Okay, I don’t want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue.

The full list, according to the description in YouTube:

• 1900 – The Enchanted Drawing
• 1903 – The Great Train Robbery
• 1923 – The Ten Commandments (Silent)
• 1927 – Sunrise
• 1933 – King Kong
• 1939 – The Wizard of Oz
• 1940 – The Thief of Bagdad
• 1954 – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• 1956 – Forbidden Planet
• 1963 – Jason and the Argonauts
• 1964 – Mary Poppins
• 1977 – Star Wars
• 1982 – Tron
• 1985 – Back to the Future
• 1988 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• 1989 – The Abyss
• 1991 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• 1992 – The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
• 1993 – Jurassic Park
• 2004 – Spider-Man 2
• 2005 – King Kong
• 2006 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• 2007 – Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• 2007 – The Golden Compass
• 2008 – The Spiderwick Chronicles
• 2008 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Lynch doesn’t like the iPhone. At all. At least not for watching movies. Maybe the guy doesn’t take the subway much.

Pre-Code films were apparently something of a spectacle. Harvard Film Archive this weekend is exploring their depths in a series titled Vice vs. Virtue.

Joe forwarded me a link to Kobb Labs the other day, and I’ve got to admit that the guy has a much better introduction than anything I could have written for my site:

Despite what you may have been told, I am not a mad scientist. (No, no, no, that’s all slander and lies from jealous colleagues.) As you can probably tell from my website, I’m just a man curious about the universe and the order of things.

Please note, we are not offering tours of the labs at this time, as me and my (monkey) assistants are very busy on the S.D.R.P. (Secret Death Ray Project).

Also, be aware, we are no longer shipping out rodents, due to a recent batch being infected with rabies fleas. If you received a rabid weasel from us, please contact customer service for disposal instructions. (Have your invoice number handy when you call.) Do not ship them back to us!

As good as that is, however, is just a build-up to the real deal: Kobb has a list of movies to trade. Most of them are horror flicks, and most of those sound wonderfully bad. Or, I just hope the movies are as good as the descriptions:

BEGOTTEN — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Creepy B&W horror film virtually devoid of dialogue. Unique. Terrifying.

flicks, flix, funny, horror, horror film, horror flick, kobb, kobb labs, low-budget, movie, movies, trading

I just popped in The Constant Gardener (trailer) and discovered the preview for Brick. And even though I want to see almost every movie previewed for me, I really want to see this movie.

The Constant Gardener, by the way, is good too.

brick, movie, movies, preview, the constant gardener, trailer

We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:

They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!

Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:

The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.

The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.

So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.

netflix, greencine, dvd rental, paulina borsook, movie, movie criticism, film criticism, film, films, movies, old movies, good movies, criticism

This is old news, but Netflix now offers multiple queues for each account. Queues, of course, are the movie wish lists each Netflix customer keeps; when you return a movie, they send out the next movie in your queue. In the old days, each subscriber got just one queue, no matter how many members of the household had an interest in the movies. Two people, one queue? Marital drama ensued in my home and others.

Netflix heard the cry, and now we can create a number of queues to divide our three DVDs at a time. Each queue gets a separate can be assigned a separate username/password and has most all the same options as the primary queue/account. Of course, only the primary account holder can decide how to split the stack, we can still argue about whether Sandee gets one or two of the three at a time.

tags: consumer interest, dvd, dvd rental, entertainment, films, movie, movies, netflix

I’m embarrassed to be in the middle of Fantasy Mission Force, a kung fu movie that demonstrates a brand of Asian humor that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate. I’m watching it because I’m a sucker for Jackie Chan flicks and Netflix makes it too easy to queue up bad movies. David Chute wrote the Amazon editorial review:

Jackie Chan makes a brief guest appearance in this surreally goofy action comedy, a high-spirited shambles from 1982 that hovers awkwardly somewhere between Monty Python and The Three Stooges. When all else fails, cult director Chu Yen-ping (Island of Fire) resorts to exploding cigars, guys making funny faces, men dressed in women’s clothing, even a ghost or two. The nominal star, ’70s kung fu veteran Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman), is an Allied agent assembling a troupe of commandos for a mission behind enemy lines during World War II. (Although the landscape is obviously Asian, there are Hogan’s Heroes-style Nazis scampering through the jungle.) Every member of this movie’s mismatched clown-squad seems to hail from a different planet, including one inexplicable fellow who looks like an Elvis impersonator in a kilt. Most of the exhilarating action is handled by the glorious Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, from Peking Opera Blues and The Bride with White Hair, who kicks heads and looks smashing in a red-and-black-leather jumpsuit.

As bad as it is, though, I’m intrigued by something I’ve not seen in other kung fu movies: evidence of the deep hostility between China and Japan. Here’s the synopsis from Netflix:

When Japanese soldiers kidnap a group of generals, the Chinese offer a reward to the roguish Don Wen (Jimmy Wang Yu) if he can return the captives alive. Now, Wen and his motley band of miscreants — including a con man, an escape artist, a thief and an ex-wrestler — must fight their way behind enemy lines to make a profit. This Dirty Dozen-style comedy co-stars Jackie Chan and Brigitte Lin.

Movies in the US have exploited most every possible national dispute, but why haven’t I seen any mention of China’s conflict with Japan in a kunf fu movie before? Even here, most of the action is directed inward at trials among their own people.

Technorati Tags: asian humor, brigitte lin ching hsia, cult director, fantasy mission force, jackie chan, kung fu, lin ching hsia, movies, netflix, peking opera blues, the three stooges

The are few things as joyus as the excitement of discovery, so it was a great pleasure to learn that Stay Free! Magazine has a new blog: Stay Free! Daily. The blog has a number of stories about intellectual freedom and copyright oppression that resonated with me. Take a look at Silent Disobedience, Christo’s policy of photographing The Gates, and Wizard People screening in NYC. Anybody following discussion of the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate will be amused by an old movie studio and broadcaster PSA arguing against subscription TV services.

Like TiVo, But More Prurient, however, points out the irony of how so-called “decency” groups seem to collect more indecent material than the rest of us. Back in the day, J. Edgar Hoover would have his FBI G Men confiscate porn and other “indecent” materials for his private collection. Raise your hand if you think all this fuss is just a beard for those who don’t want to admit they’re interested in the stuff.

But we’ve known Republicans have been sexually repressed since long before Jeff Gannon/James Guckert became a household name.

Shifting back to the intellectual property discussion, however: It also turns out that Stay Free! is a founder of the Illegal Art Museum, a collection of works that got hit by the copyright bus at the intersection of art and commerce. The heading to the list of video works notes:

The films and videos below appropriate intellectual property, whether through the use of found footage, unauthorized music, or shots of copyrighted or trademarked material. (Filmmakers and videographers now have to get permission for just about every concert t-shirt, store sign, or other piece of intellectual property that happens to appear onscreen).

Illegal Art’s collection of related articles is a good place to start if this is the first time you’ve considered the wrongs of copyright. And there’s more of my own thinking on this in the Copyrights & Intellectual Property thread here at MaisonBisson.

[update:] This wasn’t the real point of this post, but Cliff is begging me to link to his roundup of the Gannon/Guckert affair at Spiralbound.net. It seems like the White House wouldn’t be what it is without some sex scandal, but I think we’d all be better off with more open gays there. My concern, however, is the repression that conservatives must live with. It’s unhealthy for them, and bad for us when they’re leading our country. Funny thing: the redder the state, the greater the consumption of liquor, beer, cigarettes, and porn, and the higher the divorce rate.

tags: broadcast flag, bush, christo, dubya, fbi, fcc, gannon, guckert, james guckert, jeff gannon, laugh, movie studio, movies, prurient, psas, repression, sexual repression, stay free magazine, stayfree, subscription tv, tivo

Cliff over at Spiralbound.net posted the video of Bush flipping the bird. It’s not as exciting as I’d hoped, but it’s on video.

Then there’s the Dubya Movie. It’s a fantastic mashup of old Don Kotts movies, but that’s already giving too much away. Go watch it, you’ll laugh.

tags: bird, bush, dubya, flipping the bird, laugh, movies

The New York Times did a Netflix story. The Author, William Grimes, seemed to like it, but…

[My wife and I] each judge the other’s selections harshly. I scored a major victory with “Mon Oncle” by Jacques Tati, a director I once dismissed as tedious, annoying and far too French. He is now a god in our house. But I have had my back against the wall after “L’Atalante,” a film I had never seen but knew to be, by expert consensus, a towering masterpiece. Less than 10 minutes after the opening credits rolled, the atmosphere in the living room grew frosty. I lost control of the mouse for a week. At least I had the foresight to sneak off and watch “Russian Ark” on my own.

That’s the fun of Netflix. Along with savage recriminations, my home now resonates with high-toned animated discussion of directors, cinematographers and camera angles. Once again I’m the moviegoer I was in college, when Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut were in full stride, and adventure was in the air, and bright-eyed cinéastes could sit through a film like “El Topo” and not demand their money back. It’s not available on Netflix, alas, but the Web site does propose an alternative, a compilation of “Ed Sullivan” shows featuring Topo Gigio. Close enough.

Interesting enough, but Netflix — and services yet to appear — are a sign of things to come: a world of entertainment shaped by the consumer, not by marketers.

Netflix executives say their edge over the competition is not their library but the way the library is presented to users, who are asked to rate the films they have seen. By sifting through the ratings, about 400 million of them at present, and analyzing buying patterns, a company program called CineMatch generates rental suggestions specific to each user.

“Lost in Translation will outperform most $300 million films for us, and that’s because of our ratings and recommendations,” said Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix. “Monster will be huge for us, and that’s not because our subscribers are more sophisticated than the general moviegoing public, but because our merchandising system is much more specific.”

It will be a world of what you want, and only what you want, as clearly marked by your previous purchases and selections. You’ll never be upset by products that you don’t want, even if you didn’t know you didn’t want them, nor will you have to tolerate contrary opinions or debate.

tags: consumer interest, dvd, dvd rental, entertainment, film, films, movie, movies, netflix

Living Room Film Club, a Click Away
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: March 19, 2004

It so happens that I have a perfectly valid excuse for watching “Hercules in the Haunted World.” The film, made in 1961, offered brief employment to a slab of beefcake named Reg Park, the British Steve Reeves, and at first glance it would seem to be a two-ton wheel of cheese. But somehow a genuine artist became attached to the project, a director named Mario Bava.

And who is Mario Bava? Why, the seminal influence on Dario Argento, the cult Italian horrormeister. One by one, his stylized, incredibly violent films found their way into my home in a blood-soaked festival organized by my wife, an Argento fan who cannot bring herself to watch the leisurely stabbing scenes that take up about half of every movie. We made our way through “Inferno,” “Deep Red,” “Suspiria” and “Tenebre.” Then it was on to Bava.

Thank you, Netflix.

Netflix, founded in 1998, is an online movie-rental company that could be described as the anti-Blockbuster. It deals only in DVD’s, and customers pay a flat monthly fee of $19.95 to rent an unlimited number of films with no late fees. The sole restriction is that subscribers may keep only three movies out at a time. (The company also offers more expensive five-film and eight-film plans.)

As each movie is returned in its self-addressed, prepaid envelope, Netflix sends out the next film on a list that the subscriber maintains online. Since the company has 23 regional distribution centers, most movies arrive the day after they are sent out. In theory a fanatic customer watching three films a day could go through several hundred DVD’s each year, whittling down the per-film rental cost to a dollar or less. In practice the average user watches about six movies a month.

I became one of Netflix’s nearly 1.8 million users several months ago, and I have never looked back. Overnight, life became much simpler. No longer did I have to make a mad dash to the video store, either to rent a film or to return it by the noon deadline. Late fees vanished and so did the check-out line. I cursed the endless hours spent prowling the aisles in search of misfiled films, or something — anything — to watch. Anything that is, except the dead-enders artfully arranged in the section labeled “staff favorites,” a euphemism for “films that no one will rent, ever.” Best of all, I succumbed to the pure pleasure of browsing endlessly through thousands of movies, making my selections with a click of the mouse and then seeing them slip through my mail slot, in their bright-red envelopes, just a few days later.

Netflix not only changed my routine, it also turned me into a different kind of movie watcher. Culturally, I am no longer the same person.

The flat-fee system elicits two responses: more frequent renting, and more adventurous renting. To justify the cost, you watch more films. But since four films per month averages out to the cost of four films at Blockbuster, every subsequent movie is, in a delusory sense, free, and therefore there is no risk. Why not roll the dice and order, say, “Russian Ark,” a bizarre Russian film, part audioguide and part costume drama, that pulls the viewer through the Hermitage Museum in a single, extended camera shot, skipping from century to century. It’s even more unwatchable than it sounds. But so what? I dropped it in the mailbox knowing that “Naked City” and “Adaptation” were on their way.

So far I have not been sent any damaged discs, and only one has gone astray after being mailed back. I filed a “missing in action” report on the Netflix Web site, and a day later, it either turned up, or Netflix wrote it off. In any case, it was no longer listed as being out.

A Few Catches

There are a few snakes in this cinematic paradise. For one thing, Netflix cannot accommodate the moviegoer who needs instant gratification. If you simply have to see “Scarface” tonight, then only the video store can help you. Cable systems offer movies on demand, but the pickings tend to be slim. My metabolism doesn’t work that way. Browsing through a vast library and clicking as the mood strikes feels plenty spontaneous to me. You see it, you want it, you add it to your queue right then and there.

There are two other weaknesses in the Netflix system, one unavoidable, the other understandable. First, the company does not rent videocassettes, so its library does not include thousands of films, some of them obscure, but many of them recognized classics. Anyone hoping to binge on Barbara Stanwyck will have to do without “Ball of Fire.” Preston Sturges fans will look in vain for “Easy Living.” Even within the more limited universe of DVD, Netflix is not totally comprehensive. Its mainstream orientation has left an opening for GreenCine (pronounced GreenScene), an online rental company that specializes in art-house films, documentaries, Japanese anime and cult films. It does not have multiple distribution centers, but it does have “Cane Toads,” an Australian documentary about, not surprisingly, cane toads. I scanned the first 20 titles listed under “film noir” and found six films not offered by Netflix.

Wal-Mart, which entered the online DVD rental business last June, undercuts Netflix with a three-movie plan priced at $18.76 per month. Its library of about 12,000 titles passed the Dario Argento test with flying colors. Wal-Mart has 10 of his films, compared with five on Netflix. GreenCine, despite its alternative profile, offers only two Argento films, although it has two documentaries about the director.

Netflix, too, has its niche side. An innovative program called Netflix First makes a small number of independent films available exclusively to Netflix subscribers for a limited period. The program, which started with “Croupier,” has grown to include about 20 films.

Netflix executives say their edge over the competition is not their library but the way the library is presented to users, who are asked to rate the films they have seen. By sifting through the ratings, about 400 million of them at present, and analyzing buying patterns, a company program called CineMatch generates rental suggestions specific to each user.

Polishing the Profile

“`Lost in Translation’ will outperform most $300 million films for us, and that’s because of our ratings and recommendations,” said Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix. “ `Monster’ will be huge for us, and that’s not because our subscribers are more sophisticated than the general moviegoing public, but because our merchandising system is much more specific.”

My experience of CineMatch makes me an agnostic. Right now my account page tells me that, based on my rentals and ratings, I might like to rent “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” “Stagecoach” or “The Vicar of Dibley.” I see the logic, and it is primitive. The “Stagecoach” recommendation reflects my rental of John Ford’s “Searchers,” just about the only western I’ve seen in my adult life, unless you count “Blazing Saddles.” CineMatch got lucky here. I found “The Searchers” riveting, and I put Howard Hawks’s “Red River” on my queue. “Stagecoach” is indeed a viable candidate. “The Vicar of Dibley,” a gentle and not very funny British comedy series, shows up because I rented two other British series, “Full Bottom” and “Thick as Thieves,” both of them a lot less funny even than “The Vicar of Dibley.” Three wrongs do not make a right.

In theory, as I generate more ratings, CineMatch will develop a more complex taste profile for me, but I’m doubtful. I think it will just get confused.

I don’t blame it. At the moment, a domestic battle rages for control of the Netflix queue, which can be revised and reshuffled at any time. It is disputed territory. My wife likes very fat films or very slow films. It’s either nonstop action, with a lot of gunplay, or painstaking, exquisitely nuanced psychological dramas, like the interminable “I Capture the Castle,” a British film about an eccentric family living in Wales in the 1930’s. My weakness is for pretentious foreign films. At the moment, I feel a creeping urge to rent “Andrei Rublev,” a three-hour film about a medieval Russian icon painter.

Frost Warning

We each judge the other’s selections harshly. I scored a major victory with “Mon Oncle” by Jacques Tati, a director I once dismissed as tedious, annoying and far too French. He is now a god in our house. But I have had my back against the wall after “L’Atalante,” a film I had never seen but knew to be, by expert consensus, a towering masterpiece. Less than 10 minutes after the opening credits rolled, the atmosphere in the living room grew frosty. I lost control of the mouse for a week. At least I had the foresight to sneak off and watch “Russian Ark” on my own.

That’s the fun of Netflix. Along with savage recriminations, my home now resonates with high-toned animated discussion of directors, cinematographers and camera angles. Once again I’m the moviegoer I was in college, when Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut were in full stride, and adventure was in the air, and bright-eyed cinÈastes could sit through a film like “El Topo” and not demand their money back. It’s not available on Netflix, alas, but the Web site does propose an alternative, a compilation of “Ed Sullivan” shows featuring Topo Gigio. Close enough.