iPhones to films are what mustard is to ice cream.  In the theater, they are pernicious, and I yearn for the day when those who are on their devices during a picture are summarily placed in stocks in front the multiplex where they can be freely pelted with Milk Duds and Cherry Icees.

At home, the impact is no better, but at least you’re only draining your own brain.

That said … the iPhone test is real, and it is reliable.

If you are watching a movie, and you feel the urge to check your texts, a sports score, or social media, or Bumble, you should resist that urge.

But the existence of the urge is telling you something valid.

Well, more than one thing.  Primarily, it is telling you that your attention span has so deteriorated that you lack the capacity to engage singularly with art.  You might think you’re a keen multitasker, or that your capabilities to receive the flow of information from many sources simultaneously makes you special. But you’re wrong.  You’re just mentally degraded, and it will only get worse, until the apocalyptic end, when we are caught flat-footed by Skynet because we are gobbling increasingly dumber morsels of bite-sized shit that has been pre-packaged, pre-engineered, and pre-spiced to scratch the itch Zuckerberg identified and aggravated so we could keep coming back to his mental Calamine.

Speaking of spice, I liked Dune plenty, though it was too dark, too grey and a bit anticlimactic. While it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater post-COVID, I didn’t review it, but I dug it.

Dune: Part Two has hit HBO Max and it is long.  So long, I needed two nights, because I get sleepy.  But I was drawn in and eventually, riveted, and now find myself yearning for the next installment.

Denis Villeneuve has created an epic, grand, sweeping yarn with a lot of truly fine actors, and the world created is adult, forbidding, and intriguing.  A full recap is unnecessary, but there is a Game of Thrones quality, with Great Houses vying for a facsimile of oil (spice) as well as the emperorship and control. There is also sinister magic, geopolitics, religious fanaticism, hand-to-hand fighting, big ass sandworms, and a love that dare not speak thy name (Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet).

Full disclosure: we paused the movie because at my advanced age, I have to pee more than I’d like.  And I did a quick rinse of the dishes because I hate when the food sticks.

But I don’t think I thought about looking at my phone.

One nit – Christopher Walken is now such a caricature, he just doesn’t work outside of quirky, comedic roles.  As an emperor, he shambles in (actually, kind of phones it in), and distracts.