Taking new things for spins

It's been a weekend of trying new things on the movie home viewing front.

Originally this post was going to be entitled "Taking our new TV for a spin," but then a second "new" type of experience presented itself, even though it's of a more superficial nature.

But let's start with the big one.

We got a new TV this past week. It was something of a surprise, as in, we didn't even really talk about it. In fact, it was all transacted in a couple emails while I was at work one day.

We've had a pretty modestly sized 30" TV since moving to Australia, even replacing it with the same 30" make and model when the first one died after about two-and-a-half years. The price was right so we hoped it wouldn't have the same mechanical failure this time, and it hasn't so far. But some additional stability in our finances (I got some new security in my job) and end of financial year sales tempted my wife to check out the possibilities for an upgrade. A scant few days later, a 43" TV arrived on our doorstop.

I guess that means it's nearly 50% larger, and the difference is significant.

We originally expected it last Friday, and in fact, my wife made sure she didn't stray far from the house or for very long, in order to be around for their ridiculous 12-hour delivery window. It didn't come that day, meaning I couldn't revisit a visually dynamic favorite movie from my collection last weekend as anticipated. That was the way I wanted to symbolically break the thing in. But it did arrive the following Monday, meaning I ultimately had to make my first movie on it ... High Plains Drifter, which you know I really didn't like if you read this post.

But I knew another weekend, a three-day weekend, was on tap in just a few short days. We celebrate the queen's birthday here in Australia, so no one is working on Monday. Even though the queen's actual birthday is in April. But we have like four other holidays in April and none in June. (In fact, without the queen's birthday celebrated in June, we wouldn't have a single public holiday between the end of April and the middle of September. And that September holiday was just introduced since I've moved here, meaning the drought formerly lasted until November.)

So this past Friday night I planned the real debut of the new TV after its previous "soft open." And that was ... Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Perfume is one of a dozen "new favorites" that I watch every couple years ... "new" being defined as "post 2000" I guess. And since I do watch these movies pretty frequently, I was kind of surprised to see it had been more than three years since my last Perfume viewing. I originally planned to involve my wife in this viewing, since she had stated a desire to watch the movie again herself, having seen it only once. But she was too tired on Friday night, for any movie let alone a 140-minute one. I imagine she saw the disappointment in my eyes, and never wanting to hold up one of my own viewings for her schedule, she urged me to continue with it anyway. (She'll probably be content to wait another two years for her second viewing, at which point I'll be ready for my seventh.)

And yeah, it looked pretty effing great on the new TV.

This is going to be fun.

I should also mention it is, of course, a smart TV, but I couldn't have anticipated the ways in which that intelligence would present itself. Without even pairing them, the TV now has dominion over our BluRay player. That's right, its remote control allows us to control the BluRay player controls. Which is no small thing, because our BluRay remote has been dead for at least two years and we've been using an app on our phones to control it. That app relies on the WiFi, so if we are having internet problems, we can't use it. BluRays or DVDs are a good alternative to Netflix if we are having internet issues ... but not if we can't play them. (There are certain things you can control with buttons on the front, but certain things you can't, and some of those things are insurmountable.) So yeah, this is big, and though I suppose it also relies on the internet in some way, it's possible it does not. Hey, I don't profess to fully understand all this stuff.

The second night of the three-day weekend didn't involve another visual feast on the order of Perfume, but it did feature my second "new" type of viewing experience of the weekend.

Namely, I've got a new supplier for my movie kiosk needs.

Even though the rest of the world has moved away from physical media, I still like going to a kiosk and renting a movie ... even if it usually involves going out of my way on the second day to return it. It's the last vestige of the experience of going to a proper video store, which is now well and truly dead.

Kiosk rentals looked to be dead too, as I have witnessed and written about the steady demise of the Hoyts kiosks I've been using since moving here. They may be entirely gone now; I'm not going to their possibly former website at this moment to find out, as it's too depressing.

But in a sign of some optimism for the delivery method if not for Hoyts in particular, the last Hoyts kiosk I used, at the Woolworth's in Moonee Ponds, has actually been replaced with a different brand of kiosk. In all previous other instances I'd witnessed of a Hoyt kiosk vanishing, it disappeared from the location without a successor. But the Moonee Ponds Woolworth's now has a Video Ezy kiosk where the Hoyts one formerly stood.

Pretty much the same deal, except I think the movies are $4 rather than $3.50. That, of course, is not a deal breaker for me. The time and gas required to get to and from the store probably cost me twice that much.

That's not my closest Woolworth's, but I was going that way Saturday morning anyway because I needed to pick up my bike from the bike shop, where it had undergone some repairs. I had gotten a glimpse of the new Video Ezy kiosk on a previous occasion, and this time I planned to use it.

And fortunately, the first movie that came up when I browsed was one my wife and I both wanted to see: Game Night.

Alas, she ended up skipping out on this viewing too. We were over at a friend's house for dinner last night, and though I thought we might return around 8:30, it was nearly 10 o'clock when we got home. I will of course watch a movie starting after 10, especially a short one like Game Night. Not so with my wife, who was ready to retire to the bedroom with the TV shows that she watches that I don't.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks of the single-night rental experience were underscored by Saturday night's example. If I'd had my druthers, I might have put off my viewing of Game Night for a time when a) my wife could also watch and b) I myself was not so tired. But if $4 won't break the bank for me, $8 might, so I couldn't/wouldn't extend my rental of the movie a second night.

And so I can barely tell you what happened in Game Night, as I slept several times during it. I paused it each time and rewound when I noticed I'd slept through some actual content, but the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash in my memory. I do know that I marginally enjoyed it.

And also that it looked pretty effing great on our new TV.

Picking over the bones of another video store

When I first arrived in Australia, I described it to a friend back home as "kind of like the U.S. in the 1990s."

This is not to say that most things are backward or particularly behind here. In fact, certain things -- like the ease of paying for goods, where you can sometimes just tap your card against a screen -- are a bit ahead of the U.S. Rather, what's old-fashioned is the quaint ongoing viability of certain things that have long since fallen by the wayside in the U.S.

Pay telephones, for example. It's easy to find a pay telephone here in Melbourne. They are few and far between in the U.S., but they are still plentiful here, still a resource that provides a useful service to the public.

Book stores? Don't get me started. You can't go a city block in almost any part of the city without tripping over a book store. And the price people will pay for books -- even used books -- is absurd. I'm sure people have their kindles and their iPads, but by and large, they still love reading a good old paperback or hardcover book.

And video stores?

Well, it looks like the times are finally catching up with Australia in some respects.

Until recently, I had two video stores that were equidistant from my house. The one I regularly frequented -- well, on $2 new release Tuesdays, anyway -- was called Video Ezy, and then Network Video. The other I've never even set foot inside, because a phone called told me they didn't have any equivalent to $2 Tuesdays.

Well, I'm going to have to learn what deals they do have, because Video Ezy/Network Video is no more.

My wife broke the news to me about a week back. She'd received a text, apparently, that they were going out of business and that everything was on sale. Why I didn't receive this same text, I don't know -- they texted me once when they thought I didn't return a movie on time, which turned out to be their error. Since then, they must have lost my number.

So I planned to go there on Wednesday, to pay my last respects.

Except it was closed on Wednesday. From now until April 2nd, when it shutters for good, it will only be open Thursday through Sunday. Which I can certainly understand, since they're not renting anything anymore, only clearing out the remaining unsold inventory.

I made sure to return this past Saturday, this time with only the older of my two sons in tow.

And I guess my purpose was not so much to thank Video Ezy for all the good times -- it had always been a pretty lame video store, if I'm being honest -- but rather, to figure out which movies I could buy on the cheap.

So though I do still recognize the passing of each remaining video store that closes with a bit of sadness, now the inevitability of the event has adjusted my perspective. This new version of me doesn't dwell on the sadness. Instead, apparently, this new me tries to dig in and find deals.

I instinctively avoided the new release wall, because a) those movies were selling for $7 instead of $3, and b) I don't necessarily want to buy movies that have just come out on video, since they aren't the kind of old favorites I typically add to my collection. (The good titles had been picked pretty clean by Saturday, anyway.)

It's an interesting challenge, to choose titles from a whole video store that's separated out by genre, and know that pretty much everything is affordable. There were still a couple thousand titles available, so it wasn't like I was down to just the dregs. My idea was to look extra hard at the comedies, because those tend to be the ones with the most repeat watchability (and the ones my wife is most likely to repeat watch with me). I gave cursory looks at the other sections as well, but came away with more comedies than anything else.

Having not bought a movie in more than year, I thought I could go a little hog wild. So after circling the store for about 20 minutes, coming up with an initial pile of purchases about twice this size, and driving my son to the brink of boredom-inspired insanity, I came away with the following seven titles:

Seen this twice, but the second viewing was probably four years ago. My wife likes it too, so we'll probably throw it in within six months.

Really liked this one and have only seen it once. Also, I don't know if my wife has seen it yet, and it's right up her alley.

Comments for Cedar Rapids are pretty much ditto for this.

I've already seen this twice, but it's been more than three years since my last viewing. My wife doesn't like this as much as I do. Then again, I don't think anyone likes this as much as I do.

Okay, leaving the comedies behind now ...

Did I say "leaving the comedies behind"? I should have waited one more movie before saying that. The funniest Star Trek is in my top 100 of all time, and I haven't seen it in forever.

My favorite movie of 2005. I may not have a burning desire to see this again, having seen it again about five years ago, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to own one of my #1 ranked movies. This was the last to make the cut.

And finally ...

I've seen this movie three times already and it only came out in 2013. Obviously I love this movie and need to own it.

Some that didn't make the final cut: Private Parts, Go, Headhunters, Philadelphia, a few others I can't remember. These are movies I like or in some cases love, but I just couldn't quite pull the trigger, either for repeat watchability reasons (Philadelphia) or having just seen them recently reasons (again, Philadelphia). Besides, that was $21 worth of movies, and I still had to pay another $10 for two videos my son wanted -- which were priced at $5 apiece because they were brand new.

So while I'm sad that another chapter is closing in the way we watch movies, at least I can salve my wounds with seven nice new additions to my video collection.

A reminder of the state of video stores

These days, the only things you can reliably expect to find at a video store are the most popular movies released theatrically between six and 12 months ago. Anything else is a crapshoot.

But you'd think that if there are any older movies you'd be able to reliably find, the Star Wars movies would be them.

I found out otherwise yesterday at Network Video, formerly Video Ezy, in Flemington.

As I wrote in this post, I am doing a bit of a Star Wars challenge in 2015 -- watching one of the six existing movies, in the order of the story's chronology, during each of the two-month segments of this year, leading up to the release of The Force Awakens in December.

Well, hoping to do it, anyway -- pending the availability of the movies.

I stopped by Network Video yesterday in the hopes of scooping up Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, which would rent for a mere $1.90 for an entire week. I'd probably try to watch it on one of the next three nights and return it on Tuesday when I had an easy opportunity to do so.

Except it wasn't in. In fact, unless someone else is doing the same challenge I am, I suspected that they didn't carry it at all. A suspicion confirmed a few moments later when I asked the clerk.

"Yeah, we just have two of them. Whichever two are there."

Those two were The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith, episodes V and III.

A rather random assortment of Star Wars movies. They are arguably the best of their respective trilogies, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with why Network is carrying them.

My guess is that they had all six at one point, but the other four were never returned by someone who rented them, and they just never bothered to replace them.

It's a pretty bottom-line decision. We carry movies that either a) we rent consistently, or b) we already have in our collection. And if one from group a) no longer falls into group b), well, it's gone and forgotten.

It makes sense, but offends my basic instincts toward completism. A Star Wars collection at a video store should look more or less like the one in the picture above, not the two lonely DVDs resting on their sides that I saw yesterday.

Now I am actually worried whether I can get The Phantom Menace at all before my self-imposed February 28th deadline. iTunes doesn't carry it either.

Fortunately, I just now looked at the good old library, and believe I have successfully reserved myself a copy that I can pick up at my local branch.

It shouldn't be so hard to get your hands on one of the biggest financial successes in the history of movies, though, should it?

Then again, if we're talking "should" and "shouldn't," we also "shouldn't" be in a time when video stores are about to go extinct entirely.

Titanic under the volcano

Pompeii is not a particularly good movie. I should get that out of the way at the start.

But I liked it perhaps more than I should have, because it's nearly exactly what I expected it to be.

I'm not talking about what I expected from the trailers, because actually, I didn't see a single trailer for the movie. No, it was exactly what I expected it to be when I first envisioned it as a movie, almost exactly five years before the date I saw it.

I'm writing this post on September 1st, 2014. On September 1st, 2009, I wrote a post called "Where's my Pompeii movie??", having just come from an exhibit on Pompeii at a Los Angeles museum, and wondering aloud why there had not yet been a big-screen Pompeii movie that benefited from the latest in FX technology.

Here's a bit of what I said in that post, all of which you can read here:

"It plays terrifically in my mind's eye: You have the ornate period architecture of a movie like Gladiator, pelted with raining volcanic rock and washed away in floods of lava. Plus, the whole thing took place by the Bay of Naples, meaning you could have the A.D. 79 watercraft trying vainly to escape in the roiled sea, giving the chance for some cool shipwrecks.

"With that kind of budget, you might have to to tack on a Titanic-style love story to push the audience beyond just young males. But then again, most of these disaster movies try to have Titanic-style love stories anyway, so this isn't much of a concession."

This is, like, exactly the movie Paul W.S. Anderson made.

Both movies I casually referenced here ended up being major influences on Anderson's Pompeii. How nutty is that?

Gladiator may be the most obvious point of comparison, as all the movie's pre-eruption action set pieces involve gladiators in the arena. The lead character played by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington is known only as The Celt, and a life full of seeking revenge over the slaughter of his parents has turned him into the most badass gladiator in the Roman empire. Well, almost -- the undefeated gladiator he's scheduled to fight is pretty up there, played by Lost's Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. And if you wanted to throw some cop drama tropes in there with everything else unoriginal Pompeii does, this is supposed to be Akinnuoye-Agbaje's "one last fight" before the Romans grant him his freedom. In any case, there are numerous scenes of gladiators fighting in arenas, and even an appearance of the famous "thumbs up-thumbs down" determination of whether a fighter should live or die.

The love story, of course, is all Titanic. And I didn't just throw Titanic out there as an example of any old love story -- it's a love story under the duress of a major catastrophe. The Celt is basically Jack Dawson, the poor boy who gets noticed by the rich girl, as Emily Browning's Cassia fulfills the Rose DeWitt Bukater role -- she's the daughter of the rulers of Pompeii, and she seems to fall in love with him over an incident in which he spares her injured horse further pain by snapping its neck. See, The Celt's people were horse whisperers, of a sort (to borrow from yet another familiar movie). That would put Keifer Sutherland in the Billy Zane role, as Sutherland plays a nasty Roman bigwig who wanted Cassia during her recent excursion to Rome, and has now come to Pompeii in part to take her into his possession in the most demeaning manner possible.

But the real comparison to Titanic is what happens after the disaster starts. The funny thing about a disaster like a ship hitting an iceberg or a volcano burying a coastal city in lava is that it can never feel like something that springs logically from the story. If the best scripts are ones where the action proceeds logically from what is written in the first five pages, love stories set against disasters always feel a bit odd, since the story is hijacked by something sudden, inexplicable and essentially irrelevant. In a tight script, what role should an erupting volcano have in helping sort out all the various dramatic conflicts set in motion during the first half? It shouldn't have any, but that's because natural disasters and man-made accidents both fall into "shit happens" territory in terms of narrative causation.

And so both Titantic and Pompeii are forced, somewhat ridiculously, to have the conflicts continue to play themselves out despite the fact that there is now a much more urgent threat that requires everyone's collective attention. Titanic is not sunk, as it were, by needing some kind of resolution to the DiCaprio-Winslet-Zane love triangle, and I think only that silly scene where Zane is shooting at them from down that stairwell fulfills the role of trying to wrap that story up. After that, Zane rightly realizes that he cares more about his own hide than trying to kill Jack Dawson, especially if it means he has to sink to the bottom of the ocean to do it.

Kiefer Sutherland is not quite so wise in Pompeii. Yeah, he makes a couple thwarted and typically cowardly attempts to escape the city -- slaughtering the peasants in your path, anyone? -- but he probably knows he can't really leave without getting one final showdown with the man who stole the attentions of that woman who despised him and was never going to marry him anyway. So we are treated to the spectacle of them doing battle in the remains of a coliseum being pelted by giant flaming chunks of magma. Naturally, one might say.

It's the spectacle of the final 30 minutes of Pompeii that really saves it, and by "saves it" I mean "makes it worth watching at all." The destruction of Pompeii is more or less exactly what I envisioned it might be in that museum five years ago this weekend. Oh, and remember those cool shipwrecks I speculated about? Not only do we see volcanic rock pulverizing several escaping ships, but we are also treated to a tsunami that delivers a couple of these boats right down Main Street.

Who could have asked for anything more?

I couldn't, which is why Pompeii gets a grudging three stars from me. Good on ya, Paul W.S. Anderson (a.k.a. the lesser Paul Anderson), for making me look pretty damn prophetic.

And a few thoughts about the experience of renting Pompeii ...

Support Video Ezy, you fool 

We had decided to watch a new release on Saturday night, so it was kind of a bummer when my father-in-law had to cancel a Sunday gathering at his house that was going to jointly recognize the birthdays of my son and my sister-in-law. She was sick -- same thing we'd had -- and was in bed all weekend, from what I understand.

It bummed me out because that meant we weren't going to be naturally near a Woolworth's, where we could return whatever movie we rented the night before to the Hoyts kiosk there. We weren't going to be naturally near a Woolworth's on Saturday either, but I figured as long as we could either rent or return the movie with no more than a modicum of inconvenience, we'd be good. A long trip to both rent and return it, and it wouldn't be worth doing.

When I expressed my frustration over the turn of events, my wife said "Why don't you just get the movie from Video Ezy?"

"Video Ezy charges like $5 for a new release," I told her. "The Hoyts kiosk is only $3.50."

Sounded like reasonable logic to me, so it's a good thing I have others to set me straight. "You've got to support Video Ezy if you want them to stay open," she told me. "Why do you think there's never anybody in there?"

It was true. I've rented from Video Ezy probably 20 times, and on only a handful of those occasions were there any other patrons in the store besides me. For most businesses, that would be a sign it was time to go out of business.

And I definitely don't want Video Ezy to go out of business. It's among the last of a dying breed: a place you can go and actually browse for movies to rent by walking up and down aisles. Actual, physical aisles. That experience is becoming increasingly virtual in our day and age, which doesn't bother teenagers in the slightest. For old folks like me? We like the video stores. We value them, even if only for providing us a sense of nostalgia.

It's not like Video Ezy is just down the block or anything. But it's more or less in our neighborhood, at least. And you'd think the comparative convenience would be worth the extra $1.50, especially given how little else you can buy with a meager sum like $1.50 these days.

It was nice, also, to hear my wife urge me to help keep Video Ezy afloat, because it was she I thought I was protecting by trying to go cheap (and frequenting Ezy only on $2 new release Tuesdays). I know I've got a nearly insatiable appetite for new movies, one that far outstretches your average citizen. If I knew I had to feed the beast anyway, sometimes watching movies most regular people would instinctively avoid, the least I could do was not overburden our bank account.

But I felt so good forking over $5 for Pompeii that I also picked up a $1.90 weekly rental of John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and bought my son and me a candy bar each. Mars, it was.

If my eight dollars and change goes a little further toward keeping the neighborhood video store open, then it's something I'm going to do, dammit.