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Movies Since Last Post: 

Fate of the Furious

The Gift (2015)

Planet Hulk

Lincoln

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

Free Fire

Nasty Baby

The Deerhunter

The Hurt Locker

The 2017 movie tally now stands at 41 (Hey, one for every year of my life), and while that’s not horrible for 4 months, I have a small fear that things may start to slow down. For one, baseball season is in full swing, but that’s a minor problem. Here is what I may think will be the issue, and it’s not something I could have predicted; We really like TV shows.

Between Netflix and Amazon, the perception was that I could find basically any movie I wanted. I was only limited by my imagination. I mentioned in a previous post that I was a video store jockey, and when I started this quest, I figured it would be similar to going to a video store back in the day. Aisles and aisles of movies, divided up by genre and usually even alphabetized for you, all for the renting. Really, your only nemesis was if another customer was thinking the same way you were. And if you happened to be at a Blockbuster, that was not always an issue because, if your choice was a popular new release, they would literally order a billion copies of it. So, as long as you didn’t have super-eclectic tastes, you would probably go home happy.

But the game has changed. Now, if I am just trying to spend an evening watching a movie, I can go to Amazon, click on Prime Video, and the very top bar is a scrolling ad for Amazon’s original series’. Below that, I get Recommended Movies and then Recently Added Movies. Fair enough. I’m sure they’ve done their research and determined that people like to watch shows, and hey, it’s not like it’s a lot of work to scroll down an inch to see what movies they have. So I’ll stop whining.

Heh, no I won’t. I’m making a point here. Similarly, Netflix, a site where you can’t even buy other cool stuff like cat litter and toilet paper, has a lovely scrolling ad promoting their original series, and a whole lot of comedy specials, which I find interesting. Again, Netflix and Amazon have tons of customer data that says that we like shows (and I guess people like comedy specials). So that’s what they give us. I don’t blame them for not catering to some weirdo who wants to watch a lot of movies in a year and has a thing for Brie Larson.

The interesting part, though, is that the number of movies on Netflix is around 4500, and dropping. And according to Variety, Amazon Prime Video has “four times as many films available for streaming.” Funny thing is that Hulu has jumped ahead of Netflix, “with 3,588 shows and 6,656 movies,” as of last March. Netflix has apparently not disputed the fact that they are moving away a little from obtaining the rights to existing titles, instead choosing to invest in original content, estimating spending “more than $6 billion [in 2017], investing about 5% of its cash content budget in original films.” Original films doesn’t sound that bad, but it doesn’t exactly replace the video store. I’m actually wondering where the Hell they get $6 billion in the first place. I know everyone has it nowadays, but that’s a lot of lettuce.

Back to that stat about Amazon, though. it’s all well and good to say that they have 4 times as many movies as Netflix, but what does it matter of most of those movies are shit? A quick glance at the first few comedy movies they suggest to me shows Daddy’s Home, Dirty Grampa and… Classic TV Bloopers? Hey, I get that we all need a a laugh once in awhile, but if I go to Amazon because I want to spend an evening watching a movie, I’m probably not interested in watching Classic TV Bloopers. Call me crazy.

So, they have a lot of crap, and I spend a lot of time scrolling and searching for something that I can watch. In fact, I am limited to my imagination, but I’m also kind of limited to what they happen to be highlighting at a certain point (I’m probably going to end up watching The Purge: Election Year at some point, just because it’s there.) This is what lead me to Nasty Baby, which was a pretty nasty movie starring Kristen Wiig as a straight woman who has agreed to be a surrogate mother to a gay couple. Maybe if they had played it a different, that would have made for a good premise, but instead the thing just took a turn and went straight to Crazy Town. I love Kristen Wiig, but this was not one of her better moments (especially the actual moment when they actually showed her injecting herself with the guy’s… stuff. I know it’s a visual medium, but, damn.)

There’s still the old tried-and-true movie theater, though, right? And with summer here, I’ll sure to be hitting the reclining seats more often. Why, yes, however, there’s a little hook there, too. And it coincides with this posts’ Brie Larson pick: the indie shoot-’em-up comedy Free Fire (which I highly recommend). I saw this at the Assembly Row theater in Somerville, which still kind of has the “new theater smell” going on. First of all, the young woman next to me was completely shocked when the first guy got shot (I’m not sure what movie she thought she was seeing, but even if you have no idea what it’s about, it started out with a bunch of dudes buying a bunch of guns, so there’s a good chance somebody is going to get shot.) She kept talking to her boyfriend, even after I told them to quiet down, in so many words. After the gun play really got going, she got up and left and never came back. So, no harm done, I guess.

But here’s the real kicker: with about five minutes left in the movie, three people come in, phones out, voices loud, and start searching for their seats. Again, I tell them to please keep it down (in so many words), but they don;t seem to understand that they are either very late or very early. Finally, someone else in the theater tells them that there’s only a few minutes left, and they need to get out. Of course, a few minuets later when we are all exiting the theater, these three idiots are standing at the door. I checked the next showtime, and it turns out, it didn’t start for another forty minutes. First of all, these dummies walked in to a dark theater 45 minutes before their show and don;t seem to notice that there’s a movie going on. And what’s even more annoying is that the theater employees obviously let them in and didn’t tell them that their show wasn’t seating yet. Unless they were trying to “double feature” it, but there was only five minutes left, anyway, so they deserved to get yelled at.

I could (and maybe will) do a whole post on how little patience I have for people who don’t know how to behave in a movie theater, but at the moment, suffice it to say:

So, I guess the point of all this is that this experiment might be a little harder going forward. The solution might just be to get a Hulu account.