My first mountaintop movie

As I've told you on a number of occasions, I love seeing movies when I'm out of town. I love the experience of seeing familiar movies -- familiar in the sense that I've seen ads for them and been anticipating them -- in unfamiliar locations. I prefer tucked away little single-screen theaters, but multiplexes will do in a pinch. My mere lack of acquaintance with them makes them exotic.

You might say that I like these movies in these cinemas to "show me the world," so to speak.

Aladdin may have done that in a way more exotic than all the others.

It's not because Aladdin, set in Arabia, is exotic in and of itself. It's because I saw it on top of a mountain.

See, this past weekend my sons and I went to Mt. Buller, about a three-hour drive from our home in Melbourne. Most people ski there, but my kids have never done that before and I'm still recovering from my dislocated shoulder, so we just frolicked. It's what Melburnians call "going to the snow." It doesn't snow in Melbourne of course, but during the winter months -- June, July and August -- it snows close enough by that you could actually make a day trip of it if you wanted. We made a three-day trip of it, starting Thursday night and returning Sunday afternoon.

At first I thought "going to the snow" would be the name of a hypothetical activity only, and not an actual description of what we were doing. See, Mt. Buller has not gotten much snow this winter. A co-worker who pays more attention to these things than I do told me, as I was departing on Thursday, that I'd be lucky to see much at all. So that's kind of what I prepared for.

Boy was she wrong.

There was a base of snow there already, and the rain on Friday made it wet and easily packable for snowballs and snowmen. That would have been enough to say we'd really had the experience. But then on Saturday the experienced kicked into high gear. Fluffy snow fell all day long, necessitating the chains for our tires we had rented ("hired," as they say here), never expecting to actually need them. There's plenty of drama I could tell you about the installation of the chains, whether they were on the right wheels or not, and my removal of them at 10:30 at night by the side of the road, but I'll spare you the horror. Let's just say that all's well that ended well.

We were still up on the mountain, and not back to our Air BNB about 20 minutes from its base, because we decided to take in Aladdin at the little Mt. Buller theater on Saturday night, starting at 6. Given what I've told you, how could we not?

Here's a picture:

I'd like to tell you the building resembled a small Swiss ski chalet, but as you can probably tell from the picture, it did not. It was actually in a six-story building set into the side of the hill that also includes the post office, a place with a bunch of trampolines and climbing equipment, and even the Mt. Buller campus of the local primary school. The auditorium where the movies are shown functions as a lecture hall and meeting location in addition to Mt. Buller's ticket to the silver screen.

But what the theater lacked in quaintness it made up for in remoteness. This is a theater that cannot even be reached by ordinary car. The village that surrounds Mt. Buller has as many as 50 different restaurants, according to the promotional materials, as well as accommodations, a little grocery store and a bunch of places you can buy and rent ski-related necessities. What it does not have, though, is parking for more than the most essential vehicles, those being the ones used to make and clear snow, and ferry guests up and down the mountain. The rest of the vehicles park five minutes' drive further down the mountain, accessing the peak via free shuttle.

The theater plays two movies per night, and Aladdin fit the bill perfectly, since none of us have seen it and it started at 6. Given how people had cleared out of the village square after it got out, having returned to their rooms or down the mountain already, I realized how much it was really intended for the people who are actually staying on the mountain, and can just walk back to their rooms. Given the events that delayed our return home until almost 11, I'm really glad we didn't see the 8:30 Godzilla: King of the Monsters. But I already said I was not going to horrify you with that.

Anyway, it was a really fun experience. The popcorn wasn't very warm and all up I spent about $70, which is a far cry from the zero money I usually pay to see movies. But we all liked the movie -- I was surprised at how much it overcame the initial shortcomings I perceived it to have -- and my older son declared it "either his second or third favorite movie." Then again, he's said that about each of the past five movies we've seen together.

I'd like to think watching it on the top of a mountain, as an escape from a cold but beautiful winter wonderland, had something to do with it.

Disney's unnatural clustering

Have you ever noticed there are periods of time when you feel like you are seeing certain actors in everything? It could of course be that they are blowing up, but sometimes, they're appearing in so many roles that you wonder how it was possible they even did all this work at the same time.

The answer is: They didn't. Because films have different periods of gestation, it's possible you did the work two years ago and it's only just now coming to the big screen. That's how an actor like John C. Reilly appears in The Sisters Brothers, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Holmes & Watson and Stan & Ollie, all released within a period of about four months in 2018. I'm not looking it up to confirm, but I'd bet he shot those over 18 months or more, rather than the intense four-month period their release dates would imply. Reilly himself had no control over when those movies would be released. He just showed up to work.

But a studio has a lot more control over the release of its movies, at least in theory. Often times they establish release dates in advance, then pull whatever strings are necessary to meet those release dates. Sometimes they miss and have to push it back, but for the most part, they don't.

Which is why I think it's so weird that Disney is giving us Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King all within 2019, at two-month intervals, starting at the end of this month.

I'm tempted to say it's like releasing three Star Wars movies within the space of five months, but that's not an exact parallel. These movies have nothing to do with each other in terms of story.

However, they are all part of Disney's most clearly delineated new initiative, which is to make live action remakes of most if not all of its classic films. I mean, it probably won't be all -- I doubt we're going to see the Treasure Planet or Home on the Range live action remake any time soon. But isn't that all the more reason to space them out? It's like they want to drain the whole well in 2019, and then move on. Who knows, maybe they do.

It seems hard to imagine that these films won't cannibalize one another in some way, either in terms of providing actual competition for one another or in terms of reducing our overall appetite for watered down CG versions of Disney classics. In North America, competition is not as much of a problem as it may be here in Australia, where movies tend to play longer in theaters.

I imagine these movies are messing with the Australian release strategy for children's movies, which often involves delaying releases to times that coincide with school holidays, which is why we are still waiting another month for the Lego Movie sequel. Dumbo's late March release works perfectly with the upcoming school holidays, which begin on April 5th, but Aladdin's May release can't rightly be pushed back to the end of June for the next school holidays, because The Lion King is hot on its heels.

Whether these movies cause logistical problems for one another, they just don't make sense from a strategy standpoint. You don't want to saturate the market with a particular type of film because the audience will stop considering it special and will kind of implicitly ask you for less of it. If they learned anything from the failure of Solo, maybe it should be that.

Or maybe they just think the appetite is inexhaustible for these live action remakes, as they are serving a different audience. Star Wars geeks rebelled (no pun intended) against the annual release of Star Wars movies, if not actually then implicitly, by not throwing their money at Solo. However, the money has been good for movies like Beauty and the Beast, so maybe either that Solo-type reckoning is still ahead, or will simply never happen.

Or maybe they recognize that the appetite is about to be exhausted, so better churn these out now before the audience definitively turns away from them.

Before I leave you I should probably explain that subject.

"Unnatural clustering" is a useful (if I do say so myself) term I coined in discussion of a phenomenon that occurs when ranking movies on Flickchart. (I can say I "coined it" because it's still used by people on my Flickcharters Facebook group). It refers to what happens when you are ranking movies in filters, as in, all Star Wars movies against each other. It's problematic to do it this way, because if one movie beats the other, it moves one spot ahead of it on the whole chart. In reality, those two films probably do not belong consecutively on your chart, but by forcing similar movies to duel each other, it's created the impression that they have landed naturally next to one another. That may occur in the course of random dueling, but filters force specific duels, and the problem is only worsened if Film C beats Film B, which had beaten Film A, leaving three consecutive Star Wars movies on your chart of potentially thousands of films.

Disney has created its own kind of unnatural clustering by taking three movies that would logically be their own types of tentpoles for the initiative they represent in their own calendar years. Instead, it's just 112 days from the release of the first to the release of the third.

For Disney, it could end up being a clusterfuck.