As these are crazy times, I think I may not be seeing something from 2020, but rather, something from 2003. Bong Joon-ho's second feature, Memories of Murder, has been very hard to get your hands on, but it's showing at Cinema Nova right now. I may write an actual post about this, so I won't steal any further thunder from that potential post.
But in scanning the options playing at Nova, I noticed they were showing a movie that had played a starring role in the early part of the pandemic.
You may remember this post from back in April, which I wrote on the occasion of my first time noticing a movie with a rental price point of $19.99. That has since become commonplace. In fact, Mulan reached a high of $30, and only if you were already a Disney+ subscriber.
I didn't rent Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a drama about a girl considering an abortion, at the time, even though in that post I said I might. No, instead I made my first $19.99 rental Trolls World Tour of all things, and have since repeated that rental price twice: The King of Staten Island and Bill & Ted Face the Music.
I'm not seriously considering seeing the movie at Nova this week, mostly because its latest showtime on any of the days is 5:55, and that just doesn't work with my schedule. (Unless I'm seeing a 10 a.m. showing of Tenet, that is -- oh the exceptions to my rules.)
But seeing the movie playing did prompt me to go back to iTunes, figuring its rental price would now have come down, and at least I can finally throw some money its way, not to mention see an acclaimed 2020 independent film.
Well, its price has indeed come down. It's now $14.99. But that is for purchase, not for rental.
Just buy the damn thing and get it over, Vance.
You might say that. But buying a movie I don't know if I'll even like goes against my principles. I don't have unlimited storage space, and I also just don't believe in it as an approach to watching movies. If I'm going to own something, I want it to be an intentional decision, not a choice I have to make because I can't rent it. This may be a fairly academic objection, especially if buying something costs less than renting it would have. But its for these same academic reasons that I won't just buy it and then delete it after I've watched it, which is the same thing that would happen if I rented it.
So my eye wandered down the page to see when it would, again, be available for rental, presumably at a lower price:
June 1, 2021.
Um, what?
That is a date so far in the future that it is just plain absurd. In COVID times, I don't know if anyone can plan even to February, let alone next June.
Before I had sympathy for this movie, which had its (albeit modest) box office ambitions kneecapped by the pandemic, and was just trying to make a buck with an elevated streaming rental price. Now, though, this feels like shenanigans.
Every movie has its window of maximum profitability, which is either a theatrical run or an increased initial rental price. For some movies that rental price is something like $6.99, though in COVID times it got up to $19.99. Fair enough.
But then those movies are supposed to settle in at a rental price of $4.99 or thereabouts, and stay there for the rest of their lives as streamers, excepting the times they go on sale for a short period of time.
Withholding a reasonable rental price for Never Rarely Sometimes Always for the first 14 months of its existence is just absurd. I can't begin to understand the strategy.
I really want to watch this movie to include it in my 2020 year-end rankings, but if this is how they're going to be, well then they can just forget it. If you can play chicken, then so can I.
It seems a harsh stance to take toward a little underdog indie about a girl considering an abortion. And maybe I'll lose that game of chicken after I've thought about it for a bit.
But I think part of the current cinematic landscape is acknowledging when something is just a loss. Tenet had to be the guinea pig and eventually stumble out into theaters at a mere fraction of the box office it could have made in normal times. Greyhound, which I just watched on Friday night, had to movie to AppleTV+. Bill and Ted's latest excellent adventure was on the small screen for most of us.
But let's look at Bill & Ted Face the Music as an example of how these things are usually done. Only two months after it debuted at that $19.99 rental price, you can now rent this movie for $5.99 and buy it for a little less than twice that.
That's what we should be seeing with Never Rarely Sometimes Always. That's the last vestige of some kind of normal we might expect from 2020, and though 2020 has been anything but normal, that last vestige is attainable in this case.
And since I started this post talking about Memories of Murder, let's look at that. I'll pay a lot more than $14.99 to see that movie, and it came out in 2003. The difference is that I won't own it afterward, which in this case I consider to be a good thing.
By running away and hiding, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is not helping anyone. "Always" is the amount I want to see this movie, but "never" is the amount I may actually see it.
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