Priced to (never) sell

Barnes & Noble is smoking crack.

They're pricing DVDs like BluRays -- expensive ones -- and they're pricing BluRays like video games.

I couldn't believe my eyes yesterday when I happened to stroll into the DVD/BluRay section of the store closest to my work. I wasn't necessarily in the market for any DVDs or BluRays, but movie sections pull me in like the Death Star tractor beam.

I randomly went over to a DVD that I knew was a new release -- The Rum Diary -- and nearly fainted looking at the price:

$30.99.

My first thought was whether the price was actually listed in American currency.

$30.99? That's ridiculous. That would be high even for a BluRay. I can't say for sure what Target is charging for this same new release, but I'd bet they'd be afraid to go any higher than $19.99.

The price of a new release BluRay -- Real Steel -- didn't stagger me quite so much, but it was still high: $39.99.

Are they actually moving any of these units?

There has always been a price divide between boutique retailers and discount retailers, and I guess for these purposes we'll consider Barnes & Nobles to be the former and Target to the latter. You wouldn't expect to see the exact same prices in both stores. Barnes & Noble's movies are priced to snare people who would never set foot in a Target, considering it full of commoners.

But this is a pretty significant price divide, especially in an age when many people are buying their movies on the internet -- if they're buying their movies in physical formats at all. Barnes & Noble can never compete with online prices, but you'd think they'd come closer to competing with Target. If Target is charging $19.99 for a new release DVD -- which is still more than most people want to pay -- then you'd figure Barnes & Noble wouldn't dare go any higher than $23.99 or $24.99. That should still get them the couple additional dollars of profit margin they need to stay afloat, without sending a savvy consumer running away screaming.

In fact, I almost did just that. When I set down the Rum Diary DVD, the words "That's absurd" escaped my lips. Not loudly, but loudly enough for the salesman behind the nearest counter to look up. I almost hoped he'd take my involuntary expulsion of language as an excuse to interface with me, ask me if he could help me. I don't think I would have been able to resist telling him what exactly it was I found so absurd.

And here's another absurd thing: Barnes & Noble isn't even adhering to the basic principles of Pricing 101. Everyone knows that if you want a supposed psychological advantage over the consumer, you price a retail item as close as possible to the next price threshold without actually getting there. Like that BluRay of Real Steel -- I'm that much more likely to buy it at $39.99 than if they increased the price by a single penny. "Oh, it's not even forty bucks" I'd theoretically tell myself.

And I think that's what struck me so much about the $30.99 DVD price for a movie most people didn't even think was very good. It crossed the $30 threshold, which just seems totally out of bounds for a DVD in the year 2012. But it only just barely crossed it, which makes you wonder why it was even worth doing. I might not have noticed it if they'd just shaved off a dollar and charged $29.99. In fact, I might not be writing this post at all.

I should mention something here: Almost every movie Barnes & Noble carries has a sticker on it that discounts the price, either by 10 or 20%. If you cut the price of The Rum Diary by 1/5th, you're starting to get down into the industry standard range. I guess that's kind of a Pricing 101 trick in and of itself. Still, the listed price is what registered with me, what gave me the necessary sticker shock to come write this post immediately, a day before I planned to actually post it. If that was the takeaway for me, it's likely the takeaway for a number of other prospective customers as well.

I guess they have to jack up the prices for movies, because it's one of the few areas where they can actually control what to charge. Books very impertinently tell you exactly how much they cost, right there on the jacket. I've always wondered why that is -- must have something to do with publishers desiring to control the economics of their own industry. I'm sure the internet would tell me why if I looked. I always find this kind of annoying because it tells you exactly how much someone spent on a present. Why even bother with a gift receipt? Might as well give the actual receipt.

Unfortunately, we may be able to conclude something rather sad about this whole incident: Barnes & Noble is in trouble. They survived the initial industry correction that took down their primary competitor, Border's, by pioneering a popular e-reader. Border's had bupkus, and closed its doors. Those of us who like the idea of physical book stores breathed a sigh of relief and said "Okay, I don't have to worry about Barnes & Noble for another ten years."

But that may not be the case. In fact, a three-story Barnes & Noble adjacent to one of my favorite movie theaters just shuttered in the last couple months. This saddened me, as having the store right next to the theater made for a highly satisfying and enriching concentration of culture. You could even see into the book store from the lobby of the movie theater, and vice versa, through the glass walls that separated the two businesses. In fact, it was common for us to stroll through the book store while we were killing time before a movie. This theater is pretty progressive, and they used to even allow you to buy snacks in the Barnes & Noble Cafe and bring them into the theater. And we used to regularly avail ourselves of that option.

Now, every inch of those glass walls is covered with brown butcher paper.

It could just be that the rent was too high in this particular location. National chains make decisions all the time on which stores to close and which to keep open, based on such factors as the desirability of the location and the price to rent the space.

Still, I can't help but think that this could be a bad sign for the bookseller, and that their movie prices are a sign of their desperation. If they don't start making more profit, maybe all their stores will end up like the one next to the Landmark Theater on Pico.

Maybe I should have bought that $30.99 Rum Diary after all.

Everything but a horror movie

It's the Friday before Halloween ... do you know where your horror movies are?

Who'd have thought we'd so notice the absence (for the first time since 2003) of a new Saw movie? Now there are simply no scary movies being released on the Friday before Halloween. How unlikely.

Okay, maybe not so unlikely ... Paranormal Activity 3 and The Thing both came out earlier in the month, presumably to put more asses in the seats before Halloween actually rolled around. Smart strategy.

And perhaps that's why counter-programming is so abundant on the October 28, 2011 release date. Without a perceived front-runner for this weekend's box office dollars -- that is, a perceived front-runner among new releases, as all movies will be grappling with the phenomenon known as Paranormal Activity 3 -- a number of other movies have jumped up to the fore to stake their claim to this weekend's available dollars.

In fact, I now have to laugh at myself for this post, in which I wondered whether March 10, 2011 might be the busiest release date of all time. In retrospect it seems quite funny, especially now that I've seen all the movies that came out on that date, and they were no great shakes. I contended that Battle: Los Angeles, Red Riding Hood, Mars Needs Moms and Jane Eyre (which I later discovered was only opening in limited release) were about as hot as it got for movies releasing on one date. Of course, now I know that only Jane Eyre is actually a really good movie, with Mars Needs Moms being decent and the other two being guilty-pleasure laughable at best.

Clearly, back then, I wasn't expecting a release date like October 28th, 2011.

Roland Emmerich goes legit

The movie I've been looking forward to most for a couple months now is Anonymous, Roland Emmerich's attempt to lift himself out of the bowels of the disaster movie gutter and contribute something thoughtful to the world of cinema. I've discussed previously that I love a genre I've made up called the "wax-stamp movie," which is any movie in which the production design is such that a wax seal either is or could be used. (You know, the kind used to keep a parchment letter from coming open, back in the day.)

Anonymous certainly qualifies in that regard. Which makes it the last movie I would have expected Emmerich to direct.

I'm going to choose not to hold his previous career against him and go in to this movie with an open mind -- especially since it looks fantastic. And Emmerich's most recent film, 2012, is actually my favorite film he's ever directed, so maybe he's finally figured out how to do this job after so many years in the business.

The thing I wonder in a humorous sort of way is whether this will become one of those "issue" movies. I don't know how I started thinking this, but it seems that when a director (or star, or producer, or what have you) makes a movie on a certain sociopolitical hot-button topic, they sometimes try to spread the word about whatever the particular cause is, during rounds of press interviews and (if it works out this way) during award-show acceptance speeches.

I don't think Emmerich will win -- or probably even get nominated for -- an Oscar for this movie, but I do think it'll be funny if he decides he needs to take up the campaign about whether Shakespeare really was a fraud. Which wouldn't be a very popular cause to promote in the same way that, you know, gay rights (Milk) or water contamination (Erin Brockovich) may have seemed like causes their stars or directors needed to promote.

Shirking Shrek

I couldn't find online the one poster that first gave me the idea for my take on Puss in Boots, the spin-off from the Shrek franchise starring the voice of Antonio Banderas. That poster gives my sub-heading a bit more meaning than the poster I've chosen does.

It was actually a billboard, and I started seeing it on my drive home from work a month or two ago. It shows a vaguely expressionistic, purple-colored drawing of the face of a cat with the name Puss in Boots below it.

No reference to Shrek, and certainly no visual call-out to the signature Dreamworks animation style that made the title character in this new movie famous. (Man, really wish I could locate that image.)

But this poster here is enough different from the vaguely bulbous animation style of the Shrek movies, and few if any of the posters make a reference to this film's origins within the Shrek universe.

Curious, right?

Latin American chaos

Speaking of posters that do or don't do what they're supposed to do, I find the Rum Diary posters to be some of the most effective I've seen in a long time.

Pair the posters with the trailers and you get a terrific environs in which to set a movie:

Latin American chaos.

There's something I find primitively exciting about the potential for bacchanalian drunken chaos set in a country where they speak Spanish. Do you get me? ("We get you sir!") (Hmm, don't know where that came from. Starship Troopers, I think. )

Anyway, the trailer put me in the perfect mood to imagine a series of wild adventures, many of them actually or theoretically involving rum, in the vaguely lawless version of Puerto Rico created for this movie.

Granted, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and in that sense is not really Latin American. But you get what I'm going for, I think. Anyway, you said you did two paragraphs ago. Let's just say this movie looks really fun and I am very excited to see it. (And it could be the Hunter S. Thompson-ness of this movie, more than its Latin American-ness, that I'm responding to.)

One thing I think will be interesting -- and I really should read more about this -- is that this is the director's first movie in 19 years. Bruce Robinson, a name I vaguely recognized, last directed the movie Jennifer 8 in 1992. Love to hear how he found his way back into the director's chair after all these years -- especially in a high-profile project starring Johnny Depp.

Justin Timberlake, action star

It's rather amazing to me how many films Justin Timberlake has now made -- he crossed over from being primarily a singer to primarily an actor a couple years ago -- and he has yet to appear in what you would call an action role. He's got the features for it, it just didn't happen until now.

And when it did happen, that action role had to be in service of a high-concept science fiction plot.

In Time may not end up being a good movie -- in fact, I'm starting to be worried that it won't be -- but it won't seem like some kind of cash-in for Timberlake either. This apparent update of Logan's Run is clearly a movie with ideas, even if they may not end up getting executed effectively.

Just reminds me again how smart Timberlake's choices have always been. Sure, he's made the occasional dud like The Love Guru, but far more often he's selecting material that is interesting or challenging in some way, such as Alpha Dog, Black Snake Moan and The Social Network.

Okay, okay, so 2011 hasn't been his greatest year on record. I haven't seen them, but I hear that Bad Teacher and Friends With Benefits are nothing to write home about.

Look, I just want to praise the guy. Is that okay with you?

The smart romance

It occurs to me that Like Crazy, as original as it will probably be in many ways, is the latest in a string of similar movies that we hope will be a "smart romance."

It may just be me and I may be just taking a very quick look at it, but doesn't this movie remind you a little bit of things like (500) Days of Summer and One Day?

Which is not to say that Like Crazy borrows from either movie -- it seems to be a far less whimsical affair than (500) Days, and it was made pretty much at the same time as One Day, only One Day happened to release a couple months earlier.

More than anything I'm identifying a hunger for independent movies in which two beautiful young actors -- not too beautiful, just beautiful enough -- are involved in some kind of lyrical, semi-tragic romance. You could probably throw in a movie like Blue Valentine, even though that movie is presumably a lot sadder than this one.

Well, I didn't particularly care for (500) Days and I didn't see One Day, whose negative reviews kept me away. But I admit this hunger in myself, and so I'm hoping Like Crazy is good. If the reaction it received at Sundance is any indication, it will be.

*******

More than anything, this weekend at the movies marks an unofficial start to the cinematic home stretch of 2011. Two weeks ago we got a pair of remakes, and last weekend was dominated by the genre giant Paranormal Activity 3. Next week it's November, and many of the year's high-profile award contenders are going to start hitting the theaters with regularity.

Before I get stressed out about all the things I can't see -- Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter already in theaters -- I'll just try to focus on which of the above movies I'll see this weekend. As of now, Anonymous is the top contender, with Rum Diary a close second.

One thing I can tell you I won't be seeing this weekend:

A horror movie.

In the theater, anyway. On video? Hell yeah! At least one if not several.

It's Halloween weekend, after all.