The Road Warrior finally has lossless audio. Watch for a Blu-grade Comparison post today or tomorrow that pits this against the 2007 disc.
Beyond Thunderdome is on Blu-ray for the first time. Watch for a full review of the metal-encased Mad Max Trilogy set soon.
• Just announced: Universal is releasing a 30th Anniversary Edition of Monty Python's Meaning of Life on 8 October. It retains all previous extras and adds a new hour-long reunion special with all surviving Pythons, plus a new Sing-Along mode.
• Criterion's July slate includes:
• Well Go USA has sequel Tai Chi Hero on 2 July and powerful Korean gangster drama New World on 23 July.
• 20th Century Fox has another wave of vintage classics hitting Blu-ray throughout July, including Tyrone Power matador movie Blood and Sand (9th), The 300 Spartans (23rd), and a pair of Marilyn Monroe movies (Niagara and Bus Stop) and Elvis in Love Me Tender on 30 July.
• 2 July also brings a trio of great titles from Shout! Factory: The Producers Collectors Edition, Kentucky Fried Movie, and Tower Block, which had the unfortunate timing of being released with very close proximity to both The Raid and Dredd.
• 2 July TV titles worth noting are Portlandia Season 3, the DVD-only North & South (the BBC one, with Patrick Stewart) and the astounding box set of The UP Series, collecting the over half century of work done across eight films
• 9 July brings a couple of more obscure releases: Taika Waititi's Boy from Kino, and Shout! Factory has 1989's Roy Scheider/Adam Baldwin-starring Cohen & Tate (an adaptation of O. Henry's Ranson of Red Chief, previously on MoD DVD from MGM).
• 16 July is extremely varied, with everything from Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic and another entry in the Jackie Chan Collection (Battle Creek Brawl/City Hunter double feature) from Shout! Factory, just-announced discs for Sony's new Evil Dead movie (director/writer/cast commentary & featurettes) and WB's Bullet to the Head (with just a single, lonely featurette), a pair of Mario Bava Collection discs (Black Sabbath and Kidnapped) from Kino, and finally, at long last, a US edition of Michael Bassett's genuinely pulpy Solomon Kane, starring James Purefoy.
• The week of 23 July is one of the most interesting of the month, including another batch of Olive Films titles: Harlow (1965), Tennessee Williams adaptation Summer and Smoke, Once is Not Enough starring Kirk Douglas, and WUSA starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Music Box Films has The Silence , Magnet has Xan Cassavetes' Kiss of the Damned, and Drafthouse releases both Grace Land and Piéta. One of my favorite docs of last year, The Bitter Buddha, arrives on DVD only. Shout! also has a 4-DVD, 27th edition of their long-running Mystery Science Theater 3000 sets. Rounding things out is a two-DVD SE of a Korean baseball movie I'd never heard of called Glove. I really want to track that one down.
• 30 July is packed with more Shout!: George Romero's Knightriders and a Scream Factory release of John Carpenter's The Fog, and more Olive: Angel and the Bad Man, That Touch of Mink, and Bullfighter & The Lady. New releases include DC Animated's Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Filly Brown, and Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt. Kino looks to be kicking off a new auteir "collection" series for Erich von Stroheim with Foolish Wives.
• 30 July TV titles hit heavy with HBO's Banshee Season 1, and yet another sure-to-be-amazing pair from CBS: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 4 and Star Trek: The Next Generation - Redemption, a "telefilm" cut of the Season 4 finale plus the concluding first episode of the following season. This worked well for The Best of Both Worlds, and I bet this will be interesting as well.
• Joining Oliver & Company on 6 August are Blu-rays of Disney's Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone, as 40th and 50th Anniversary Editions. Both retain all previous extras and add new features in the form of an alternate opening (for S&tS) and a deleted sequence (for RH).
• 13 August brings both HBO's Girls Season 2 and Shout! Factory's the Luc Besson-produced The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.
Disc News Digest collects recent, relevant, and upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release dates in one place rather than fill your feed with a ton of individual stories for individual discs.
On 4 June, he lives for revenge.
The first movie is the exact same transfer, down to the data bits, as the previous MGM Blu-ray. It just comes with a new label. This is a good disc that I've not been crying over. The contrast isn't very dark, but I've never seen it very dark. To muck with it and artificially boost the blacks would be a bad move, and betray the accuracy of representing the movie's production values and original look.
Posting more of these today, between other articles.
This is the only sequence (a few seconds long) that shows very visible flaws in the scanned print. Doesn't bother me.
I played through this game over Thanksgiving break right after it came out, but I don't remember much outside some of the major cutscenes. It was to be one part huge, sprawling adveture, and an equal part full of Final Fantasy series fanservice, in-jokes, and references. I would probably re-play it if they remastered it for HD.
I worked at a videogame store then called FuncoLand (now consumed whole by GameStop), where we actively advised against getting the strategy guide because it was utterly useless. The Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide, as noted by Kotaku, told you to go to the (shortly-thereafter defunct) PlayOnline website for just about everything. 13 years later, a completely unknown side quest has been discovered (found by a NeoGAF poster), as seen in the video below. Go to the YouTube page for more info in the About description:
This is a side quest on disc 4 that was unknown to most FFIX players until yesterday when a topic popped up on the FFIX message board at GameFAQs. It was discovered by The_Kusabi_ (through the Ultimania guide) and confirmed by MysterPixel. Naturally, I had to check it out and I decided to record a video.
THR reports that the primary contributing factor to Robinov being shown the door will end up being a fraught relationship with Legendary boss Thomas Tull. The power struggle with now-President (and former WB home video head) Kevin Tsujihara is quite secondary:
Given his track record, Robinov can make a strong argument for himself. After a rough start to the year, The Great Gatsby has crossed $200 million and Hangover III, though disappointing with a $63 million domestic opening, is not a disaster. More importantly, buzz is loud on the Christopher Nolan-produced Superman reboot Man of Steel that could launch a mighty Warners franchise and perhaps even a Marvel-style universe of films from its DC Comics division.
Robinov also has strong relationships with such talent as Nolan and Ben Affleck. And while not universally loved, Robinov's performance on the job leads one leading film agent to predict that he will remain at the studio. “The main thing you want is stability,” says the agent. “You’ve already got television in transition. Even with Jeff’s odd personality and quirks, I’d re-up him.” But this observer acknowledges that he is one of a minority wagering that Robinov will remain.
On the other side of the scale is the tension between Robinov and Legendary Entertainment, Warners’ partner on films including the Batman and Hangover trilogies. Sources say Legendary and Warners shared the decision to put Hangover III against Fast & Furious, but Legendary’s Thomas Tull has made it known that he feels disrespected and may move (mostly likely to Universal) when the company’s deal expires at the end of the year. (Some of his chagrin may have originated when Warners declined to sweeten Legendary’s deal on the third Batman, though such a decision would have been made above Robinov's level. While it was a 50-50 partner on the first two films, Legendary got only 25 percent on the third. Meanwhile, Warners has 25 percent of the risky Legendary project Pacific Rim, set for release July 12.)
WB needs Legendary. Without Legendary, WB's theatrical slate is anemic at best. From the outside, WB theatrical is embodied in the lackluster money-losers they've pushed into production and taking years to get anyone slapped onto things like the Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie. Look what happened when they did Green Lantern without Legendary.
If I were a betting man, Robinov even possibly being on the way out is a strong indicator that Tsujihara is doubling down on Legendary. Despite their own share of bombs, Legendary actually have a strong success ratio both critically and financially. Especially when comic book-scale action movies (The Avengers, Fast & Furious 6) are the big winners, you want someone who can do that sort of thing and do it well, especially if you want to make a Justice League movie.
Yoji Yamada's remake of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story opened in Japan back in January. The first embed is with English subtitles. The second has none. It feels like a Japanese TV drama more than a movie. Huh.
Tomorrow's issue of Empire is teased to contain a full "exit interview" with Steven Soderbergh. From the portion excerpted on their website today, we get an update on the new version of Kafka he's been working on, now dubbed the "Midnight Cut":
...“I’ve got a 35 page fax from (screenwriter) Lem Dobbs about it that I’ve got to wade into at some point,” Soderbergh tells Empire. “Lem and I have had this back and forth because I’m trying to alter the DNA of the whole movie. I think we want to put out a dual Blu-ray with both versions. I’ve been calling the new version the ‘Midnight Edition’ because it’s perfect for Friday or Saturday night shows.”
Kafka, Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape follow-up, was made under the fierce spotlight that came with being a Palme d'Or-winning wunderkind, and its original issues have continued to nag away at the director. An oblique conspiracy thriller starring Jeremy Irons and Alec Guinness, it will get a German-language dub, “probably” a new score and a substantive reworking of the edit. The cuts will, as Soderbergh emphasises, “be bloody”.
“I was frustrated with Kafka – it had a mixed-to-negative reaction when it came out – and I’m trying to completely rethink it in the hopes of at least turning it into something that’s unified. The tone was all over the place – which is the classic young filmmaker’s mistake. I’d like to make it a little more abstract and more of a hardcore art movie. It’s not a tweak: it’s triage.” So a better-director’s cut of a director’s cut? “I hope so. It’s shorter.”
A new Soderbergh/Lem Dobbs commentary is like discovering a print of a great lost film.
Wesleyan has a transcript over on their site.
I'm overstating THR's report that Larry King has signed to do a show for a Russian network. Anyone else find it equally interesting and odd that Cold War news icon Larry King is collaborating with the Sovie--Russians to do a show for the Kremlin's news station?
Late last night, All Things D posted the full video of yesterday's Tim Cook interview.
At the ten-minute mark, they dive into discussion of TV. I found it interesting that All Things D themselves omitted "very" in quoting Cook on what Apple is doing about "fixing television". Following Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo playing their hands in the set-top space, Cook was exactly as cagey about TV as he was last year. Of completely inconsequential interest: the roadblock ads that are running on All Things D this week appear to all be for new $7000 Sony 4KTVs.
I'm fairly convinced that at some point in the future, Apple is going to release both a revamped "hockey puck" and a physical TV set.
Look to the iMacs and the Thunderbolt monitor released over the last couple of years to see Apple refining glare, viewing angle, and contrast quality. The radically slim profile of the newest "Late 2012" iMac displays reveals a continued drive toward thin, colorful, and beautiful monitors.
What no one really talks much about are the aspect ratio and resolution of the 27" iMac and the Thunderbolt display, which both feature a 16:9 panel that runs at 2560x1440. It isn't an enormous leap over 1080p, which is where it appears the vast majority of 22-inch and larger computer displays are bizarrely (to me) topping out. Jump down to the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and you have a 2880x1800 display.
The resolution of 4KTV is 3840x2160.
I would be surprised if Apple didn't wait to release a TV until it could be more than "just" an overhauled AppleTV puck crammed into a 1080p display. It has to be more than a gorgeous aluminum and glass shell. I don't know why Apple would release less than a 4K television.
Apple is pushing all of its products toward the Retina ideal. No matter what unfounded "channel sources" tell some analyst who gets quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Apple's own product evolution patterns have proven time and again to be the best way to read their moves. Apple plots a very steady, concerted course, and that's visible in that for two straight years, we've gotten the same kind of dodge at All Things D from Tim Cook on TV. Frankly, we got almost the exact same rhetoric from Steve Jobs at D8, with some adjectives swapped. Based on their overt focus on "resolutionary" devices, I'm going under the assumption that the Apple "iTV" is a matter of when, and not if. They're massively bought-in with the display industry, and the TV is the one mass-market screen they don't make as of yet.
So, when do we get this fancy Apple television? Everyone, including Kara Swisher on stage, has been pulling a Veruca Salt and demanding it now. Since Apple talks like they're waiting on something, my assumption is that it's for 4K panel pricing to go down. That way, they can sell a TV at a price that people will actually pay. No matter what vestiges of the Apple Pricing Myth still exist, they won't put a TV on sale that costs $7k, no matter how pretty it is.
The AppleTV, as it currently exists, could very well be what we have through the end of 2013. They may finally do a substantive overhaul of the OS. They may add more apps (channels). I hope they at least take a cue from Roku and add system-wide search. Maybe they'll rev the device again with a yet-faster processor.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will both cost around $500 this fall. The Wii U is not likely to budge from $350. I got a hearty laugh this week from well-heeled game and media industry columnists who bent over backwards three times to explain how badly their tech-averse parents will be desperate to pay $500 for an expensive, aircraft carrier-sized bloatbox. For $350-500, my mother would much more likely get an iPad and, depending on the iPad model, an AppleTV, both of which she would actually use.
The sound logic for leaving the puck in play is that it's the actual TV's Trojan Horse, thanks to an extremely low cost of ownership. Even after the introduction of the full-on TV set, it turns any non-Apple TV into most of whatever that thing ends up being and doing. This disparity already exists traditionally in the Apple ecosystem, with the best example found in comparing the iPod touch and the iPhone.
The two devices are much closer in feature set and software support than ever before, but the iPhone is always king when it comes to internals, most prominently in the processor, RAM, and camera. The question then mutates into pondering what Apple will add to the AppleTV to make it more compelling, as well as what they will hold back for the actualt TV hardware.
Let's start with a couple of things that Apple will not do.
Unlike Xbox One, there won't be some sort of ever-present, "always listening" system in a physical or functional form like the Kinect 2. That sort of surround-speaker-sized box would never get into (much less past) the concept design phase. The moment I saw that bit in Microsoft's keynote, I could instantly picture Phil Schiller's takedown: "the new AppleTV is only listening when you tell it to listen, and it won't track your heart rate, the number of people in the room, or whether you're in your underwear".
Tim Cook said himself that Apple is not in the content creation business, nor does it want to be. That's a smart move on Apple's part.
Indicative of what I think they will do on the TV side of things is the way in which Cook chose to answer a question regarding "new services" late in the interview. He indicated that Apple is more focused on finding more applications of existing services than they are in creating new niche services to see what sticks (like Google has). He made specific mention of Siri, FaceTime, and iTunes.
The AppleTV puck needs better navigation control than the gumstick remote it comes with currently. "Just get an iPod touch/iPhone/iPad" is not a solution to this. I don't see them going bulkier with something like Roku's RF-based, accelerometer-enabled Wiimote pseudo-ripoff...but maybe Apple will at least make a new RF-based remote that finally frees us from the tyranny of line-of-sight.
With that addition, AppleTV can have Siri, which would be activated by a button press and hold on the remote, just as on iDevices. The key is not having a remote that does not require line-of-sight. Siri has to "just work", right out of the box. System-wide search ("Siri, I want to watch The French Connection") should be part of that. Why else did they spend so much time working on and showing off Siri finding info about movies, actors, directors, and so on? Why stop at buying movie tickets? Why not build on this function in a different application?
There's no way the puck gets a FaceTime camera. People would have to attach it to the top of their TVs like the original iSights. The FaceTime camera will go right where it is on Apple's existing displays when they make the TV. Gesture control could theoretically be implemented, but it would be odd of Apple to require that the camera be on at all times. They actually care about privacy and design things around that, instead of constantly tying themselves in knots trying to look like they do (see Microsoft's last week of press).
The question mark for me is iTunes, and what "iTunes" continues to mean. Cook talked about it as this massive content ecosystem full of this and that, but functionally, it's a storefront.
Apple likes to throw around the buying power their users offer with record labels and studios. Apple would face anti-competitive inquiries if they fully blocked other storefronts from AppleTV, but they haven't opened the platform to very much paid video content outside of iTunes. Those few include Netflix, Hulu Plus, MLB, and NHL apps.
Amazon Instant is still missing from the AppleTV app list, even though it's on all other set-top app boxes. It presents the best cross-section of problems. Unlike Netflix and Hulu, there is "purchase and own" content in that Amazon service, which is protected by Amazon DRM. It would be inelegant if the Amazon Instant app for AppleTV lacked all of those purchase options (just like the iOS app does), only giving Amazon Prime users access to their free streaming content. Then again, "inelegant" has never stopped Amazon before.
Will we see Apple open up so that channel apps like Warner Archive Instant, Acorn, Crunchyroll, and others could pop up as they do on Roku, Blu-ray players, and so on? I don't see how they can avoid that, but they will do everything possible to delay that for as long as they can, and make sure that the interface defaults to driving people to spend money with iTunes. If there's any monopolistic thing Apple should be worried about, it's limiting which services you can buy or rent content from on their set-top service. Their saving grace on iOS has been the 70-30 split standard, which puts it on the vendor to choose whether to accept those terms.
By iTunes, did Cook also mean the App Store? Apple has admittedly never been serious about console-style, "real" games, but their iOS game developers already speak the language that the TV would. It would be interesting to see what they could come up with that isn't just an iPhone or iPad game over AirPlay. All three major console manufacturers have multiple things going against them in the indie developer space.
This is very much an open topic, and it won't be closed anytime soon. I'll revisit all of this after WWDC and E3.
Don't expect any direct TV talk at WWDC. See Jim Dalrymple's excellent summation of where your expectations should rest.
What you should pay attention to is the further convergence and interaction between iOS and OS X, which will take center stage. The design and UI choices found in both iOS7 and OS 10.9 will be especially indicative of however it is that Apple is actually thinking about TV. Remember, they've been working on this for years.
THR reports that Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra is the most-watched "HBO Film" in nine years.
Contrary to the Twitter hivemind, there is no mathematical formula that will tell you, in millions of dollars, exactly how stupid every studio in town is for not putting it in theaters nationwide. In the same breath, I'll add that Magic Mike was a major gamble on paper to Warner Bros., even though it went on to be one of the biggest successes of 2012. We could play "what if?" until the end of time.
What's certain is that we still live in an age where mainstream industries are scared to death of male sexuality in any form, and not just the gay one. Male Gaze theory and voyeurizing woman? That's what keeps America (and the world) strong!
Wouldn't it be great if you could be an HBO subscriber without having a creaky old cable subscription? I bet they could do more of these and have those one-time-nine-years-ago ratings more regularly.
This piece at Deadline is half informative, half pot-stirring.
When CEO and caretaker Jason Kilar left, that was a big sign of uncertainty and instability. This compounded concerns after rumors spread of News Corp and Disney possibly pulling out their 1/3 ownership stakes due to disagreements over the focus of the business (paid vs. free). The idea being that with them, their content would also go. Either or both would be a critical blow to Hulu.
Now, eight entities are actively bidding for the service, including an unnamed pay-cable channel. Wouldn't it be crazy (or great) if that turned out to be HBO? Amazon is nowhere to be seen. Some entries on list aren't terribly exciting:
KKR & Co.
Silver Lake Management with William Morris Endeavor
Guggenheim Digital
Time Warner Cable
The first three (SLM and WME bidding together) are private equity firms. They're odd fits or not likely to bid for the amount or package that it's speculated Hulu's board will go for, just as in the previous bidding process. Time Warner Cable is bidding to buy in an ownership stake, which is allegedly the opposite of the full buyout that Hulu's trio of stakeholders want.
On the very interesting side:
DirecTV
They have a very dedicated satellite TV customer base, but they want a piece of the streaming business. This could be a good asset for that, but only if they go with massive-scale thinking. My assumption is that they would want to use Hulu as an enhanced pipe that offers the content Hulu already has in addition to DirecTV's cable channel offerings. Content deals for "Hulu" would be lumped in with their existing negotiations, with the paid Hulu service effectively becoming the infrastructure of "DirecTV Instant".
For example, they could ditch DVR recording and shift to cloud-accessible files that don't need a hard drive or massive box like they do now. Instead, an XML file lets users pick up where they left off, wherever they log in. The bad news for existing users is that, in theory, the Hulu they know now might cease to exist, just like Blockbuster rental stores have.
On that note...DirecTV's ownership of the flagging Blockbuster service could piggyback into this, making a revised Hulu UI the unified DirecTV interface for cable subscription, clip videos, and VOD. There are so many options on the table, there's no solid way of knowing what DirecTV is thinking of for sure. If they're really in the game, they have to be thinking of something this big, rather than an acquisition that would leave Hulu largely untouched.
Chernin Group
Peter Chernin helped start Hulu by both bringing in capital partners and taking Jason Kilar's side every time that it mattered. I would be surprised if he weren't going for the whole thing, with an eye to run it in the successful way Kilar did. The open question then (and for any all-in buyers listed here) is how steep a price current Hulu owners Fox/Disney/Universal will ask for the content they are currently licensing to themselves after offloading Hulu itself.
Yahoo
This could be a great addition to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo-from-the-ashes campaign, in a mold that I would hope is different than the Tumblr acquisition. I'm not the only user who thinks that Hulu needs a big UI overhaul, across set-top devices and native apps alike.
Pushing all of Yahoo's exclusive video content to Hulu and leveraging Yahoo's existing advertising business feels like an excellent match. YouTube has an uphill battle in getting people to pay for anything, but Hulu has a multi-mixed model that encourages users to pay for Hulu Plus. Yahoo would then have a long-term model for their funding of original content that doesn't involve it getting lost in the glut of "anyone can upload" that is YouTube.
Yahoo-exclusive series like Electric City and Burning Love have been seen, but not as broadly as they could have been on a hybrid Ya-Hulu service. If I ended up coining that "Brangelina-ization", I hope someone credits me.
More interesting to me than all of that? Former CEO Kilar and former CTO Richard Tom have been recruiting for a new stealth startup in Los Angeles. Kilar's brilliant blog post about the future of TV still resonates:
Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners.Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience. What we’ve heard:
* Traditional TV has too many ads. Users have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to avoid the advertising load that traditional TV places upon them. Setting aside sports and other live event programming, consumers are increasingly moving to on-demand viewing, in part because of the lighter ad load (achieved via ad-skipping DVRs, traditional video on demand systems, and/or online viewing).
* Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them. People want programs to start at a time that is convenient for their schedules, not at a time dictated to them. Consumption of original TV episodes will eventually mirror theatrical movie attendance: big opening Friday nights, but more consumption will be in the days and weeks afterward. Consumers also want the freedom to be able to watch TV on whatever screen is most convenient for them, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, or, yes, a TV.
* Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal. Consumers now also have the power to immediately tank a bad series, given how fast and broad consumer sentiment is disseminated. This is nothing short of a game-changer for content creators, owners, and distributors.
Thankfully, Soderbergh did not call his True Cineaste Emporium the above (nor The True Cineaste Emporium).
Instead, he chose Extension 765, a reference to Coppola's The Conversation. Slate did a great job creating a cheat sheet for hipsters who want to pretend they're like, so totally into Friedkin's 70's ouvre. In true hipster fashion, the only one I didn't know was the one for The Best of Everything. My favorites are for Marnie, Saboteur, and under-appreciated shot-in-Austin Soderbergh picture The Underneath.
The next time I have a big pile of money to throw at a new t-shirt wardrobe, this is where it goes. If you order four shirts or more, they send you a "bonus shirt" that they can't describe for whatever reason. Someone go buy me four shirts. I wear a large. Thanks in advance.
Also worth looking at, the Extension 765 stationary that Soderbergh had made. Did I mention that The Underneath is really good?
Not pictured: baseball jersey-style "American Newsreel Inc." shirt
Yesterday morning, a new movie network appeared over-the-air as a sub-channel to Fox-owned stations across the US. It's called "MOVIES!", and it's on the air 24 hours a day. My wife stumbled across it this evening just as Mel Brooks' High Anxiety started. The next movie on? Silent Movie. This sounds terrific, but I've a few caveats before you start thinking it's the best thing ever. The good news is that I find it's a great addition to the wide-open sub-channel space, and is bound to improve over time in areas where it's lacking at launch.
From the Blu-ray of An Affair to Remember
MOVIES! is SD-only, and there are some really gross picture artifacting issues that arise regularly. When Mel Brooks runs from pidgeons in High Anxiety, everything goes all blocky. This isn't a result of reception issues, but rather, broadcast signal strength.
It's "free" over-the-air broadcasting, but some boosted signal will improve the likelihood that people will stick with it. I don't expect that most are massive picture quality obsessives like me, but crap looks like crap looks like crap.
The channel is commercial-supported, but thankfully, the ads are not so frequent nor lengthy that they defeat my interest in watching a movie on TV that I have in much higher quality on the shelf. The feeling of the program flow is like the old days of weekend afternoon movies, which I like very much. This is in part thanks to ads like the ones for new-fangled catheters (hosted by Chuck Woolery) or AAG insurance (hosted by a goateed Senator Fred Thompson).
The programming is pretty diverse, with a regular patch of westerns and/or detective stories around the middle of the day. Each evening looks like a double feature followed by an encore of said pairing, with a late-night movie after. Tonight's is Anastasia and An Affair to Remember. The next day is The Star Chamber (starring Michael Douglas, and just out on Blu-ray) and The Sicilian Clan with Alain Delon. Others coming up over the next week include Capone (1975) and Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and a Mansfield to Day/Hudson double bill in The Girl Can't Help It and Do Not Disturb.
Then on June 1, something goofy happens. They start doing some syndicated TV crap from 10am-1pm, with movies the rest of the day. Most people including myself are working at that time anyway, but it's odd. The calendar only goes through June 2nd, so who knows what they plan after that point.
What is on there reflects some actual programming acumen, rather than throwing darts at DVDs tacked on a wall.
On the business side of things, the channel is run by the people of Weigel Broadcasting out of Illinois, who added dedicated MOVIES! execs earlier in May. The channel exists thanks to a deal with owned and operated Fox Television Stations. The content pool they're drawing from includes the entire 20th Century Fox back catalog. If the channel is successful, it could expand to more markets where Fox owns and operates affiliates. I would speculate it would also be offered to non-O&O Fox stations at some point, too.
In a media landscape full of expectations and prognostications about TV apps, omnivorous mega-boxes, and "smart" TV, something like MOVIES! might seem quaint or out of place, but I think it is quite the opposite. Whether something like this translates to the theoretical "TV app" future sooner or later, I think it's inevitable. The owners of these massive content libraries are smart to start using them to bring in revenue by actually getting the content dusted off and out of the vaults. That isn't to say that content deals with Netflix and Hulu are dead, but this is a good example of content owners leveraging the considerable arsenals they have under much more direct self-control, but with a layer of generic, unfettered branding.
I know at a glance that all the movies are Fox, but the un-branded naming of MOVIES! coupled with varied types of content prevent a reflexive reaction to whatever the word "Fox" means to anyone. I'll be interested to see what's on after next week.
Note to City of Austin officials: this is how to keep things weird.
This is a new addition to the "personal favorite episode" collection. Within minutes of the episode's posting, I got a guy compaining that we didn't warn about spoilers for The Iliad and The Odyssey.
As always, full shownote links can be found on the episode page. Below is a watching/reading/listening list of watch/read/listen-able things discussed in this week's show. This post is usually for general reference, but I actually think using the below as a binge playlist makes for a really solid Memorial Day Shut-In Weekend.
Peter Weller: PhD, and responsible for some out of a thousand faces
Welcome back to an old feature made new. More about how it works at the end of the article.
Individual releases are listed in no particular order. Assume Blu-ray on all unless otherwise noted. Click on the links to purchase at Amazon. This supports the site and this feature.
These posts are periodically updated with more info. Follow the Arthouse Cowboy twitter feed for notifications of additions.
The smallest kid in the frame below is named Clay O'Brien. He ended up being a seven-time world champion roper on top of turning in one of the best performances in one of The Duke's best movies.
I have a whole lot to say about where everyone is placing their battleships, and this is just a bit that I've been thinking about since the XBox One announcement. I want to resist any comment until after E3, but I'm not convinced a lot of this will change, so here goes.
Microsoft is obsessed with this new one being the "one box to rule them all", the way they're pitching it. Their keynote was fuill of "TV" this and that. Their pitch is not so fundamentally and functionally different than that of the PlayStation 4. Microsoft's edge is theoretically in console-exclusive content.
They've been easier to develop for since the beginning of the past generation, too, which helps...but indies are leaving them in droves since XBox 360 XBLA games won't work on the new rig, which is sheer insanity on their part. You're telling me their beast-like new console can't run an emulator runtime so you can play Super Meat Boy? Why kneecap the biggest opportunity for new user adoption in a space where you're already leading?
The move to curb used game sales is not a surprise, and isn't something consumers can do much about if they choose the XBox One as the box in their house.
That's a big "if", and not because hardcore gamers are screaming about used games, nor because it isn't backward compatible.
The true test to how complacent and fully owned their current and future audience is will come in users' acceptance that the new XBox Kinect is "always listening":
In response to a question about whether that functionality means that Kinect is always on, Link said that Kinect is always listening, but in a limited capacity. It also helps ensure developers can count on the peripheral, he said.
"The Kinect has a variety of settings," he said. "You know, it's always available to the system, so ... you can count, as an application developer or a game developer, [that] everyone's going to have a Kinect. You always have that stream available. And then, you know, there are settings, obviously, in the console to be able to change the settings of how your Kinect is used, if you're interested."
The always-on functionality even when the console is powered down comes courtesy of "multiple power states," he said. At its lowest setting, which Microsoft refers to as "wake on voice," the peripheral is "listening" for specific commands.
That creeps the hell out of me, and means I won't have one in the house.
Die-hard Halo fans (along with other XBox-only titles) may very well accept XBox Big Brother One because "that's where Halo is". I desperately want this to be Topic One for this weekend's Critical Path #86.
Oh yeah, Spielberg is doing a live-action Halo TV showthat XBox Live users get some sort of exclusivity on in a way that hasn't been 100% confirmed.
