Last Year #13: What I watched on my summer vacation

I started this blog on the final day of my last ever summer vacation.  During June, July and August I binge-watched a few shows:  Downtown Abbey (all 3 seasons), last summer's Dexter (Season 7), Top of the Lake, and all three parts of the UK version of House of Cards.  I'll say more about the actual shows in another blog-post.  As a committed daily blogger I will, after all,  be starving for content soon enough.  And I do like to write about moving pictures.

But tonight I want to say a few words about binge viewing. The practice has been called "a pandemic" by Jim Pagels, a Slate op-ed dude who thinks binge viewing bad for a variety of aesthetic reasons including episodes having "an integrity of their own."  The Wall Street Journal sees binging as a threat not to the aesthetic traditions of yor but to the industries who relied on a certain pattern of access.

But even though the binge-viewing has become main-stream, it isn't all that new a concept.

I am, for once, an early adopter - of a trend, at least.  Back in the mid-eighties I watched all 15 1/2 hours of a German mini-series called Berlin Alexanderplatz in just two days.  My sweet Babboo, then a senior prof at Idaho State University, talked the Speakers and Artists Committee of said institution into renting a 16mm version of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder masterpiece.  It was shown over the course of the week and then in full again over the weekend.  I was living in and going to school in Salt Lake City at the time, a 3 hour drive away.  When I came up for the weekend, I found out that my spouse had pretty much arranged for his school to give me a gigantic birthday present -- a hard-to-find movie by one of my favorite directors!

So, that's an example of early adoption binge-watching.  I don't consider the ten hour Our Hitler:  A Film from Germany (subject of 1/2 my ISU master's thesis) to be binge watching because it was conceived by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg as a single art piece.   Watching all of it at once is a meal, not a binge. 

And could "movie orgies" be thought of as early adoptee binge watching?  Back in the days of my ISU student government film programing, I planned a couple of science fiction orgies, based on the ones I'd seen in California.  These film orgies started in early afternoon and ran till after midnight.  They generally offered a variety of films of the same subject matter:  science fiction, westerns, Planet of the Apes movies.

How does sitting in a theatre and watching for 5-10 hours at a time differ from sitting in one's living room doing the same thing?

List at least five differences between the home setting and the theatrical setting for a movie/tv binge.  You have ten minutes.