07.06.12 |
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Staff over at The A.V. Club discuss the plot devices and mistakes that take you out of a film’s story. I chuckled at this choice by Marah Eakin:
Mine’s super-petty, but here it is: I hate when a character drinks from or carelessly wields a clearly empty “hot” coffee cup in a movie or TV show. Most people would just be a little annoyed by this, but it makes me question the whole production. Couldn’t they bother to put some water in those cups? And if they aren’t paying attention to even middling details like that, then what else did they ignore? Are the characters developed? Are the sets how they should be? Did they edit the whole thing together well?
07.05.12 |
film |
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I love Blu-rays. They’ve got great visual quality and serve as a counterpoint to the high prices, loud audiences and endless ads at mainstream theaters. But Blu-rays are dying in the rental market with à la carte streaming taking its place, a more limited and often inferior substitute.
I’m aware that a defense of any disc media can appear shortsighted as tech shifts to mobile and the cloud. Streams clearly have several big advantages, most notably their convenience. But for the cinephile in me, Blu-rays for now are an unparalleled experience. There’s fewer artifacts or compression and no visual stutter from a bump in your internet connection. Almost every Blu-ray soundtrack delivers 5.1 surround. Also Blu-ray color depth and saturation trounces the content I stream from Amazon and iTunes.
Yet Blu-rays feel virtually inaccessible for rental. Netflix queue times are laughably bad; I’m averaging about two months from the time a new release movie is available for download or Blu-ray purchase, and when I get it from Netflix. I live in New York, a worldwide film hub, yet most local video options are long gone. Nearby self-service boxes from Blockbuster and Redbox have little selection.
This no-win situation is probably exactly what studios want: pony up $20 or more for an outright Blu-ray buy or suffer inferior quality (and no special features) at $5 for a 24-hour download rental. We deserve better.
Unfortunately, there’s no signs of the trend changing course. The studios set the rules. Distribution patterns for physical media take forever to change. If anything I’d expect more unskippable trailers and less content on rental Blu-rays to make the situation even worse.
So Blu-ray as a rental format appears dead, but movie streams and downloads don’t have to suffer the same fate. Hollywood has the chance to prevent a lot of problems (while cutting piracy) with a few changes in its download and streaming content:
Provide higher end streaming options that offer less compression and more special feature tie-ins. When I have to play a guessing game or run Google searches to find out if your “1080p HD” version is butchered by artifacts or other shortcuts, I’m out the door. Even at a slightly higher cost, I’d happily pay a $1 or $2 premium for an enhanced stream.
All films get 5.1 surround where available. It’s true if you listen from your laptop or mobile device, this doesn’t change much. But home theater packages have bumped up their quality in recent years at lower price points. Surround tracks can make a huge difference, and not just with blockbuster action films (e.g. the atmospheric surround touches in “Mulholland Drive” are pretty masterful.)
Cut the price of HD back catalog titles by at least $1 or $2. Why is the classic comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles only a buck less than a new release on iTunes? I know the “one simple price” mantra is popular for Blockbuster and the iTunes music store. But this is a very different market; a movie rental stream is a watch once, low investment impulse buy (just look at the popularity of Netflix’s instant streaming.) Tap into that by keeping the back catalog priced low.
Online delivery is clearly film’s future. Yet that medium, much like we’ve seen with music, has the ability to disrupt the Hollywood studio system. It won’t kill it, because they still hold most of the content (i.e. why the same few studios have ruled films for decades.) This, combined with growing frustration by consumers on increasing content restrictions along with pirated torrents being easier to access, can significantly harm Hollywood. If the studios don’t adapt and change, the market will force them to.
06.15.12 |
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Critic Todd VanDerWerff nails the unevenness of “The Phantom”:
Some of what hampers “The Phantom” is, surprisingly, Weiner’s direction. He’s done such a fine job with all of the previous finales—even nailing the tricky tone of “Shut The Door. Have A Seat”—that I’m surprised at how weirdly flat this episode feels, confined by lots and lots of unimaginative shots and brusque directing that might have been standard on any TV drama. The pacing is all off in the first half of the episode, as everything jumps between storylines somewhat haphazardly, and though Weiner comes up with one magnificent image toward the end—the five partners of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in their new office space, looking out toward what’s to come—so much of the rest of the episode feels like it’s trying to fit three or four episodes’ worth of plots into one hour and just barely pulling it off.
There were clearly some highlights – Roger’s mixture of happiness and genuine melancholy with Marie, Pete’s final speech to Beth – but I found this to be a pretty unsatisfying finale. Compared to the eloquence of Season 1’s “The Wheel”, or the surprise and movement of Season 3’s “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” and Season 4’s “Tomorrowland”, it was a pretty tame episode.
06.15.12 |
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I read all the time how the cable, TV and movie industry will collapse under the weight of the internet and other new tech…but, as analyst Dan Frommer writes, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. (It’s all about who holds the content.)
06.10.12 |
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I’m very late in weighing in on “Commissions and Fees”, this season’s second to last Mad Men episode from a week ago. It was well executed but something felt distinctly off. Todd VanDerWerff really expresses this well (warning major spoilers ahead):
I’m not sure Mad Men is the kind of show that desperately needs character deaths. I’m not saying I didn’t think the show built unbelievably to Lane’s end, nor am I saying that I wish it had just trundled him off to England to hang over the final two seasons of the show. Once Lane reached the point of hopelessness he reached around the midpoint of “Commissions And Fees,” having him kill himself was one of only two or three options that would have made any story sense, and the show accomplished this task with its usual mordant sense of humor…
Yet at the same time, the show seemed to constantly be fighting against the whole cheap, desperate feel of any TV death that comes up at the end of the hour and is meant to both shock and move us all at once. Please understand: It mostly was able to overcome this. But the whole thing felt just a little sordid, as though the show were stooping beneath itself.
I can’t wait to find out how this season wraps up when it drops into my Apple TV queue sometime tomorrow. I’m not suspecting a surprise on the level of Tomorrowland, last year’s closer, but I think we’re in for something fairly big.
06.03.12 |
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Because the Lost craze kind of passed me by with little effect, TV and film writer Damon Lindelof didn’t ring a bell with me at first. But now he’s attached as the main writer for Prometheus, so I checked out his interview on the latest On the Verge podcast. Really good discussion here about screenplay, TV endings, living up to prequel expectations, working with Ridley Scott and much more.
06.01.12 |
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Matt Zoller Seitz, wrapping up his recap of Mad Men’s “The Other Woman”:
I want to go on record saying how flat-out amazing this season has been…Something Sgt. Peppers-level major is happening on Mad Men this year, a seismic creative flowering comparable to season one of The Sopranos and season three of Breaking Bad. Every season five episode is a creative experiment that draws on the cumulative power of every episode that preceded it. We’re nearing the point where everything on Mad Men seems to connect to everything else — not just from episode to episode within season five, but backwards, as if the new episodes are somehow unfurling tendrils into the past, fusing the whole run of Mad Men into a fiendishly intricate mega-story. It’s just extraordinary.
Damn right. I rarely get those “on the edge of my seat” moments when watching TV. Yet it happened with the The Wire, season four. Breaking Bad, season three onward. And now I can clearly add season five of Mad Men. We’ve had a few so-so episodes (e.g. “Hare Krishna” from last week), but many extraordinary ones: Signal 30, Far Away Places, and now The Other Woman.
05.29.12 |
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Thorough and excellent analysis of this week’s Mad Men by Salon writer Nelle Engoron (spoilers ahead):
But it’s Joan’s story that sadly underlines the circumscribed state of women, circa 1966. Having kept the firm running smoothly for 13 years, she deserves to be made a junior partner on those merits. But instead she must sleep her way into the position, and not even with a powerful man she desires like Roger (who seems never to have considered rewarding her in that fashion) but with a repulsive man who sees her as a pair of breasts between which he symbolically hangs a tiny jeweled chain.
It was an extremely sad, almost tragic episode that, as Engoron focuses on throughout her piece, centered almost entirely on feminism and women in the 1960s. Christina Hendricks deserves major praise for her acting this week; I suspect when we look back at Mad Men series highlights her work in “The Other Woman” will stand out.
05.18.12 |
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Slick buying guide from The Verge. Especially nice work on the info graphics measuring set top box versatility.
04.30.12 |
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Really interesting analysis and breakdown by the opinionated Tom and Lorenzo couple of Mad Men’s fashion. It’s deeper than just what’s trendy in the late 60s; by reading their episode recaps (with plenty of helpful screen grabs) you learn a lot about costume design and how subtle choices can help characterization on film and TV.