It’s time for movies to be honest about our relationships — with our phones
Despite the fact that so much of our communication now happens online, TV and film have traditionally done a bad job of translating our texts, emails, and DMs to the screen. There are a lot of good reasons why: text communication doesn’t have the inherent drama of face-to-face dialogue. It dates itself quickly. And, as Tony Zhou pointed out in his video “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film” on Vimeo, dedicating precious screen time to depicting, well, another screen, can be counterintuitive and expensive. Text-based conversations on-screen often end up feeling awkward and unnatural, with geriatrically large text to let us read over a character’s shoulder, off-brand emoji floating in midair, or, worst of all, characters that...