The exact price of schlock

One of the reasons I enjoy renting movies from Redbox is because I know exactly how much I'm paying to watch bad movies.

With other plans, like a Netflix or Blockbuster plan, the cost may be nebulous. Depending on your rental patterns and how quickly you turn around the discs you receive in the mail, it's probably not a whole lot. The ability to stream online may cut down the cost further. In most cases, the watching of a single movie would be considerably less than the $1.10 (with tax) they charge for a night's rental at Redbox.

But there's something about knowing I paid only $1.10 to see Jonah Hex that makes it a pretty good commentary on what it was worth.

It's a small enough amount of money that you would describe it as a charge in name only -- we routinely spend $1.10 on a ton of things every day without praying on it to make sure it's the right course of action. That's one of the reasons the Redbox model works so well -- few of its target customers would ever consider it a burden to pay a dollar to rent a movie, and having the kiosks in grocery stores makes it a great impulse purchase. The question doesn't become "Can I afford this rental?" but rather "Is there anything I want to see right now?" or "Do I have time to watch this before it's due back?"

See, if I'd gotten Jonah Hex from the library or borrowed it from a friend, it wouldn't be the same thing. Zero doesn't count as a value, because we receive free rentals of all kinds of movies that we end up loving. Paying $1.10 is a much more perfect way to insult a movie.

I'm thinking of a metaphor related to my dad's perspective on helping friends fix their cars, which was not my dad's profession, just a hobby he loved. When he once told me that he'd rather do the work for free than take a nominal fee, I didn't really understand where he was coming from. He explained that the two options should either be to do it for free, as a friendly gesture that might be returned one day, or get paid the same or similar hourly rate that he'd get paid to be at work. It was almost always the former because the latter would be a) prohibitively expensive and b) somewhat icky in terms of an actual financial transaction. His time was too valuable to be paid a small amount of money. If he did three hours of car work for someone and they paid him $25, it would seem more of an insult than doing it for free.

Paying Redbox prices for Jonah Hex is like paying my dad $25 for three hours of mechanic work.

And perhaps this is why I've come to think of Redbox as my source for all movies schlocky, potentially schlocky, and otherwise unfit to present to respectable company. Now that I no longer have my Blockbuster account, I don't have any backdoor methods to rent movies I don't want my wife to necessarily know I'm renting. Not that I'm actually ashamed of watching Jonah Hex, but what if my wife thinks that I'm renting it because I've got a stiffy for Megan Fox? Yeah, she's an attractive girl -- albeit incapable of playing a sympathetic human being -- but I was in it to see if they could do more with the steampunk sensibilities that inspired the production design than Wild Wild West did with the same ingredients. (They did, but not a lot more, and given how awful Wild Wild West was, that's really not saying much.)

I can rent things through Netflix, but my wife and I both have access to that account, she was its original owner, and she receives the email notifications of new rentals. So that's about as public as it gets.

So when I want to see something and I don't really want to have an actual or implied conversation with my wife about why I'm seeing it -- even though it's all in my head that she would actually judge me about it -- Redbox is my place to go. Which means a bunch of schlock gets rented from Redbox, for $1.10 apiece.

What kind of schlock? Well, let's review my Redbox rental history to find out.

Law Abiding Citizen (4/3/10) - This was my first Redbox rental, and I actually wrote about it here. Pretty schlocky alright -- violent, amoral and preposterous. Although not entirely un-fun.

The Informant! (4/4/10) - Not schlock, but not as good as I wanted it to be either. This rental was made the very next night after Law Abiding Citizen, not out of a prurient desire to see something schlocky, but out of excitement with the new rental method I'd just discovered. Besides, this was early, and I didn't yet know how I planned to use Redbox going forward.

Pandorum (5/31/10) - Murder-and-mayhem-in-space schlock. Actually, after watching Outland recently, I wanted to write an entire post about sci-fi movies that involve murder and mayhem in space, but I didn't strike while the iron was hot, so now I'll wait for the next one.

Youth in Revolt (6/21/10) - Not schlock, but this was a free rental as part of some Redbox promotion, so I was happy to tell my wife about it, removing it from the realm of a back-room transaction. She had the option of watching it but chose not to.

The Joneses (9/25/10) - Schlocky, if not out-and-out schlock. A social satire, but I had to admit that my interest stemmed somewhat from my attraction to Amber Heard, so that made this qualify as the aforementioned type of secret and shameful rental. My wife ended up watching it with me when she failed to make it to a baby shower she had been planning to attend. I'd been planning to watch it during the baby shower, but it wasn't like I was going to return it unwatched just because I didn't get to execute my original plan.

The Losers (10/2/10) - Comic book schlock, which actually ended up being witty, visually dazzling and fun. Not great, but definitely better than I expected it to be. I watched it while my wife was at The Social Network, and I was home with baby.

Repo Men (10/24/10) - You'll notice a pattern here -- watched this while my wife was at a bridal shower. However, there was also a football game on I was interested in, and an inconsolable baby to deal with, so the viewing had to continue after she got home. More future sci-fi schlock, this time located on Earth.

Jonah Hex (11/28/10) - The very definition of schlock. I kept urging it to be good. Did it have its moments? I'm sure it did. Did those moments stick with me or have any lingering impact on me whatsoever? Nope.

So only eight rentals in nearly eight months. Surely I must want to watch something secret and tawdry more often than that, right?

But that's where the $1.10 price comes in -- you only get the movie for one night. So when you rent it, you have to be pretty sure you'll have the chance to watch it that night. Before 9 p.m. on the day after you rent it, anyway. When you're juggling babies and trying to deemphasize to your wife the fact that you're watching the movie, this can be difficult. (Incidentally, she found out about all but maybe two of the above titles, and obviously, she didn't care one way or the other. In each case it ended up being true that she didn't really want to see the movie in question, though Pandorum has now made its way onto our Netflix instant queue, even though I told her it's not very good.)

But I may already have my next one lined up. My wife is heeding my advice and seeing Tangled tomorrow night. I may rent The A-Team from Redbox, to watch during that same time period.

Do I care if my wife knows I saw The A-Team? No.

But is it schlock? My yes, I'm sure it is.

And I'm sure it will be worth every penny of that dollar and ten cents.

When placing products is the point

Dealing with how to represent products in the movies and on TV is extremely problematic.

You're basically damned if you do and damned if you don't. We're all going to notice either way.

The movies that are going for maximum realism, as well as a corporate sponsorship buck or two, will leave all the normal products in. You'll see a can of Pepsi here, a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes there. And even though that represents our real world pretty accurately, it also calls attention to itself. And it blurs the line between art and commerce in a way that a lot of us are really uncomfortable with. If Pepsi's can of soda appears in the movie, who's to say that someone at Pepsi isn't whispering in the producers' ears, trying to control the content of the movie in which their product appears?

But consider the alternative -- blatantly fake brands that we know don't exist, and that are done shoddily. I can't remember what it was -- either a movie or one of the fall's new TV shows -- but I recently watched something in which a character was drinking what was obviously supposed to be a Corona, but instead the label read "Cerveza." Which just means "beer." This would actually have been okay -- it's sort of a clever way around the problem -- but the label itself looked like it had been scrawled by a third-grader. Much worse examples than this abound.

Either way, you notice the choice they've made. And it can be a distraction, however momentary.

So it's interesting when a movie comes along where placing products is precisely the point. Like The Joneses, which I saw this weekend.

For those of you who need a brief synopsis, The Joneses is a movie in which a beautiful family, comprised of David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard and Benjamin Hollingsworth, moves into a beautiful home in a rich neighborhood, and immediately starts flashing their bling to the neighbors. That's what they've been hired to do -- they're all salespeople, unrelated to each other, whose task is to create brand awareness by having what everyone else wants and being what everyone else wants to be. It's a clever idea for a film, even if the execution is a bit off -- I thought it should have been more of the farce it is in the first half, and less of the drama it morphs into in the second.

But what was interesting to me was that the producers of The Joneses didn't commit to either real products or fake products. They used a little of both.

Under the real products banner, Duchovny's Steve Jones (not his real name) drives an Audi Q5 sports car and wears an Under Armour shirt golfing. However, when it comes to food products, apparently, no real sponsors wanted to jump on board. The appetizers the Joneses serve at a party are frozen pastries from an imaginary chef (probably modeled on Wolfgang Puck) and frozen sushi from an imaginary seafood company. Not to mention the wine coolers that come in juice bags, like the juice bags you give little kids -- these almost certainly do not exist.

Given that I wished the film had been a farce instead of a surprisingly dour cautionary tale about our societal consumer excesses, I wish they had had more alcoholic drinks in juice bags than Audi Q5s. Clearly, no sponsor would put their actual name on an alcoholic juice bag -- not only is it the equivalent of the tobacco industry's attempts to sell cigarettes to children, but one character gets into a serious car accident after drinking too many of them. But it's the right kind of idea for lampooning the ridiculous type things that are sold to us, so I'm okay with its blatant fakery.

I don't know what my real point is here, except that the movie made me think about product placement -- a thing I always notice in movies -- and finally gave me a real logical opportunity to write about it.

I guess the best thing to do, if you can block your action cleverly enough, is just try not to show cans of soda or boxes of cereal at all. Have the soda in a glass, have the cereal already poured into the bowl. In the bowl, even if you think you're seeing Lucky Charms, there isn't anything that actually says Lucky Charms, so you're okay.