For a number of reasons, including slight differences in their offerings, I have started to rent more movies through Amazon than through my old standby, iTunes. One big issue with iTunes is that movies I rent there won't play through my projector, assuming I am using the iTunes software itself to view them, for some technical reason that I still don't understand. I watch a relatively small percentage of the movies I see through my projector, but it's definitely become a factor in my vendor preferences. I'm sure there's a way to watch them through the Apple TV website that circumvents this, but let's just say it's felt like a bridge too far.
In the case of The Kid Detective, the movie I watched in October for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, it was a difference in what was available that was the deciding factor. These are pretty rare. While iTunes only has this movie available for $12.99 purchase, it was rentable via Amazon. Typically the availability is determined at a higher level and not customized on a vendor level, or so I have always assumed, but this was the exception.
I liked the movie. I'll include my FFFF review below. But what I'm writing about today is the follow-up emails Amazon has been sending me, asking me to rate my purchase.
I find this strange, because I think Amazon wants me to tell them how much I liked the movie. But in most other cases, Amazon wants me to tell them whether I got the thing I bought in a timely manner, whether it came in the same condition they said it would come in, all that stuff. If I'd hated The Kid Detective and rated it one star, wouldn't that look the same as if I told them that a pair of headphones came damaged, or a book arrived two months late?
Books are probably the valid point of comparison here. I feel like when you receive a book from Amazon, you are clearly meant to tell them whether it was physically undamaged when it arrived. You aren't meant to read the whole book and then subject it to a rating of its quality from one to five stars. Especially since in this case, they ask you to rate the purchase only a few days later, and you can't have been expected to finish the book and assess its quality by that point. You might not even have started it.
With a digitally rented movie, there is no chance for it to come damaged, at least not physically. If for some reason you couldn't play the movie, you would contact customer support and they would either issue you a refund or get you to a link that actually worked. There would be no shipping involved in returning the faulty item. In fact, I don't think you'd necessarily even feel inclined to negatively rate the experience, unless customer service just totally dropped the ball. You'd always know it would be resolved easily enough.
So even though Amazon has asked me twice now to rate The Kid Detective, I have not complied. When it comes to other purchases I make online, I do usually do stuff like this and do not want to make them beg. I know that reviews are a big part of increasing consumer confidence in the thing in question.
But I'm not that interested in contributing to Amazon's dialogue surrounding The Kid Detective and whether someone else should rent it based on its merits as a movie. I don't rate movies I watch on Netflix. That seems like the most similar thing to what Amazon is asking me here.
Okay here's that write-up on FFFF:
I watched [Redacted]'s #50, The Kid Detective (2020), about a week ago, and unfortunately, failed to strike while the iron was hot to write this review. So this may not end up being my usual length, but I will give it the old college try.
I quite enjoyed the movie. The basic setup is that the main character, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), is a bit of a prodigy who successfully solved a missing persons case (if memory serves) when he was a kid, and was celebrated by the whole
town. Instead of this just being a one-off thing, he continues as an underage detective, and has success solving crimes. Now at 32, though, the life has lost some of its luster and he's not so much celebrated as pitied by the townspeople. His parents still parent him like he's 13.
The story is about his new case, and what I really liked about this movie is that it follows the same structure as your typical noir but in this small-town setting and with largely younger characters, including a teenage femme fatale played by Sophie Nelisse. (She serves that function in the story but is a total innocent, unlike most fatales.) I expected it to be cutesy and sort of a comedy, but it's a lot more contemplative and adult-oriented than you might expect from a film with that title. There is humor in it but it's all deadpan. In fact, I don't think I laughed once, though I was consistently amused by everything that was happening on screen -- without that amusement crossing over into taking the project less seriously. It gets that balance just right.
In fact, it's plenty adult in its approach, with (again if memory serves) profanity in addition to drug use and violence. Abe might not get knocked around to the same extent as other noir heroes but he definitely exposes himself to danger and has the sort of narrative arc through the movie you would expect from a detective beaten down by time.
In a way this film is doing something similar to Rian Johnson's Brick, but I like this film better. I'm not a big fan of Brick because I think the dialogue is annoyingly stylized and Johnson is a bit too cutesy with all his camera tricks and other noise. I enjoyed the straightforward approach of director Evan Morgan and especially Brody's performance as Abe, which gets a really satisfying final moment on screen.
I'm not sure if this was one of the intended themes but the film functions as an interesting analogy for child actors growing into adults, which is sort of a reality for Brody (he got started acting when he was 19, it would appear). Child actors are rarely able to convert the charm of their younger years into becoming appealing adult actors, with a few notable exceptions, and so we see the same is true for Abe as a young detective.
Let's see how it enters my chart:
The Kid Detective > Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl
The Kid Detective < In the Heat of the Night
The Kid Detective < Dave Made a Maze
The Kid Detective > The Brothers Grimsby
The Kid Detective > Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The Kid Detective < Tommy Boy
The Kid Detective > All the King's Men (1949)
The Kid Detective < Queen of Katwe
The Kid Detective < Incident at Oglala
The Kid Detective < City Island
The Kid Detective > Swing Vote
The Kid Detective > The X-Files: Fight the Future
The Kid Detective > Bronson
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