This is one of the reasons I’ve become more interested in local theater. The dropped lines, unexpected blackouts, and last-minute casting replacements are what makes it so much more engaging to me than a slick professional production. Avatar left me completely numb… yes the visuals were stunning, but I feel much more connected to fantasy characters in a BBC-TV video production from the 1980s.

We are living in an age of casual magic, and it has numbed everyone on both ends of the equation. Filmmakers are so used to being able to just call someone and ask them to do the impossible that they take it for granted, and audiences have become so jaded about the effects they see that when things are anything less than flawless, they get angry about it. Never mind that we are frequently seeing people reinvent the entire process of how something is created onscreen, sometimes starting a movie not entirely sure how they’re going to accomplish everything they have in mind, and innovations seem to happen every year now. People expect flawlessness, and anything less is unacceptable.

via Hitfix