is just about as fitting as one of Will.i.am on CNN. But do you really want to see (spoiler alert!) the Death Star explode next to your e-mail?
6. “War Games”: There isn’t anything so cinematic about this 1983 thriller starring Matthew Broderick. But watching a movie about Cold War-era paranoia in which a computer threatens to bomb the world might cause you to panic out of distrust for all things computerised and throw your laptop out the window.
7. “Barry Lyndon”: The same computer rebellion of “War Games” might also apply to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, but the Kubrick film that deserves the absolute best presentation is his 1975 period piece. The cinematography by John Alcott — including a candlelit scene shot with Nasa-developed camera lenses — is best seen projected in the dark.
8. “Raiders of the Lost Ark”: You have to worry that a story about an adventure-seeking archaeologist with a whip fetish who gets chased by boulders might seem a tad unrealistic when shrunk down from the big screen. (But feel free to be disappointed by the latest “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on whatever platform you like.)
9. “The Third Man”: Carol Reed’s 1949 film is one of the most exquisitely shot films ever and meant for the movie theatre. Also, a web junky might take the wrong lesson from “The Third Man”. The Internet has a way of depersonalising people, much in the way Orson Welles famously looks down at far below humans from atop a Ferris wheel in “The Third Man”, caring nothing if the “little dots” stopped moving.
10. “You’ve Got Mail”: It’s just a little too cutesy to watch this romantic comedy on your computer, don’t you think? — AP
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