Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show. 

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ... 

Audient Zeitgeist: Eat Pray Love

This is the first in my 2025 bi-monthly series watching previously unseen movies who have some significant role in the zeitgeist.

Now I can tell you about the actual inspiration for my new bi-monthly series, which was not The Bucket List, that being my example of the phenomenon I'm considering when I first announced Audient Zeitgeist.

The actual inspiration was Eat Pray Love, which I seem to have encountered a lot in culture, even 15 years after it came out -- in fact, especially lately.

I can't count the number of times -- okay, it's probably only two or three -- that I've seen a character in some movie or TV show talk about an upcoming trip of self-discovery and say "I'm going to Eat Pray Love that shit." In fact, it's a line of dialogue I can imagine someone like Jonah Hill saying, because that's the kind of thing a Hill character would say -- at least back at the time that Eat Pray Love actually came out, if not the current version of Hill.

The idea being that while on this trip the character is discussing, they're going to eat a lot, pray a lot (or at least a little), and, if all goes well, love. 

Which means that like The Bucket List, Eat Pray Love has risen up in our culture beyond its potentially modest roots as an adaptation of self-help chic lit starring Julia Roberts, to become a thing everybody knows about and can easily understand the meaning of what you're talking about just from a reference to the title.

Of course, the really qualifying aspect of the movie for this series is that I had never seen it.

I corrected that on Tuesday night, perhaps choosing an inopportune night to do it since I'd played tennis that night and the movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long. Of course, any opportunity may have been inopportune, because I didn't like it very much.

I don't think you need me to recap the plot, but I will anyway. Roberts plays a woman, Liz, who discovers sort of abruptly (at least as the film presents it) that she is not very happy in her marriage to a character played by Billy Crudup, and one day, after anachronistically praying to God (Liz is not religious), through tears she tells Crudup she doesn't want to be married anymore. She hasn't yet discovered what she does want, and has a fling with an actor played by James Franco. Because of the poor sense of pacing of Ryan Murphy's film, the passage of time in this fling is hard to chart, such that in no screen time at all, she also wants to escape Franco and it seems like they've had some sort of soulful relationship that she mourns in equal measure to her marriage.

The thing she does want, ultimately, is to travel around the world to three specific locations all starting with I -- could there be any better metaphor for her self-involvement -- which are Italy, India and Indonesia. (Though Indonesia is always referred to in the film as just "Bali," since perhaps that sounds more exotic than "Indonesia.") She couldn't know that this was how it would turn out, of course -- unless the script is lazy enough to posit that she does -- but these three legs of her journey will correspond to the three words in the film's title, in that order. The trip is planned to take a year.

First I want to talk about how shoddy this film looks, especially for a travelogue into which we are meant to dream ourselves away. And I don't think it was just the fact that Stan, my Australian streamer, makes everything look a bit shoddy, especially compared to watching the same movie on any of my other streamers. (I should have checked to see if it was on them. I just saw it was on Stan, because it's the kind of movie Stan would have, and stopped there.)

More specifically in its shoddy appearance, let's talk about the lighting. Which is way too dark, even in the majority outdoor scenes in these three locations, but especially where we start in New York. That may have been an intentional thematic choice by Murphy, but I don't feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But on that topic of lighting, there are entirely too many scenes where Roberts has light shining on the back of her head, which made me think Murphy intended that as a halo effect. Yawn. 

It's hard to think of there being a halo around Liz' head because it's not very easy to like her. For being two and a third hours long, Murphy's script, which he co-wrote with Jennifer Salt and Elizabeth Gilbert, doesn't put in the time for us to understand where Liz' sense of ennui originated. Sure, a person can be unhappy just because they're unhappy, but Liz comes across as a privileged person who doesn't totally appreciate what she has. Even the presentation of Crudup's character is pretty mild as an inciting incident for her divorce, and I wonder if that was to flatter the character by not making her capable of marrying a true narcissist. Without having an obviously toxic male to run away from, though -- and the movie starts to portray him more cartoonishly after the fact as a sort of corrective measure -- we don't really get what's driving this sudden desire to leave. Ultimately the movie is going to posit the fact that she "doesn't love herself so how could she love anyone else," which may be a true phenomenon in the world but doesn't seem any less corny, especially in Murphy's hands. 

The journey gets better as it goes -- at least Murphy gets the momentum going in the right direction -- but I found Liz' experiences in Italy particularly insufferable. This is the section of the movie that bears the brunt of the "Eat" portion of the title -- only once do we even see her eat something again after this -- but it's not very good food porn. And there's the sort of ridiculous notion that Liz and her companion need to buy new jeans because they've gained too much weight while indulging in pizza and pasta. Because these are both professional actresses, one an icon of her generation, of course they did not gain a single pound while shooting the movie, so the notion that they now both have a "muffin top" -- Liz' term for the small roll of flab at her waist -- is totally unsupported by what we see on screen.

Plus this section is replete with cultural stereotypes of Italians and in all other ways unconvincing. There's this one attempted "joke" where a small Italian girl gives them the finger from the fire escape of her apartment building, based on nothing that they've done, only a desire by the screenwriters to add personality into the moment. It falls as flat as any of their other attempts at "jokes." At least, I should note, her handsome language teacher does not become a love interest for her, but rather, for her friend.  

The India portion is weighted down by Liz' interactions with an American named Richard (billed as "Richard from Texas" on IMDB), and he's played by an actual Richard, Richard Jenkins. He gloms onto her so mercilessly that it seems like a failure at both the performance level and the directing level. The failure at the writing level is that he takes to calling her "Groceries," because when she first gets to the ashram where she'll be staying, he sees her eating a particularly large plate of food. Guess the "Eat" portion of the film is taking its time to transition into the "Pray" portion. And poor Liz, I think this is the last time we see food touch her lips in this movie. You shouldn't call someone "Groceries" if they have as big of a "muffin top" as Liz has. (Wait, no, she doesn't have a muffin top at all.)

He's of course got a back story that will reveal itself over time, and in this ashram -- which is, in a bit of irony that is never resolved, missing its guru because she's in New York, effectively trading places with Liz -- Liz has to do menial labor tasks to earn her keep, in addition to her praying. She also has an underdeveloped relationship with an Indian girl who works there (I. Gusti Ayu Puspawati) and who is dreading her arranged marriage. 

I did eventually thaw on this section of the film a little bit, but I was pretty eager to get on to the Bali portion because that's the only of the three places I've actually been. (I was in Italy in college but it was the very far north and for a ski trip, which is very dissimilar to what we see here.)

Here, with the same level of abruptness that characterizes many of the other interactions in this movie, she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian who I guess retired here (Bardem was only 41 in 2010) after his wife died ten years ealier. This is a homecoming of sorts for Liz because in an opening I didn't totally understand either, she had been there earlier to interview a local who can read your palm and tell your fortune, which is, I suppose, reason enough for her to have taken this trip in the first place, when the man told her she would be in one short marriage and one long one, but she didn't know which she was currently in. 

I say this relationship is abrupt because I have already forgotten how these characters actually meet, but like one scene later they are swimming in beautiful Bali bays and apparently already deliriously in love. I guess they didn't meet cute enough for me to remember that part.

I didn't hate this section of the film either, but the overall effect of the whole experience was pretty disappointing.

I don't know, I guess I thought this might be fun -- kind of in a similar way to another Bali-set movie starring Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney, was fun. At least I thought it would be lit better.

But actually, I don't think this movie really wants to be fun. It tries to be fun on a couple occasions, but I think that's more a concession to the fundamental components of filmmaking than it is an actual interest in being fun. I think we need to read more into Roberts' opening tearful speech to God -- which comes out of left field when the movie is barely five minutes old, her crying face seen in awkward profile -- if we want to understand what this movie really thinks its about. 

Now the real question is: Is its enduring spot in our zeitgeist justified?

I guess that's a different question than "do I understand it."

Yes I understand it, especially since few of the cultural references to the movie would be considered respectful. They're far more likely to be taking the piss out of the movie than suggesting a journey like this is actually a clear-eyed means of achieving self-actualization.

For one, such a journey is only available to someone who is pretty wealthy, or has been working all their life to save up for it. Roberts was only 43 in 2010, so she isn't the latter. She'd have to be the former even though, if memory serves, her character is only a journalist. And that's not me insulting journalists. That's me having been a journalist and knowing that the pay isn't great.

Then there's the inexcusable self-absorption of it. We are meant to be our own biggest supporters and all that, but there's a fine line between looking out for yourself and the "me me me" mentality that is only slightly softened here by Roberts' charm.

Plus there's the definite tourist's attitude to the hip trend of trying to know yourself better through eastern religion. I don't think Liz even articulates why it is that she wants to go to this ashram, considering that she doesn't seem to be that into the idea of the spiritual when she tries to pray to God. It's almost like it's shorthand that she's just a shallow rich lady who is susceptible to the ideas presented by the 2010 version of influencers without having any sincere knowledge of why she's doing the things she's doing.

Eat Pray Love is a myopic conceit that purports to be a real formula a real person could use to try to achieve a happier life. The cynical thing about it -- the book before it, I'm sure, and then the movie -- is that the people who are ready to receive this sort of message are rarely the ones who are in a position to enact what it is suggesting. I'm sure there were more than a few midwestern moms with mortgages -- MMMs, we might call them -- who dropped everything and took a plane somewhere in the hopes they would eat Italian food while still looking as good as Julia Roberts, and were quite sure there was a soulful Brazilian widower out there just waiting to fall head over heels for them. Three weeks later, maybe they came back with significantly less money to pay that mortgage.

I'll be back in April to chew over another zeitgeist movie I haven't seen.

Demographics for dummies

The usual goal, with any film that gets released, is to reach as many different types of viewer as possible. That's the way you make the most money. And that's also why you sometimes see several different TV campaigns that are distinctly different in tone -- one that might push the romantic side of a movie, one that might emphasize its funny parts, one that might make it look like a thriller. It's all just a matter of cleverly editing the available footage.

Considering this, can you remember a weekend that was more packed with new releases that didn't give a damn about appealing to anyone outside their target demographic?

The three major new releases this week -- Eat Pray Love, The Expendables, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- are each basically the prototypical example of the type of movie they are. Eat Pray Love -- adapted from a self-help book, starring Julia Roberts, and featuring dozens of exotic locations -- is squarely aimed at women age 18 to 49. The Expendables -- a testosterone-laden gathering of everyone who's ever starred in an action movie since 1984, and directed by the king of that group, Sylvester Stallone -- is intended purely for the men in that same age range. And Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- starring teen icon Michael Cera and based on a graphic novel -- is for everyone under 18, of both genders.

So, pretty much everyone will have something to see this weekend. Those over 49 will probably go see Eat Pray Love. Which I'm predicting will be the weekend's box office winner. Hey, it's Julia, after all.

However, it will be interesting to monitor the performances of the other two, as they are each something of a test of the viability of a certain type of movie.

The Expendables is the one I'm most interested in -- not in terms of wanting to see it the most, but in terms of how it will fly with audiences. As I wrote last year when 12 Rounds came out (check out the post here), the "action hero" as such is something that doesn't really exist anymore, like he did in the 1980s -- except in this movie. In fact, this movie is giving some seriously out-of-work actors (Dolph Lundgren, anyone?) another chance at glory -- which may be either a brilliant move or an extremely stupid one. There's a reason guys like Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal don't appear in movies you've ever heard of anymore -- the audience simply stopped wanting to see them. At least Stallone didn't go that far down the list to Van Damme and Seagal, and smartly hedged his bets with some guys who have current box office appeal, such as Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham and Jet Li. But even Stallone himself is a total relic these days -- the man is 64 years old -- so it will be really interesting to see if audiences buy a movie in which he is basically the star, and basically playing the 1982 version of himself.

As for Scott Pilgrim, that's the one of these three that I would probably see, but only because I'm still trying to hang on to that 18-year-old version of myself. Actually, I know it could be really good, but I also have my doubts, in part because of my well-documented case of being over Michael Cera. (There's something about the earnest way he's rocking out on the guitar in this poster that just rubs me the wrong way.) But I did discuss the possibility of seeing it a couple weeks ago with a friend, so that may transpire. In terms of being an observer of the film industry, I'm interested to see just how much box office clout Cera actually has. His roles have been steadily increasing in profile in recent years, as he's been breaking out of ensembles and starting to really carry movies himself. This is the first summer release he's had since last year's Year One, in which Jack Black did at least as much if not more of the heavy lifting in terms of trying to bring in audiences. This time out, he has no co-headliner, so it will really serve as some kind of gauge of Cera's ability to sink or swim. Let's hope having Edgar Wright as director can only help.

Eat Pray Love? I will see it on an airplane sometime.