For a new movie, call ... CinemaNow

I always tell you when I discover new ways to consume movies. Don't I?

Well, I've got one.

The thrust of my Friday night movie watching took several unexpected twists and turns. At one point I was going to go see Django Unchained, but I called an audible and decided I was in no physical shape -- the indulgences of the holiday had caught up with me in the form of consistent heartburn and general exhaustion. If I hadn't been going to do that, the plan was to watch The Duplass brothers' The Do-Deca-Pentathlon with my wife. But before we had a chance to start that, we decided that its 76-minute length made it the perfect choice for one of our son's naps. That left us with a half-dozen other choices of 2012 movies on Netflix streaming, all of which were serious documentaries or impenetrable foreign films -- not "Friday night viewing," anyway.

So we decided to check among our BluRay player's other internet-based choices in its Netcast section, specifically the literally named service CinemaNow.

We'd used CinemaNow previously to watch the last couple episodes of The Walking Dead, which became necessary when our DirecTV tuner crapped out and we lost the episodes we had saved. For a minimal fee (something like $2.99 each), we were able to easily catch up with those episodes -- which was especially key given that The Walking Dead is not available to watch online for free, and without this, we might have been forced to wait until the show was available on DVD. (Or itunes, but we'd still have to watch it on one of our computers.) My wife had also used this service to catch a couple episodes of Bones.

Anyway, quite obviously, CinemaNow is not for TV only. And last night represented our first perusal of the movie options. At first I didn't notice anything special, except that the choices are organized in a very easy-to-digest single row that moves along the middle of the screen. (That's the same way Netflix is set up on our old BluRay player, but sadly, not our new one.) But then I noticed something that did qualify it as special: For a Good Time, Call ..., which I'd given up as inaccessible to me before the deadline for my list (it won't debut on DVD until January 22nd).

If I were staying in a hotel, I'm sure I could have gotten FAGTC back in October. But in all non-magical non-hotel environments, I figured it wouldn't be possible to see before my January 10th ranking deadline. Along comes CinemaNow. After all, it's called "CinemaNow," not "CinemaJanuary22nd."

And since my wife had already registered her credit card for the purchases of Walking Dead and Bones, all we had to do was click a single button to rent it for $3.99. 

If I were 15 years younger or 15 years more technically savvy, I wouldn't be impressed by the fact that there are any number of alternatives for affordable instant movies at my fingertips, CinemaNow probably being neither the coolest nor the most significant among them. After all, DirecTV has plenty of on-demand movies as well, which are probably around the same price -- we just haven't availed ourselves of that option very much because the interface for choosing them is significantly clunkier.

But I am and can only be me, and as me, I was pretty impressed.

One of the best things this reminds me is that even if I haven't made what's becoming my daily visit to Redbox, I still have plenty of options for not getting stuck with a serious documentary or an impenetrable foreign film. And the advantage it has over Redbox is that I don't have to commit to a choice. (Of course, Redbox has the advantage of costing a third of the price.)

I wouldn't be surprised if CinemaNow rears its head again sometime before January 10th.

The movie? Three stars out of five. It's the very definition of uneven, but its good moments are pretty delightful.

The language of personal ads

Coming up with movie titles that sound straight out of personal ads is by no means some hallowed Hollywood tradition. In fact, in canvasing my brain on the topic, the only one I could immediately think of was Single White Female -- and in truth, that's just the elongated form of the personal ad notation SWF, which indicates the demographic of the type of roommate the poster is seeking.

Speaking of seeking ...

The year 2012 has featured two such movie titles: Safety Not Guaranteed, which we saw about a month ago, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which we watched last night as kind of a belated doomsday theme movie. (The world hadn't ended and it was already December 22nd in many parts of the world, but we thought it was a good theme viewing anyway -- we still had a couple hours of December 21st left here in Los Angeles.)

With Safety Not Guaranteed, the title is literally an extraction from a personal ad. Those three words are the caveat given to the reader should he or she choose to undertake the ad's offer of traveling back in time with the poster. "If you die, it's on you."

With Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it's only an encapsulation of the film's themes, using the language we usually associate with such ads. "Seek" is just about the most common verb used in personal ads, as in "SWF seeks same." It's interesting, in a way, that normal people can even comprehend these ads, since the fact that they charge by the word requires heavy reliance on shortcuts in logic. It's kind of like reading those ridiculous Variety headlines: "Sticks nix hick pix."

And actually, there's a third example that I haven't seen yet: For a Good Time, Call ... This might be more likely to be scrawled on a bathroom stall wall than appear in the personals, but I'm sure it could appear there too, and I'm sure it originally appeared there before gravitating to this more unsavory medium.

The thing that's weird about this sudden "trend" is that it comes at a time when people don't really use personal ads the way they once did. In fact, you could argue that the target audience of all three films is more accustomed to transacting this type of business on Craigslist, where there's no premium on the words used and the poster can actually type out complete sentences (if they're capable of writing one).

Why, then? Well, it could just be another case of everything that's old being new again. Our reaction to the way technology has taken over our lives is to willfully go back to a time when it hadn't. There's something very quaint about placing a personal add. If they'd shown Mark Duplass actually composing his advert for a daring time-traveling companion, the scene probably would have depicted him hard at work on a clunky old typewriter.

It's appropriate, as well, that the two movies I've seen both deal with a central romantic relationship, even though the thing both titles are overtly requesting is only friendship or partnership. It seems that the most classical way to use a personal ad is to seek (there's that word again) out a love interest. Neither of these scenarios involve that on the surface, though of course that's what materializes.

I just wished I liked either of these movies better.

Both are terrific in concept. The idea of investigating a crackpot who thinks he can travel back in time, in order to write a quirky newspaper piece about him, is rich with potential -- it creates the necessary conflict by having the reporter hold back a key piece of information from the crackpot the whole time she's growing closer and closer to him. And with Seeking, when was the last time you saw someone try to do a romantic comedy that was set during the final weeks of planet Earth? Answer: Never, and I always loving seeing them attempt to do things I've never seen before.  

But the execution is wanting in rather significant ways. The resolution of Safety Not Guaranteed is too much of a departure from the kind of movie it seemed to me they were making, and that narrative gets sidetracked by a B story that's given nearly as much weight as the A story even though it comes out of nowhere and doesn't deserve such emphasis. And with Seeking, the perfect seriocomic tone is established in the first half-hour before being abandoned for a mix of dreary and schmaltzy, and the plot elements become unforgivably slapdash. Plus, the laughs die off a good week before the people do.

So I feel like placing my own personal ad:

"Seeking a good movie inspired by a personal ad."

Maybe For a Good Time, Call ... will respond.