Meanwhile With Trevor
Culture • Lifestyle • Fitness & Health • Movies • Books • Food
Who Controls the Content?
September 24, 2024
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I don’t expect anyone to believe me, but as a kid I saw streaming coming. Wish I still had that kind of foresight now. Somehow I sensed the day coming where music would be available whenever, wherever. More exciting to me, as a passionate fan of classic television, was the idea that every TV show ever made would be put up on some sort of digital database. How many of my dream shows haven’t I gotten around to yet? Too many.

But I could stop writing right now and start.

For some reason my mind skipped right over home video, even though we had plenty of VHS tapes in a box under the couch, and went right to online access. What I, in my naive youth, didn’t consider was subscription fees. My family had cable and I understood that my parents considered it a luxury, so I should have connected the dots. Now it seems that we’re all paying cable equivalent fees for the future I dreamed about back in the late 90s, and unless we’re willing to deal with the indignity of commercials it’s only getting worse.

Still, the future is here!

And to be honest, I’m already tired of it.

Before I get into that, we need to talk a little bit about Hollywood and how protective it is of its content. The film industry used to have it pretty good. Before TV they could put out big budget prestige pictures and low budget filler, knowing that they’d always have an audience. As time went on, they could rerelease the more successful films knowing that people would want to see them again. Disney famously put their animated features back in theaters on an eight year cycle for decades, which is how I got to see Bambi on the big screen in 1988.

Mom has been telling me, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” ever since.

When television sets arrived in family rooms across the country Hollywood was jealous of its dominance. Movies got more spectacular, with Cinemascope and VistaVision, 3D, and crazy gimmicks. And I hope that augmented reality headsets will allow to me experience Cinemascope someday. But you’ll notice that none of those things really exist anymore. The reason is probably in part because TV didn’t turn out to be the death knell for movies.

Licensing was too lucrative.

Allowing TV stations to broadcast old movies was a moneymaker. Still is. The studios got money, the TV stations got advertising money, and people got to see old movies at home. Everybody won. Life was good again until VCR posed a new threat. Now average, ordinary, viewers could own copies of movies to loan to friends, sell at yard sales, or use for bootleg duplicates. But maybe it didn’t turn out as bad for them as they thought, because the home video market turned out to be a means for making up profit when something didn’t do well at the theater box office. 

Then came streaming.

Apparently not everyone was the visionary I was, because Blockbuster Video should have taken the lead while Netflix took the gamble. They did not. Notice that it wasn’t the studios jumping on the streaming train right out of the gate, even though it returned to them their control over their content. They may have had their doubts about the new technology, but they were willing to take money (lots of money) from Netflix to license content. When streaming proved successful, and Netflix proved to be a threat by making their own shows and movies, the studios scrambled to reclaim their libraries and start all of the services we see today.

We’ve seen tremendous progress, but for the consumer we’ve taken a step back.

Sales of physical media have stumbled because streaming is more convenient. Sure, we have to pay a monthly or annual fee for it, but who wants a bunch a discs cluttering up the house? Who wants to get up and change a disc every four episodes during a day-long binge? Not I! But how many times do we sit down to watch a movie and find it’s no longer available? I had two yanked away from me in one week. We can buy digital copies, but those are just indefinite rentals. If Sears can go the way of the dinosaur, so can iTunes and what happens to “our” movies then? 

Then there’s “choice overload.”

I used to get frustrated by the shear number of options on my DVD shelf. I couldn’t decide! Now I’ve got thousands upon thousands of options. Fix a dinner you can enjoy cold, folks. If you don’t have something in mind before you sit down, that porkchop is going to be room temperature again by the time you defeatedly decide to just watch that episode of Friends you’ve already seen seventeen times. You know I’m right. And there's nothing wrong with watching something familiar that you love.

Recently I’ve found myself souring on streaming.

Not the idea of watching digital content itself, as I’ve been enjoying digital copies of TV shows I’ve “purchased,” but streaming services in principle. If I have the disc, I don’t have to wonder if it will still be something I can watch, or finish, tomorrow. I don’t have to go looking to see if it’s Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Max, Peacock, or all of the above. If I want to watch Gone with the Wind, I won’t have to sit through a lecture first or worry that someday it will vanish back into a studio vault next to Song of the South

Maybe movies aren’t important to you. Maybe you’re happy to just watch whatever is available at the time. 

But maybe, just maybe, you’ll want to consider how Hollywood feels about you owning your movies and why. 

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Content warning: language and sexual situations.

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Star Wars is dead and the more apathy you show the faster it will be allowed to rest in peace.

Instead of griping about what Disney has done, why don't you listen to my space adventure story? He Who Rides on the Clouds is supernatural noir that spans space and time. When children on Mars go missing, Alexis Leonard and his ex-wife Brittany go looking. Their search leads them to a pagan temple and an ancient religion.

If you'd like to buy the story and read ahead, it's available in the Fall 2020 issue of Cirsova, available here: https://amzn.to/3yRRywY

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Is Ladyballers Doomed from the Start?

The most honest analysis I've seen.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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Going Back to 1995

Maybe I’m just getting old, but it doesn’t feel like we had the thriving and distinct pop culture of past generations. Has there been a look or stye, or feeling, that defines this moment? Everything seems to have stagnated for the last twenty years. And it’s not as if I don’t pay attention. 

It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

So over on Criticless, I made a list.

Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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