—DVD SALES DOWN 18.3% IN 2011; ITUNES DOMINATES DIGITAL MOVIE SALES—
Interesting Variety article, that for some reason isn’t behind their suicidal paywall. Bottom line is that even though digital sales are picking up, they only make up a fraction of a market still dominated by physical DVDs — and that market is crashing. People are now renting and doing so through cheap retailers like Netflix and Redbox (as Blockbuster lowers their prices almost daily in order to stay alive).
If Hollywood wants to boost their sales biz, I have three suggestions:
1. Make better movies. The crap coming out now is not the kind of experience anyone wants to relive. Furthermore, the move towards 3D probably isn’t helping. That’s a THEATRE experience, not a living room experience. A huge theatre screen, super-duper theatre sound, and 3D might salvage a lousy movie for some people, but at home it’s just a lousy movie for all people.
2. For the love of all that’s holy, lower your prices — especially on the download side. Why in the world should we pay $15 for the digital download of a movie that we have to store on our own hard drive? Why should we pay that kind of money for an item no one had to manufacture, package, or ship? We might as well rent or buy the disc or wait six weeks and buy it as good as new from the Blockbuster previously-viewed bin.
3. If #2 interests you at all, the next step is to get us used to downloading and away from owning physical DVDs. But — and this is important — we need more hard drive space or a place on the Web where we can store our collections.
—ANOTHER REASON DVDS AREN’T SELLING: LAZY, INDULGENT, CONFUSING HYPER-EDITING—
Over at IndieWire, Matthias Stork criticizes, “[contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, [that] trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.”
As someone who’s been complaining about the shaky-cam set on puree since the damned thing was spawned by Satan, I couldn’t agree more and can’t add much more. However, I will say that this new anti-style of cutting action scenes is another reason why DVD sales are down. In the theatre, the “sensory overload” Stork talks about might make up for the confusion for those young moviegoers who dig the video game experience, but you can’t recreate that overload at home. So why buy the DVD.
Compare Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” — which is shot in a more conventional way — to “Quantum of Solace,” which is a complete mess filled with utterly confusing actions scenes that have you reaching for the Dramamine. I own every James Bond, even the bad ones, but purchasing “Quantum” is out of the question. The story is lousy, but certainly no worse than “Never Say Never Again.” But the reason I don’t own it is due to the HORRIBLE editing.
Who wants to relive that?
When it comes to the collapse of DVD sales, the elephant in the room that neither the industry nor the media that covers it wants to point to is the quality of the product.
—MORE PROOF STREAMING IS THE FUTURE—
Let me say it again: People want to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it. Network and cable television as we know it will be dead in less than five years. The Fox network’s attempt to force people back into the habit of appointment television was obviously going to fail. What we want is to sit down when we want to sit down, scroll a menu, find the latest episode of our favorite show, and press PLAY.
When HBO On Demand started, I abruptly stopped watching regular HBO. Sitting down for the Saturday night premiere was a decades-long ritual but the ability to stream killed that ritual off instantly.
Nope, in five years, other than sporting events, cable and broadcast networks will have to make most of their money off of a monthly subscription service. We don’t want schedules and we don’t want commercials.
It’s a whole new world.
—‘TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON’ TO BE RE-RELEASED IN IMAX THEATERS—
The sickest I’ve ever been was some 20 years ago back when I was living in Milwaukee. Something got into the city water that actually killed some elderly people and while my life was never in danger, I did want to die. In the middle of all this anguish, Errol Flynn’s “Robin Hood” was playing on television — one of my favorite films. Laying there — nauseous, fevered, chilled, and aching to a point where even the wonder of Nyquil had no effect — and watching Errol Flynn woo Olivia De Havilland in glorious Technicolor had a strange psychological effect on me. For fifteen years afterwards, I couldn’t watch “Robin Hood.” The memory of being so ill was so strongly attached to the movie that I just couldn’t do it. My point, and I do have one…
The misery of watching “Transformers 2” had the exact same effect. Just the thought of seeing it again or any other “Transformers” film is psychologically impossible.
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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING
Last of the Mohicans (1992) — The wife and I first moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1993, when Michael Mann’s superb adaptation of the classic James Fenimore Cooper novel was rotating endlessly on cable television. And because the film is shot where we live and captures the wilderness — the terrain, trees, plants, fog, etc. — perfectly, we’ve always associated it with home. In fact, a portion of the film was shot just a few miles from where I’m sitting now.
During our eight-year stay in Los Angeles, homesickness made it impossible to watch even a minute of the film, so last night it was a real treat just to sit back and enjoy the adventures of Hawkeye and Cora once again — this time on glorious Blu-ray.
Man alive, what a soundtrack.
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QUICK HITS
WILL DISNEY’S ‘LONE RANGER’ RIDE ON WITHOUT GORE VERBINSKI?
EXCELLENT ANALYSIS: “10 LESSONS HOLLYWOOD CAN LEARN FROM THIS SUMMER’S MOVIES”
THE FAILURES OF NETFLIX: 12,000 TITLES AND NOTHING TO WATCH
“CHRISTMAS STORY” STAR FINDS DEAD MAN IN HOTEL ROOM
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CLASSIC PICK FOR WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24
4:00 pm ET: 100 RIFLES (1969) –Circa 1912, a sheriff (Brown) tracks down an outlaw gun runner (Reynolds) in Mexico and becomes involved with a feud between the local military regime and revolutionaries. Cast: Jim Brown, Raquel Welch, Burt Reynolds, Fernando Lamas, Eric Braeden, Michael Forest, Jerry Goldsmith, Claire Huffaker.
One of those underrated, late 60’s, widescreen Westerns that must have been a blast to watch at the drive-in. Raquel Welch is breathtakingly gorgeous and football great Jim Brown breathtakingly stoic, but it’s Burt Reynolds who steals the show as the charismatic Mexican revolutionary Brown’s sheriff starts out hunting but ends up joining forces with.
The director is Tom Gries, who also directed the classic “Will Penny” and near-classic (in my humble opinion) “Breakhart Pass.”
The famous sex scene between Brown and Welch was controversial at the time (the whole black/white thing), and the story itself strives for a social conscience, but the decades have worn those elements down to shrug-worthy. Today, you just have the pleasure of a simple story, a ton of star power, and a lot of well-directed action.
Including today’s pick, Welch starred in three outstanding Westerns between 1968 and 1971. “Bandolero” (1968) and “Hannie Caulder (1971) would make for a terrific Sunday afternoon triple-feature along with “100 Rifles.”
–Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com