X-Ray vision

Have you ever invented something in your mind, and then lo and behold, some weeks or months or years later, it appears before you?

I'm in the middle of watching this just-released Amazon original movie, Uncle Frank, and as this phenomenon has just occurred to me, I had to stop mid-viewing to write this post.

For ages I've thought it would be great if movies had a feature that would tell you the name of an actor that's currently on the screen, so you didn't miss five minutes of the movie scratching your head and thinking "Now where the hell do I know that guy from?" I imagined it being something like Pop-Up Video, though it would have to be something you could turn on and off for viewers who don't care about such things.

As I was watching Uncle Frank, I paused for a moment, and realized that when I did so, pictures of two actors popped up in the upper left corner. I thought nothing of it the first time, but the second time I paused, I noticed two different actors and thought "Now what is this all about?"

Then I realized it was the two actors in the scene I was currently watching, and started to get an idea what this was all about.

The movie moved on to the next scene, a scene with four actors, and sure enough, when I paused, those four actors appeared, now taking up the whole left side of the screen rather than just its upper corner. And sure enough, they were the actors on screen. I could see their names easily, and could click into them if I really wanted to know more.

Now how about that.

It's just one of the elements in an Amazon exclusive featured called X-Ray, I have now learned. You can also easily jump to other scenes in the movie based on a short description, you can look at the entire cast with a bunch of head shots, you can learn trivia, and you can even learn the names of songs playing in the film -- this last being another feature I would use all the time.

Awesome.

When you're done looking up whatever you want to look up, you just click the X in the upper right-hand corner and you're back to where you paused.

I'm going to use this all the time. It's just so handy. 

Apparently the feature has been around since at least this past summer, as I found some stories online talking about it back in July.

I'd guessed it would only work for Amazon originals, since it would take a lot of work to implement this feature on all the thousands of titles they may be streaming at any given moment. But I can see that at least some non-originals have it, as they're advertising the availability of this feature on Avengers: Endgame (which you would have to pay to rent). 

Pretty damn cool.

(And yes, I did notice the little play on words in my subject, though I can assure you it was unintentional: Paul Bettany stars in Uncle Frank, and he played a character called Vision -- in the aforementioned Avengers: Endgame, at that. Or, I guess, only in Avengers: Infinity War. Close enough. And, spoiler alert.)

And since it's Thanksgiving on the calendar today -- here in Australia if not yet in America -- this makes a nice optimistic post for the day, a reason to give thanks.

Now let's see if the rest of this movie -- chock full of family themes and released just in time for Thanksgiving -- delivers more of the same.