Kicking a Movie-a-Day Habit, After Four Years in Theaters

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Sam Barron, 28, is a big fan of the movies, so much so that he averages a movie a day.

With the new year approaching, people resolve to kick all sorts of bad habits. Sam Barron is no different â€" he vows to try to kick his four-year habit of chronic cinema addiction.

“I have an addictive personality: I don't drink, smoke or anything like that,” said Mr. Barron, 28, a business reporter from Westchester. “Instead, I take it out on movies.”

Mr. Barron says he seen more than 1,300 movies in local movie theaters in the past four years â€" which averages to about a mo vie a day. This includes every wide-release movie in the past four years, as well as cult classics, gay-themed films, children's movies and obscure documentaries. Ask him about a film in some lesser-known Indian dialect, without subtitles, and he'll most likely give you the plotline.

“When I meet people who tell me they're film buffs too, I'm like, ‘Um, no you're not,'” said Mr. Barron, who nevertheless is intent on quitting his film-going ways next month, after having seen more than 390 this year.

For one thing, Mr. Barron is now dating a woman who is not charmed by his obsession. For another, he recently landed a new job with a more demanding work schedule, he said.

The streak started as a bet with two other friends from high school that “spiraled out of control,” Mr. Barron said on Monday at a coffee shop near the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, where he planned to watch an 11:10 a.m. showing of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the first of a string of four films, ending with a Spanish movie.

“We're just regular guys, the furthest thing from film snobs,” he said, adding that he and his friends preferred watching football on Sundays, and professional wrestling, to ever going to see anything other than a big-budget action film.

He began with “Bride Wars” and “Hotel for Dogs” and was soon combing movie listings and organizing viewing schedules that would dovetail with his work hours.

He settled into a weekly routine: a multiplex in Nyack, N.Y., on Monday mornings to see about four or five wide-releases in a row. On Friday nights, he took a seat at the Pelham Picture House for independent films. On Saturdays, he would take the train to Manhattan to watch movies that don't make it to suburban theaters. On Tuesdays, he would go to the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville not far from his apartment in Ossining.

“When I started, I was like: ‘What's this? A movie with subtitles? All they're do ing is talking, the whole movie,'” he recounted of his initial exposure to foreign-language movies.

But within months, Mr. Barron had developed an affinity for such films and was even beginning to commit certain acts of film snobbery.

“At one point, I think I actually said something like, ‘Hey, it's great to see Norwegian cinema coming on strong, huh?' and my friends were like, ‘Can we punch you in the face right now?'” he said.

He and his friends trusted one another to report their viewing totals honestly, he said. Mr. Barron, for his part, kept a chronological list of the films he saw.

On Monday, Mr. Barron pulled out a fistful of ticket stubs, dozens of them from a variety of theaters, adding amusing stories about his experiences.

In 2009, any doubts he may have had about his friends' truthfulness were dispelled, he said, after he drove to New Haven to catch an obscure foreign film, only to find one of his competing friends already in the theater.

Mr. Barron claims he has never fallen asleep in a movie and never walked out. He says he never watches movies outside of theaters. He even schedules his bathroom trips by consulting a Web site that offers optimum times for taking quick bathroom breaks during films.

Even on his salary of $25,000 a year, he was able to afford movie tickets by avoiding vacations and other extraneous expenses, and subsisting on cheap meals, including a constant diet of instant macaroni and cheese â€" and steering clear of theater concession stands.

Also, he would often pay for one film, and then slip into several additional ones afterward without paying again. At the Jacob Burns Film Center, he said, he once saw eight films in a row, eliciting a knowing look from a box office worker.

“I feel more guilty if I do it in independently owned theaters,” he said.

When he started the streak, Mr. Barron was a reporter for a group of weekly newspapers in Westchester; he worked from home and could make his own work schedule. Now, he works for The Westchester Business Journal in an office on weekdays.

On Monday, Mr. Barron entered the Loews and bought a $7 matinee ticket for “Zero Dark Thirty.” He groaned when he saw that his next film, a 2 p.m. showing, was not in a nearby theater, making it difficult to slip in without paying again.

But he settled into the first film, as usual, in one of the rear rows, and tucked his left foot comfortably up on the seat and became gripped by the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Fire Hits World Trade Center Construction Trailers

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A storage container burned at the construction site of 1 World Trade Center on Wednesday.

A fire at the World Trade Center construction site damaged three construction trailers on Wednesday but did not affect any buildings and injured no one, the authorities said.

The fire broke out around 11:30 a.m. in a trailer used by master mechanics that is stored north of the Pavilion of the National September 11 Memorial Museum and just west of the site of 3 World Trade Center, according to the Fire Department and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The fire spread to two other trailers, the Port Aut hority said, and was declared under control at 12:19 p.m., the Fire Department said.

Another Photo of #FDNY o/s at #Manhattan *22-0070* 2nd Alarm World Trade Center from the back 12/26/12 #WTC http://t.co/jchoeENp

- FDNY Incidents (@FDNYIncidents) 26 Dec 12

A Newspaper Publishes Names of Gun Permit Holders Sparking Outrage

A newspaper's interactive map listing the names and addresses of gun permit holders in two New York counties drew a gathering avalanche of outrage on Wednesday.

As word spread across social media, thousands left comments expressing disbelief and anger at the map, compiled from publicly available information on handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties and published online over the weekend by the Journal News, a newspaper based in White Plains, N.Y. and owned by the Gannett company.

The clickable map is made up of thousands of dots each representing a permit holder; by clicking the dots, users can view the name and address of each permit holder. Rifle and shotgun owners were not included because, the paper notes, those guns can be purchased without a permit. “Being included in this map does no t mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so,” the paper cautioned.

The map thrust the Journal News directly into the heated national debate over guns that has followed the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., further churning the already frothy argument between those seeking curbs on certain types of weapons and those advocating gun rights.

“Now everyone knows where the LEGAL GUNS are kept, a valuable piece of information for criminals,” wrote an irate Facebook commenter who gave his name as Mike Pandolfo. “Why don't you do something helpful, like trying to find out where the ILLEGAL GUNS are kept? That would be helpful to the non-criminal population.”

The comment was characteristic of the reaction of many of the thousands that had been attached to the article as it flew around social networking sites, seemingly shared more in outrage than in support.

Poor jud gment here-creates a map of unarmed homes for criminals | NY paper publishes map of gun permit holders: http://t.co/LgjTJxQs

- Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) 26 Dec 12

Before this happens here, I'm going to go ahead and fess up. I own guns! http://t.co/5aGbp4jx

- Duane Biggs (@DuaneBiggs) 26 Dec 12

The map - published along with an article on Monday entitled “The gun owner next door: What you don't know about the weapons in your neig hborhood” - also includes dozens of permit holders who reside outside of the two counties, including at least 15 in New York City and several in Connecticut and New Jersey.

In an editor's note published with the article, the newspaper said that the author of the article, Dwight R. Worley, is himself the owner of a handgun - a Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum - and has had a residence permit for the gun since February 2011.

Editors at the newspaper and representatives at Gannett did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Janet Hasson, the president and publisher of The Journal News Media Group, defended the decision to publish the map in a statement published by the newspaper. “New York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,” she told the paper.

Her comments came as some furious readers lashed out at Ms. Hasson. According to Gannett Blog, an independent blog that follows the newspaper company, her home address and telephone number has been passed along by those disgusted by the map.

Despite the reaction, the newspaper is promising to enlarge the map to include handgun permit holders in Putnam County as well. “Putnam is still putting together its records and could not immediately provide any data,” the paper wrote on its Web site over the weekend. “The map will be updated when that data is released.”

It was not clear whether those plans would still go forward.

Game Theory: Video Games Are More Like Ballet Than Movies

Javier Cebollada/European Pressphoto Agency Gamers and dancers may have more in common than they commonly think.

Like Lucy, when I write and think about video games, I try to focus on what the medium can do that the canonical arts - books, movies, theater, dance, music, television, painting, sculpture, comics, whatever - cannot. But I think it's also worth emphasizing how video games resemble the culturally accepted arts. They're more alike than different.  In 2012, I started reading a couple of books - one new, the other newish - about the history of other art forms, and their infancies would be very familiar to gamers.

The first book is David Thomson's history of the movies, “The Big Screen,” published this fall. Film is the preferred, go-to analogy for video-game players and writers about games, so much so that critics have begun trying to avoid making movie references and comparisons when talking about games.

But the connections to games in Thomson's prose suggest themselves: “The cameraman was a small god with a machine no one else understood”; “If film is going to be an art - and some of us have longed for that - don't we need an artist?”; “American business power was determining the character of the new show (and promoting America to the rest of the world)”; early filmmakers feared that “American pictures remained crass, industrialized and trashy, and lagging behind the other art s”; and in my favorite parallel with early video games, Thomson writes of the silent picture “Sunrise”: “Nothing as rich as this had been done before in American film. But the backgrounds are subtler than the interaction between the couple.”

The second book is “Apollo's Angels,” Jennifer Homans's history of ballet. I turned to it in part because my elder daughter is tutu-besotted, but also because I wondered if it would provide insights into the crucial role that movement plays in the enjoyment of video games. Whether waving ones' arms about in front of a Wii or a Kinect, moving a mouse across a screen, or engaging in the small, precise thumb-and-finger movements one makes on a gamepad, playing games is as much about motion and gesture as it is about witnessing what occurs on a screen.

Ballet is, in the words of Homans, “full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement.” And so are games. Ballet straddles the world of music, literature, art and performance. And so do games. And much like the way video games have struggled to separate themselves from sports, board games and toys, early ballet struggled to separate itself from music-dance was not seen as a distinct art form. Yet its earliest practitioners hoped to “create a new kind of spectacle,” one that “would harmonize dance, music, and language into a measured whole.” Replace dance with “movement,” sprinkle in a dash of cinematography, and that sounds a lot like some game developers I've met.

Ballet is “an art of memory,” Homans writes. “No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations variations, whole ballets.” She continues, “These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones.” And so do gamers, when they know a vide o game. The players of Call of Duty and Halo have more in common with ballerinas than either might like to admit.

I mention all this in part to remind everyone that every new medium goes through growing pains. But I also think that if video games are going to, in Lucy's words, “take their rightful place among other creative works,” they must prove themselves capable of achievements that the other arts have already mastered. And so, on the second day of Christmas, I want to offer the current - and future - game designers who are reading this a challenge.

Beyond the Gospel stories, the holidays are awash with Messiahs, Nutcrackers, Christmas Carols, Charlie Browns and Wonderful Lives. And the list of classics is not static: Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is now so canonical that it seems like a bonus track on the Phil Spector Christmas album. Where is the Christmas game to match the texts, songs, dances, plays and movies that bring in the season every year?

I can't name a single video game that even attempts to grapple - directly - with any element of these holidays, from travel nightmares to family squabbles to religious rebirth to peace on earth and good will toward men. Journey, the game Lucy rightly praises as a landmark, makes a transcendental and universally popular holiday game seem possible. But I'm not asking for that much. I'd take the equivalent of a “Die Hard” or even a “Home Alone.”

I'm not saying making such a game will be easy. But if video games are to fulfill the potential that I, and everyone in this discussion, thinks they possess, it ought to be possible. All I want for Christmas is that.

Join the conversation here.

Author of Twitter Account Isn\'t Philip Roth

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Philip Roth

12:33 p.m. | Updated

The proprietor of a Twitter page identifying itself as the official account of Philip Roth could well be Nathan Zuckerman, his alter ego from novels like “The Ghost Writer,” but it is not Mr. Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Portnoy's Complaint” and “American Pastoral.”

“No, that is not Mr. Roth posting on Twitter,” a press representative for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes Mr. Roth's books, said in an email on Wednesday.

The Twitter account, @PhilipRothOffic, published its first po st on Monday, which read: “I join Twitter today. It's easy…” The message was widely recirculated on Twitter and drew in numerous followers, including employees of The New York Times.

In the fall, Mr. Roth announced that he was retiring from writing fiction, though he told The Times then that one of his new favorite occupations was learning to use an iPhone he had recently purchased.

The @PhilipRothOffic account was also disavowed by the author Blake Bailey, who is writing a biography of Mr. Roth, and who wrote on his own Twitter account: “The real Philip Rothâ€"yes, himâ€"would have it known that he has NO twitter account, and it is MOST unlikely he ever shall.”

That did not discourage the person behind @PhilipRothOffic from announcing on Wednesday morning that he or she would soon be posting a new short story called “140″ at that site.

In a subsequent post, @PhilipRothOffic declared itself to be the handiwork of Tommasso Debenedetti, a journalist who has created fake Twitter pages for other well-known figures.

Beached Whale at Breezy Point

Queens *Animal Rescue* Beach 216th Street & Palmer Drive. Division requesting ESU and Marine for the beached whale. http://t.co/SARw6VVg

- FDNY Incidents (@FDNYIncidents) 26 Dec 12

A whale about 30 feet long, possibly a humpback, washed up on the beach alive at Breezy Point in Queens on Wednesday morning, the police said.

The whale was spotted around 10:40 a.m. near Beach 216th Street and Palmer Place, the police said. Emergency-service responders from the police and fire departments were spraying water on the animal an d awaiting the arrival of marine-mammal stranding experts from the Riverhead Foundation on Long Island, the police said.

Video: A Red Hook Church Rebounds After Hurricane

In Red Hook, Brooklyn, people attended Christmas Mass at Visitation Church, which has experienced a resurgence since Hurricane Sandy.

The End of Spider-Man (At Least for Now)

Comic book fans who pick up issue No. 700 of “Amazing Spider-Man,” which arrived in stores on Wednesday, will see what Marvel Comics is promising as the final fight between Spider-Man and his longtime nemesis Doctor Octopus. The end result has the villain taking over the hero's mind, body, costume and mission. Doctor Octopus, who is convinced he can do a better job than Peter Parker's alter ego, begins his adventures as the wall-crawling hero in “Superior Spider-Man,” the first issue of which will be available Jan. 9.

“This is the greatest villain inside the body of the greatest hero and trying to do good,” Dan Slott, the writer of the series, told USA Today.

This is comic books, of course, so we know the real Spider-Man will eventually come back. For further proof, take a look at this roundup of some significant deaths and resurrections. But Marvel has handled this kind of shake-up very well in the past. Captain America's death in 2007 took everyone by surprise and led to two rich years of stories about a world without the sentinel of liberty, until his return in 2009. Here's hoping that Doc Ock has as good a run.

Lehane Offers Literary Reward for Missing Dog

Diana Lucas Leavengood Dennis Lehane

When a character goes missing in a Dennis Lehane novel, usually nothing good results. But Mr. Lehane, the author of best-selling novels like “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” is trying to make the best of the disappearance of a beloved dog, and is offering an unusual reward to the person who helps return her: he said he would name a character after that person in a coming novel.

WCVB.com reported that Tessa, a beagle belonging to Mr. Lehane, went missing in Boston on Monday, and was last seen around 4:30 p.m. that afternoon near a gas station in the neighborhood of Allston. Mr. Lehane, who lives in Brookline, wrote in a post on his Facebook page that Tessa was “micro-chipped, but her tags were off when she was let out into the yard,” before she jumped a fence and ran away.

Dennis Lehane Tessa, a beagle belonging to the author Dennis Lehane.

“It's possible she's staying in some good Samaritan's home right now or has tucked herself away on a porch,” Mr. Lehane wrote in the post. “But if anyone sees her or knows of her whereabouts, please reach out to this page.” He added: â €œNaming of character in the next book for anyone who gets her back to us! (No, really!)”

As of Wednesday morning Mr. Lehane had not yet indicated that Tessa had been found.

Dan Stevens Has Something to Say About \'Downton Abbey\'

PBS Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley on “Downton Abbey.”

Be forewarned that this post deals with developments on “Downton Abbey” that British viewers are now aware of, but which have not yet occurred in the American broadcast of that series. In other words, massive spoilers ahead.

Just when things were going swimmingly for Matthew Crawley at “Downton Abbey” - that aristocratic character, played by Dan Stevens, was enjoying his long-delayed wedding to Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery); his wife had given birth to their first c hild, a son; he was delighted by his fancy new motorcar - an automobile accident he sustained in the show's Christmas special resulted in his demise, and ended Mr. Stevens's tenure on the popular period drama.

Speaking with The Telegraph of London, Mr. Stevens said that his departure from “Downton Abbey” felt strange but inevitable, and that his decision to leave the series was made before he started filming its most recent season (which begins in the United States on Jan. 6).

“We were always optioned for three years,” Mr. Stevens told The Telegraph. “And when that came up it was a very difficult decision. But it felt like a good time to take stock, to take a moment. From a personal point of view, I wanted a chance to do other things.”

Mr. Stevens, who is currently starring with Jessica Chastain in a Broadway revival of “The Heiress” and has also been a judge of the Man Booker Prize, said that working on “Downton Abbey” had been “a very monopolizing job.”

“So there is a strange sense of liberation at the same time as great sadness,” he continued, “because I am very, very fond of the show and always will be.”

The character of Matthew Crawley nearly met his fate in Season 2 of “Downton Abbey” when he was wounded during combat in the First World War; his injuries did not kill him, but left him with paralysis that he miraculously overcame by the end of that season.

Going into Season 3, rumors swirled that Mr. Stevens might be leaving the show, with some publications sp eculating on whether other actors that could take over the Matthew Crawley role. But Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” shot down that possibility. “Sometimes actors feel they want to move on,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “If they don't want to come back, there's nothing we can do.”

Game Theory: A Playwright on the Art of Video Games

Sony Computer Entertainment Amer, via Associated PressA scene from Journey.

So it's the end of 2012, and it feels like gaming is pushing through its creative adolescence. There are glimpses of what it might become. Thus, for games to take their rightful place among other creative works it's important to ask what they do that other forms cannot.

For me, there's a sort of identification with your character that other media will never be able to replicate. A game makes a player its subject, while the tyranny of the director's point of view in film and the author's withholding of detail in fiction both place the viewer as an observer in the world. Of course, in film and fiction emotions are elicited and characters insp ire empathy, but the viewer recognizes  she is following a protagonist that is “not me.” The bridge of empathy comes from the audience bringing their own life experience to the narrative. Gaming can break down that division between revealer and observer, through making the player complicit in and responsible for the choices made. This allows a sense of one single, unseparated narrative, one emotional journey. It is the difference between being told something and coming to realize it yourself.

The finest example this year may be Journey, the follow-up to Thatgamecompany's gorgeous Flower. It is an almost transcendental experience. Though designed as more of a meditation than a competition, it shows what gaming is capable of. Journey allows the player to move through a set of landscapes profound in their audio and visual beauty with no instruction, but with the momentu m, disorientation and hope that emerge from any journey in life. The game captures the emotional experience through play. The choice of subject matter and its rendering would be impossible to translate to film, music or literature, coming as close to game-as-artistic-experience as I have ever known.

A sense of choice and alternate narratives has long been a way that games differentiate themselves from other works. Early PC games were often built around selecting dialogue for your protagonist from a menu, or even asking you to type your own. But this was rarely more than a way to interact with exposition. This year games have been returning to that idea but also granting real effect to those choices, using the technical and creative sophistication the last two decades have brought.

The episodic Walking Dead brilliantly feasts on player's minds by giving them meaningful choice in dialogue and action to produce different outcomes and enhance the sense of peril. It gives this tense, satisfying zombie story a creeping sense of depth and autonomy.

Catherine, an extraordinary Japanese morality game, is just as terrifying but finds its power in the fear of commitment. Catherine, which was released in North America in 2011 before arriving in Europe in 2012, mines the emotional paralysis of a young man trying to choose between leaving and marrying his girlfriend. Its daytime segments allow the player to sit in a bar, choosing what sort of texts to send her, and at night the game turns into a frighteningly well-observed series of puzzle nightmares. It's complex and insightful, though I was shocked at its difficulty. Even experienced gamers might want to start on the easiest setting. But it's worth it. Particularly impressive is a level in which the single-player form changes to include Vincent, the protagonist, and his girlfriend in a fast-paced joint race to solve a puzzle. The change in game-play of suddenly having company and help on the journey, and yet twice the responsibility and risk of failure, so perfectly captures the advantages and disadvantages of being single versus being in a relationship that Catherine tips into the profound and, again, shows what it is that games can uniquely do.

In opposition to this sense of open play and choice, the lauded Max Payne 3 has a more filmic approach and leaves me underwhelmed. The lavish cut scenes, glossy slo-mo and self-important dialogue give the impression the designers are faintly annoyed that the player has to occasionally break into their world to play.

Even the brutally linear Call of Duty franchise embraced choice this year with Black Ops, a game with variation in timeline and narrative depending on certain decisions.

BioShock Infinite was disappointingly delayed, but those seeking a replacement with intense atmosphere and an intricately drawn world could do worse than Dishonored, a sort of BioShock set in a Fable universe, which I'd highly recommend.

I feel Journey is the creative achievement of the year but my personal favorite is the quirky, original Catherine, a unique game which embraces choice in its form while also showing the shadowy, paralyzing underside of our moral decisions in its content. Plus, it's a rare game that has the guts to ask what gamers are really afraid of. Zombies? Aliens? Terrorists? Or relationships?

The British playwright Lucy Prebble is the author of “The Effect,” now playing in London, and “Enron.”

Welcome to the Friars Club

Earl Wilson/The New York Times The Milton Berle Room at the Friars Club.

Dear Diary:

A fellow comedian came up to me after a show we both performed at a small East Village bar and told me: “I like you, but you need to work on branding. I know all about this. Google me. I was big in the '80s. We can meet for drinks. You've been to the Friars Club, right?”

I had never actually been inside the Friars Club, though I had walked past its door on 55th Street many times and always wanted to go in. I even occasionally fantasized about one day being asked to join, inasmuch as my inner Groucho Marx would allow it.

I grew up in the Midwest on “Broadway Danny Rose” and Jackie Mason records with baby-boomer parents who felt a certain nostalgia for the borscht belt comedians of their youth. I remember seeing pictures of my grandparents dressed up in suits and cocktail dresses on their one vacation a year; a weekend trip to the Concord or Grossinger's.

The comedy shows I performed in New York in the mid-aughts had their own romance: makeshift stages in the basements of bars near Pennsylvania Station, and if I was lucky, being paid in drink tickets.

The night my fellow comedian and I were meeting for a drink, I reapplied my makeup in the office bathroom and headed to the Friars Club. I opened the door for the first time, checked my coat and climbed the staircase up to the bar.

A big band was playing in the corner, and the first thing I heard when I walked in was the tail end of a joke one needn't hear the beginnin g of: “So I asked her if they were hers, and she told me, ‘Well, I paid for them!'”

I was home.

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