Ready to vote with my rental dollars now

Like everyone else -- everyone I want to be associated with, in any case -- I have spent the last few days feeling glum about those corrupt, lying political partisans on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Last night I did a small part, a very small part, in contributing financially to the protest pro-choice Americans have been making in the streets since Friday.

I don't know to what extent movie rentals are considered a form of expressing your displeasure with something -- in reality, almost none. But I thought it was important not only to watch Eliza Hittman's 2020 abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always on Monday night, but to pay for that rental -- even if it may have been available on one of my streaming services, which I didn't even check.

Maybe it's just important for me. After all, the first two times I wrote about this movie was to complain about how much it cost.

I could link those posts but I won't, possibly due to retroactive shame. But I'll summarize. 

The first was the first time I had encountered a $19.99 iTunes rental price for a movie, which I obviously did not pay. That has since become commonplace, but it was a new pandemic novelty at the time, so I thought it was worth writing about, with a small amount of faux outrage. 

The second time was when I went to see when it would be available for rental at the non-premiere initial price, and that rental date was still more than seven months away. The only option at this time was to buy it, which I don't believe in doing on principle. So again I didn't watch it.

If it could play the smallest role in Roe v. Wade still being the law of the land in the U.S., I'd buy that movie ten times over.

I didn't buy it last night. I still rented it. Now it's only $3.99. I still don't believe in buying movies I haven't seen, unless it's very specific circumstances -- like trying to finish watching Martin Scorsese's movies for a series I'm doing on my blog, and only being able to watch New York, New York if I bought it on DVD. Apparently this principle is a stronger belief in me than my belief that a woman should have the right to choose.

But of course neither buying the movie nor renting it means a damn thing. I can't accomplish anything with my piddly little rental any more than the protestors in the streets, who are really doing something, will be able accomplish anything, unfortunately. Clarence Thomas only listens to protestors when he and his wife believe in what they're doing, like trying to overthrow the U.S. government.

But I do like to think that somebody, somewhere, tabulating iTunes rentals for a two-year-old movie, will see that I rented it on this particular day and will know what that means. It's one more small voice in the chorus decrying this travesty of justice.

The movie is pretty powerful, sneakily so. I say "sneakily" because Hittman's film deals in understatement. We know how awful this trek to New York to get an abortion is for a pregnant Pennsylvania teen and her cousin, not because the movie tells us this, but because it gets incredible mileage out of facial expressions, monosyllabic responses that reveal so much underneath that isn't said. And between the lines of this movie, we see how toxic men have put these girls in this position, and how they continue to do so, even when they are in the midst of it.

Kind of like the toxic men who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

They've won. They're laughing. Clarence and Ginny Thomas are giving each other high fives every hour on the hour.

Maybe our opposing voices, joining together in a chorus, will one day be enough to set things right again. 

Okay then ... never I guess?

Now that cinemas are open again and we are on our 15th (!) straight day of no new COVID cases in Victoria -- have we actually eradicated this thing? -- I just now mapped out my potential trips to the cinema this week.

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. 

Something I've Never seen before

I was listening to the most recent episode of Filmspotting and I heard something that was music to my ears: scenes from a trailer that was unmistakably a new movie.

I then found that indeed, my two favorite podcasters, stranded now without anything new to talk about for more than a month, would indeed be discussing a new film on their next podcast.

The Sundance favorite Never Rarely Sometimes Always had been moved from an expected theatrical release to a digital release in light of COVID-19. And because it's fun to have listened to the thing they talk about, I immediately went to iTunes to investigate.

As I was searching it up, I wondered how high I'd go on a rental price. I had the naivete to hope that it might be a $3.99 rental, though of course that wasn't likely to be the case. It was more likely to be $6.99, which is what I paid for Vivarium over the weekend.

It was very unlikely to be $19.99, but as you will see on the snippet to the right, that's what it was.

For a rental.

That $19.99 is what you expect if you're planning to buy a new movie, to be sure. But that new movie you'd be buying has already had its chance to get your $19.99 in the theater. Never Rarely Sometimes Always never got that chance.

So I'm writing this post not because I'm balking at the outrageous chutzpah of iTunes to charge us $20 for a movie we can only watch for 30 days, and only for 48 hours once we've started on it. I'm writing to recognize the desperation that may soon become commonplace in the movie industry, as studios/production companies/distributors try to figure out any strategy they can to recoup production costs.

And you know, I may just rent this movie.

I have until Friday to think about it, but then really, until any time after that, until I get too desperate myself to listen to the next Filmspotting. There are a lot of other things I'm not spending money on right now, and I'm one of the fortunate ones who is still making the same amount of money I was making a month ago. Maybe this is one of my ways to give back and support an industry that brings me so much joy, since I can afford to do so. And if enough of us do it, maybe they'll keep giving us new 2020 movies.

It's not something I might normally do. But COVID-19 is a never rarely sometimes always type of situation.