Streaming presents its own interesting challenges and opportunities in that regard. The TV in our AirBnB has some accounts that are logged in either to the homeowner or a past guest -- which reminds me, I think we left our Netflix logged in at the AirBnB back in Maine -- that might get me access to some things I can't access equally back in Melbourne.
I say "challenges" in addition to opportunities because there is something weird going on with the remote control for this big TV in the living room. No back buttons on it seem to work, and there are certain apps where the TV allows you to get in to a certain point, but then not to retrace your steps. Turning the TV off and back on again seems to get you to a main menu again, but once you go back into the app, it remembers the place you left off, and the cycle starts all over again.
And so it is that I'm not sure if I actually have access to Marielle Heller's Nightbitch on the Hulu logged into our TV. Within the actual Hulu app, I have progressed to a point where I can't seem to get out of a certain screen of options and the search function isn't accessible. I did search for Nightbitch elsewhere, but I'm not sure it was actually checking Hulu when it did that search so it showed as unavailable. But Nightbitch is available on Hulu, which we don't have in Australia, isn't it? I have a few more days to figure this out.
I eventually abandoned Nightbitch for a different sort of American novelty, which is Max. The Max account was fully logged in and I could go through all the choices. We don't have Max in Australia, as the things that play on Max are on a streamer called Binge, which my wife can get on her laptop but I can't get on our TV. (A boring topic that it is not worth getting into today.)
In a moment of desperation, I almost started watching Joker: Folie a Deux. However, I had resolved not to watch it out of some vague protest of Todd Phillips and his vaguely right-wing rhetoric, and I didn't want desperation alone to cause me to crumble. (Plus the movie is available on the plane if I do get to that point.)
Instead I found something that is not actually accessible to me in any other way, but is on my watchlist: Gary Dauberman's Salem's Lot. As far as I am aware, this is fully a Max exclusive and it may not even be available for rental via iTunes, though I have not checked that.
For context, Salem's Lot is one of my favorite Stephen King novels. The 1979 movie version of it is terrible, and on IMDB I am noticing there is also a 2004 version that I haven't seen. For being one of my favorites, though, I remember very little of the actual plot, only that I loved King's execution of it and that I cherished the book at the time I read it. Catching it before I finalize my 2024 rankings seemed like the best possible outcome of a night in America with my different viewing options, even though I would have preferred Nightbitch. And it was also not too mentally taxing a way to wind down from a day at Universal Studios for my younger son's 11th birthday.
I didn't end up loving the movie, though I didn't end up hating it either. I'd heard it was pretty mid, and it was.
Though it's hard to tell if a second novelty played a significant role in my assessment of the movie or not. Allow me to elaborate.
As many TVs are out there in this world, this TV is on the high-def setting that does not make movies look very good. Actually, I should clarify. It makes them look extremely "good" if your idea of "good" is to see lines so crisp and details so defined that it almost creates the impression you are watching something on video, like the high-frame rate of Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies. I've discussed this before so I think you know what I'm talking about even though at this moment I am lacking the technical language to describe it more accurately.
I don't ever like to watch movies on this TV setting and rarely would be in a position to do so because my own TV is set up on cinema mode (or whatever it's called), which makes movies look like they are supposed to look. But given the challenges this remote control was already presenting me, I decided not to try to change the picture mode, in part because I am going to assume the guy who owns this place actually wants it to look like it does. (He's got surf movie posters up around the house and I think he might be involved in movie production in some way, so I am having to assume he made this choice intentionally.)
So I decided a second novelty would be to watch Salem's Lot on this setting that I never use on my own TV, and see if I could quantify any impact it had on my impression of the movie. Which turned out to be a tall task.
People talk about an uncanny valley when they discuss Robert Zemeckis' films -- boy do they talk about that, I really wish they would come up with a new perspective. For me this is more like the uncanny valley, watching these actors in high-def, feeling like the sets and (in this case) the monsters are hyper-real in some way that bothers me, rather than cinematic creations that are of a piece with the rest of the attractive looking environment we get when we watch films in the theater or on the right TV setting. It also gave me the impression they were making a television show, not a movie, but also not a television show from the prestige TV era. In the past I've likened it to something shot for the BBC in the 1980s and I stand by that description.
So that feeling alone takes me out of the idea that I am watching something that I should consider on par with all the other movies I'm watching in a particular year -- a consideration especially at a time of year that I am comparing those movies for the purposes of my list. And it dulls my ability to properly rate all the other elements of a typical movie, like script and performance and special effects. Once I've lost my like with like comparison, I'm lost for sure.
As I was watching Salem's Lot, I found myself wondering how I would fare with a movie I thought I had good reason to like -- Nightbitch, for example. There was never a great likelihood Salem's Lot would contend for even my top 100 of 2024, let alone my top 20. Heller, on the other hand, has already made one movie that landed in my top 20 (Diary of a Teenage Girl was my #19 of 2015) and one other that probably would have contended for the top 20 if I'd seen it in time to rank it (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood).
The question, of course, is whether I want to subject a movie I have a good chance of liking to this setting. What if I would have really liked the movie but watching it this way ruins it?
It remains to be seen whether that question will be answered with Nightbitch. If I do manage to pull it up on this TV, then I can decide whether I want to make my way into the TV settings and find the proper mode on which to view it.
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