Screen Time #55: Recommended Reading & Viewing

Screen Time #55 begins a long-in-the-planning series of interviews with the people behind The Criterion Collection. Susan Arosteguy and her colleagues do amazing preservation, restoration, and appreciation work, and it shows in their beautiful special edition releases. In particular, Susan's eye as a designer results in a widely-varied array of striking aesthetics in her releases.

Her latest Wes Anderson special edition, for Fantastic Mr. Fox, arrives in a Criterion Blu-ray/DVD Dual Format Edition tomorrow (18 February 2014).

Subscribe to the Electric Shadow Channel (iTunes/RSS)
Subscribe to the ESN Master Feed (iTunes/RSS).

Steven Soderbergh Sees/Reads/Writes; Adds Sirk, VARRICK Shirts

Steven Soderbergh's Extension 765 shoppe (my arcane spelling not his) has added new shirts refencing Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind and Don Siegel's magnificent Charley Varrick. The latter may include my favorite Walter Matthau line delivery in cinema history, when he says "... box the compass". To me and six others on the Internet, this is headline news. If I hadn't just incurred a pile of credit card debt starting my start up, I would've already ordered them. My birthday is tomorrow, you would think that I would know how to ask people for stupid things I don't need.

Soderbergh has also posted an update on his booze venture, his seen/red list for 2013 and an article about how Chinatown is as good or better than we think that it is, at once (and succinctly) assailing a culture of disease that has cropped up:

Let me just say I’m sick of people digging up obscure masterpieces designed to make me feel like a philistine, or, worse, arguing that an acknowledged masterpiece isn’t in fact a masterpiece at all, but the beneficiary of some collective cultural hypnosis. I’m going in the opposite direction: I’m going to call attention to a classic that, in my opinion, is as good--or even better--than we all think it is: Chinatown.

Read on for more, including footnotes that, by the estimation of my eyeballs, are as long as the "body text".

Stay "#&%!"-ed up, my friends.

THE WONDER YEARS: On DVD (Unedited) at Long, Long Last

I've just received a press release that not only acknowledges that The Wonder Years is coming to DVD in the second half of 2014, and it's going to retain the essential original soundtrack, the licensing of which has long-prevented the DVDs from happening. There's a conditional word in there, though:

As it did for China Beach, StarVista Entertainment/Time Life ispainstakingly securing the rights for virtually every song in The Wonder Years. From Cocker's theme song, to hundreds of other memorable and classic soul, rock and pop songs, including classics from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and many others, StarVista /Time Life recognizes the necessity to release the series as it was initially broadcast, un-edited and untouched from original broadcast masters.

We'll see if that means anything. The indication is that the lion's share of the music rights have already been secured, such that we may not notice one or two songs here or there.

StarVista/TimeLife has done some pretty solid work on China Beach, The Carol Burnett Show, especially Get Smart, and various others. You can sign up to be notified the moment there's a release date, price, and pre-order option.

It's going to be a hell of a year for TV on DVD & Blu-ray.

Giant Size #1: Reading List

Merlin Mann joins John and I to talk about the X-Men and reboot/renumber our show about comics over on ESN, my new podcast network.

Subscribe to the show in iTunes or via RSS, or subscribe to the combined "channel" feed (links pending, check back), which includes Giant Size, uncut Artist Edition interviews, and Test Pattern pre- and post-shows in "canonical" (chronological) order. It turns out that there is a pre-show for the very first episode.

Here are a few recommendations based on books/trades/OGNs we discussed on the show.

$12.64

$16.16

$15.16

$15.80

All-New X-Men

Written by Brian Michael Bendis as one of the anchors for Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative, the original X-Men from the 1960's come forward to the present, causing all manner of havoc. It is surprisingly easy to get into was a new reader, which is a testament to Bendis's strength as a writer.

Uncanny X-Men

Focusing on Cyclops's more militant X-Men group, including Magneto, Emma Frost, and Magik. We acknowledge that this one is had its ups and downs in certain ways (the stretch spent in Limbo is called out [even though I was fine with it -Meddling Moisés]), but it continues to be a very good (indispensable, really) companion to All-New X-Men. This is especially the case after the Battle of the Atom crossover concluded in late 2013.

Giant Size X-Men #1

We didn't actually talk about this one very much (expect that in the next X-Men episode), but it is referenced throughout. This 1980s reboot of the team was a big launching point, and remains one of the most accessible ways to get into the world.

Amazing X-Men

Dubbed "the Nightcrawler book", this one is only three issues in at the time of this posting, but is loads of swashbuckling fun, and is written by one of our favorite writers, Jason Aaron (Thor: God of Thunder). The book follows an interesting combination of X-Men going to rescue Nightcrawler from the afterlife.

Marvel Unlimited

This yearly subscription service is growing by leaps and bounds every few months. For example, the aforementioned Amazing X-Men had its first issue made free on the service when the series launched. 

Days of Future Past

As iconic as this series is, people often forget that it takes place over the span of two comic book issues. There's an X-Men movie with this as a subtitle coming out this year, and we figure that it might be on many to-read lists this year. It is not an ideal entry point, because it needs some context before it can work very well for you. This is a great example of how concentrated major storylines could be 20+ years ago.

God Loves, Man Kills

The fifth "Marvel Graphic Novel" is steeped in the 1980s: religious extremism, jingoism, and other unmistakable themes of the era. Like Days of Future Past before it, this one is a much better contextual read. It may not work as a perfect jumping in point, but it's pretty close. This thing bleeds civil rights allegory that is all over the X-Men canon, ever since their creation. The art, from pencils to inks to color to lettering, is absolutely beautiful. This is one of those X-Men stories that delivers on all fronts in every way that it can. You just have to be into this sort of story. Interestingly enough, it is directly referenced in Bendis' current X-Men runs on All-New and Uncanny.

The Dark Phoenix Saga

This is the biggie, the top dog, the one that has been adapted as often as the X-Men have  crossed into other media (movies, animated TV shows, and so on). Jean Grey acquires some major powers all of a sudden, things go very far south, and the effects are far-reaching throughout X-Men history. Her character arc student out as a more complex female comic book character than (many would argue) had been seen before. Without spoiling the who, the what, and the when of it (the cover seems to spoil something), some major death occurs that goes on to define many aspects of the next three decades of the X-Men in various respects.

Bandit Hats (Frame 175)

I'm still in awe of this movie's level of craftsmanship. We recorded the second episode of Electric Shadow (focusing on it and Anderson in general) this morning. Expect it later in the week.

LEGEND OF THE FIST Free on Hulu (for Now)

US viewers can watch this outstanding recent Donnie Yen movie (full title Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen) for free courtesy of the good folks at Well Go USA.

I'm not sure if I've seen Yen's fists faster, and I defy you to not smile at the Bruce Lee homage.

ESN.fm is Live

You can subscribe to feeds via RSS until iTunes gets around to adding us. There's a nice handful of content already up, both tiny and full-sized.

You might say "Giant-Sized"...

The first episodes of all shows ail be posting today, with second episodes hitting at the end of the week.

ESN: Electric Shadow Network

I thought I'd share some more details about my soon-to-launch little podcast network. All three shows (and two companion feeds) start the first week of February 2014, with new episodes posting weekly.

This post will be updated with info until the site launches at ESN.fm

Electric Shadow

When Screen Time went through a format overhaul, it transformed into what I'd wanted it to be all along (panel plus limited-length interview). That show about movies, TV, games, and "moving images on a glowing screen" is now Electric Shadow, which doubles as the signature branding of the new network as seen in the title of this post.

Electric Shadow is the original title I had pitched. It comes from a literal translation of the Chinese word for cinema. I wanted something evocative that bucked the trends seen in the names of other shows and publications dedicated to any of the above kinds of storytelling. Screen Time becomes the feed for the unedited, "director's cut" versions of the interviews that make up the back segment of Electric Shadow.

Episode 1
panel: Horace Dediu and Guy English
topic: TBD, but expect something about Nintendo wedged in

Episode 2
broadcasts live: Monday, 10 February 2014 at 11am CST
panel: David Loehr, Merlin Mann, and Matt Zoller Seitz
topic: Wes Anderson and Fantastic Mr. Fox (which is receiving a Blu-ray special edition release from Criterion on 18 February 2014)

Giant Size

Much like its most recent iteration on 5by5, this show also follows the same panel plus limited-length interview format as Electric Shadow, and will have its own "uncut interview" feed, probably called something like "Artist Edition". I have a few other ideas, but welcome suggestions.

Episode 1
panel: co-host John Gholson and Merlin Mann
topic: how to get into reading the X-Men

Episode 2
panel: co-host John Gholson, David Sparks, and Casey Liss
topic: getting in or back into comics as an adult, reading recommendations

Thank You For Calling!

This will be more conversational, and looser in style. Some weeks will be one-on-one, some will be panels. Addressing sub-topics within the Customer Service industry is something I think has the legs of a long, long, long-running series. People who work in customer service, whether retail, call center, chat support, or whatever else are encouraged to email or leave a voicemail [(240) 285-9623] to tell their story on future episodes of the show.

Episode 1
panel: Brent Simmons
topic: Network Solutions charging $1850 like a threat (see his blog for more updates), and supporting customers as an indie

Episode 2
panel: John Roderick, Lex Friedman, and Brent Billings
topic: airlines, why we hate them, who holds the power, and what to do

More to come later this week on a variety of fronts. Thank you so much to everyone who has been so supportive so far.

More Nips, Tucks, and Thoughts

I've consolidated almost all of the category and series links in the sidebar under one gigantic expandable features button. I resisted creating the various subcategories and sub- subcategories under it, but I may end up going back that route, especially since some more series will begin this year.

In Liu of multiple "deals" posts, I have opted to add text headings to referral links in the sidebar. The first I've added is "worth pre-ordering". This will revolve, as will the "already available" section, which will include three or four topically relevant things to get, based on post and podcast content. I'll be adding a dedicated Amazon referral store link to the sidebar as well. I want to make sure that the top level buttons are as few in number as possible.

Another thing that I've given thought to is actually using the Tumblr account that shares a name with this site. It would mostly be a way for people who live on Tumblr to follow this site in the way that they follow everything on Tumblr (through excerpted posts). I would occasionally post things that only appear on the Tumblr, too. For example, I would never put an animated GIF on this site, but that's what Tumblr was born to host. Well, it was made for that and Doctor Who slashfic.

Kirk Lawrence, Titanium Justice, and "The Feve" (Frames 169-174)

One of my best friends, whom I met in college, introduced me to a ridiculous amount of things that I now dearly love, from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension to the majority of John Carpenter's filmography. At one stage, Kirk Lawrence and his roommates called their rental house "Chez DeLorean". Kirk had some of the absolute best taste of any geek or nerd I've known. At one point, he worked in a record store, surrounded by the media he worshipped.

My now-wife (then-girlfriend) and I dropped in to his Halloween party one of the last years we lived in Tallahassee. I was dressed as Ed Wood, she as an Alfred Hitchcock Double feature (The Birds and Psycho). Wearing a 60's-style business outfit, she had a plastic knife (partially embedded) glued into her shirt on one side, and a black plastic bird (wings spread wide) on the other.

Kirk was dressed as RoboCop. He and his roommates made a labyrinth stretching from their garage into their backyard. It was great. He seemed a little worn out. Later in the night, he just kept vomiting and his head was killing him in a way not related to alcohol consumption. He had a brain tumor that had its tentacles in him like an angry monster from a Lovecraft story.

They shaved his hair off and cut his head open to take out what they could. They sealed him back up with a titanium plate on the inside. All of his friends cheered this as a silver lining: Kirk had become a Robocop-like icon of justice and good. A few of us collectively dubbed him reborn as Titanium Justice.

Back then, MySpace and LiveJournal was where people "hung out" online, with Facebook on the ascendance. We had a sort of support group of friends unofficially knit together. We'd buy him DVDs when he was in the hospital,  One day, I put together a LiveJournal Group called Titanium Justice. The icon was the Robocop helmet photoshopped over his face.

Many cycles of hardcore treatment later, the brain cancer finally took him. Ever since, I've seen things like Watchmen and many others he would have wanted to see, and thought "I wish he could have seen…", and it goes the same way with rewatching favorites (Robocop especially), Blu-rays, and restorations.

One of my all-time favorite disc shops is Vinyl Fever, the iconic, now-closed shop Kirk worked at down in Tallahassee. Tallahasseans in the know called it "The Feve".

Knowing Kirk is the reason I'm as deeply into movies as I am. He's also most of the reason I spend more money than I probably should at used DVD/record stores. He taught me that discovery and presentation quality could be uniting, communal experiences in the way some people participate in their religions.

I miss "the good ol' days" not just because I miss him and because nostalgia is a human "thing", but because modern society has lost a lot of the joy in in-person, communal experiences that get to live within themselves in favor of constant broadcast and attention-seeking. I've changed the way I share and participate in (anti-) social media and my private life quite a bit over the last year. A lot of that has come from reflecting on friends I've lost to mortality, including Kirk, my brother, one of my mentors, and various others.

I've also doubled down on living up to a piece of North Florida resident George "P Funk" Clinton's wisdom that Kirk pulled out of his head one day:

"Give the people what they want, when they wants it…and they wants it all the time"

The new RoboCop transfer from a 4K remaster looks astonishingly good and is worth a reasonable price (like the $8 it cost its week of release). I'll post a screen grab comparison to the previous release soon.

If you really love RoboCop, note that the OOP Criterion DVD extras are all ported to the Blu-rays with the exception of the Criterion commentary. The Fox/MGM commentary features the same participants as the Criterion, but is a different recording entirely.

The New Logo

Unless you've never visited before, you noticed a new logo on the site as of this morning (see right). I like it so much that I'm ashamed I didn't spend a couple of hours making it years ago.

I didn't use an external service or hire a friend. I bought Pixelmator for $30, warmed up my old graphic design muscles, and executed a cocktail napkin sketch I drew almost three years ago. The old, "generic four-hole off-kilter film reel" icon was low-res, fuzzy, and awful, buoyed by garbage kerning and…well, everything. Better than nothing doesn't mean good.

What I wanted (which I ended up with) was something that could play a little trick on your eyes and be three different things: a film reel in profile, a dead-on POV of a six-bullet revolver chamber, and a fancy boot spur.

I also narrowed these text fields by about 200px. I like them better this way, and the revised color schema site-wide feels more at home. Hope you all like the changes and upgrades. Feedback is welcome as always.

All-New Giant Size and Screen Time, Not on 5by5

In the week since last I posted, I've been making big decisions about what and how I create the content I want to be making. These are decisions I've been mulling for a few months now for various reasons, but chief among them is that I want to chart my own course, sink or swim…you choose the metaphor.

Within the week, I am recording the final episodes of Screen Time and Giant Size that will be posted at 5by5. The shows are not ending, far from it.

"I Swear to God You're a Dead Man If This Means Critical Path Is Over"

There is no change to my co-hosting The Critical Path on 5by5 alongside Horace Dediu. We're recording a new episode this morning. He's about to do a pile of traveling (get your AirShow San Jose tickets for 30 January), so don't take any broadcast interruption to mean anything other than travel schedules complicating things vis-à-vis our show continuing for as long as Horace wants to do it.

Where Shows Are Going

Starting the first week of February, Screen Time and Giant Size will re-launch as a part of my new broadcast entity alongside the debut of Thank You For Calling, a show about customer service (pilot recorded and posted here). If you currently subscribe to the 5by5 feeds for Giant Size and Screen Time, you will have to subscribe to the new feeds on the new network.

"So, You and Dan Benjamin Are Mortal Enemies Now?"

Sorry to disappoint, but there is not some big drama behind the scenes that is worthy of being a subplot on Scandal. The infrastructure of 5by5 and what I wanted to do with my existing shows (and others that I have been developing) no longer match. This is a thing that happens. People's needs change and grow, respectively. At a certain point, Robin had to let Batman "do Batman" and go off to be Nightwing.

Apologies for the comic book reference.

I still consider Dan Benjamin not only a very dear friend, but the whole reason I'm doing podcasts in the first place, after "meaning to get serious about" doing a show for years. I owe Dan in ways I can't ever repay.

Listening to Dan's show Quit! is part of what made me want to jump into the insanely hard work that is not only producing content, but selling my own ads and sponsorships. Both parts of that equation have been elements of my career in the past, and it feels great to unify them on behalf of my own thing rather than those of others.

Due in large part to the people I've met, befriended, and been blessed to have as listeners and supporters while doing these shows on 5by5, I already have a few sponsorship deals closed or in the works. 

Dan and I are totally cool. I'm still doing a show for him with Horace. Dan will guest on my new shows as time and topic permit. I'll do the same for him. I think I'm going on a BBQ run with him later this week. We had coffee this morning. We're cool.

How the New Network Will Work

All three shows will be broadcast live as they record. There will be an IRC-based chat room where you can suggest and up-vote titles. John Gholson has agreed to remain my better-than-I-deserve co-host on Giant Size. I've begun curating a sort of revolving co-host chair for what was called Screen Time. Giant Size and the show most recently known as Screen Time will remain panel-format focused, with short talent interviews plugged on the end. Longer versions of those interviews will be available too.

Much more information will be available in the coming days, but I wanted to cover some points I knew people would wonder about.

I'm focusing on these three shows, and should they do well, a few others that I've been developing.

Screen Time: Reiterating and Repurposing

I'm still using "Screen Time" as a show title, but I'm peeling it off of the signature panel-format show. I originally pitched it with a completely different name, a name that is bolted into the branding of the network. I'm not sharing that just yet, because there are a couple of things I need to lock up that I haven't secured just yet.

Screen Time has had a weird, complicated life that has taught me a great deal. It began as, predominantly, an interview show. Most of the episodes I recorded of it are done in that format. The new Screen Time feed will include the "Extended Cut" versions of interviews that will otherwise be cut down for the main "anchor" show.

The "new name show" will be more like Screen Time episodes 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, and 53 (and very rarely #50) than any others in that back catalogue. It will have guests very much like those found in those episodes, as well as others from both the tech and entertainment industries.

The first panel on the relaunched show will be return guests Horace Dediu and Guy English.

How You Can Help

First and foremost, if you love the shows I've done on 5by5, subscribe to the new feeds when they're posted, and please rate/review the shows like crazy once they're in iTunes. Listen to the shows, continue to give me great feedback, and enjoy them. Tell a few thousand friends.

On the financial side of things, if your company is interested in sponsoring the shows, please get in touch. By "your company", I also don't necessarily mean a corporation with an enormous overall ad budget. That includes everything from one-person app developers to independent comics creators.

If you host a podcast and would like to have me on as a guest in the coming days and weeks, let me know.

If you work or have worked in any sort of customer service job, have a horror story, or a company you can't get to solve your issue, send an email and I might have you on Thank You For Calling.

Thanks for reading this, listening to any of the shows I've been on, and supporting what I do in any way ever. 

I'll have more next week. Wish me luck.

Thelma Schoonmaker on "Testing Patience"

If you don't already know Thelma Schoonmaker's name, you almost certainly know her work if you've ever seen a Martin Scorsese picture. The NY Times ran a piece talking with her about editing long movies, specifically her work on The Wolf of Wall Street:, and she does better than most critics I've read thus far in defending the pace and lingering final shots in the 3-hour masterpiece:

David Denby’s pan in The New Yorker thrice mentions its three-hour duration, while Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune describes a scene that “goes on two minutes too long,” before lamenting that “those minutes add up.” But Ms. Schoonmaker said that was precisely the director Martin Scorsese’s design. “A film like ‘Wolf’ is intended to be sprawling,” she said. “Marty wanted things to go just a little too far in the scenes sometimes, to test the patience of the audience just a bit. Because that’s what the whole movie is about.”

Nintendo Re-Examining Mobile Strategy

Nintendo has needed to be pushed to the breaking point for some time, and I'm glad they're figuring out how to massively overhaul their operations. I just hope they make the right bets and moves.

Vizio is NOT Dumping 3D

As discussed on episode 190 of TWiT's Home Theater Geeks podcast, what was initially reported out of CES is not true. 3D is only being dropped from the lower end of their line, which it's speculated means that 3D will only be on their UHD sets.

ALL HAIL THE KING Marvel One-Shot: Advance Clip

You need to have seen Iron Man 3 before watching this clip.

On the upcoming Thor: The Dark World Blu-ray, word has it that this short will reveal something hiding in the shadows. In public interviews, it's been teased that the Mandarin's Ten Rings organization is real, and very unhappy with one person in particular.

Thor: The Dark World hits Blu-ray on February 4th in the US.

Academy Award Nominations

I like to recognize nominees that sound odd as Oscar-nominated each year, like Norbit. I'll get that out of the way before looking at surprises and disappointments. Without further ado, congratulations to "Academy Award Nominees"...

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (Makeup & Hairstyling)

The Lone Ranger  (Makeup & Hairstyling, Visual Effects)

The Book Thief (Original Score) 

Prisoners (Cinematography, Roger Deakins...who will tragically probably not win, yet again) 

The Great Gatsby (Costume Design, Production Design) 

Lone Survivor (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing) 

Karen O of the YeahYeahYeahs (Original Song,  Her)

Pharrell Williams  (Original Song, Despicable Me 2)

Alone Yet Not Alone (Original Song, a Christian pop song) 

The most unbelievable snub: American Hustle was shut out...of Makeup & Hairstyling. If there were a single category it was made to win...

It's easy to poke fun that a Jackass movie has been Academy Award nominated, but I'm completely serious in saying Bad Grandpa is one of my favorite movies of 2013, and captures true modern America better than most documentaries or narrative features do. I have to emphasize once again that I am 100% serious, no joke.

The biggest mistake in my mind is not nominating Thelma Schoonmaker for editing The Wolf of Wall Street. Likewise, how on earth does Pacific Rim not get visual effects and technical nominations?

 The Grandmaster  received nominations for Cinematography and Costume Design, but not Foreign Language Feature, which genuinely surprised me, based on the money Weinstein Co put into it.

On the Documentary Feature side of things, I want The Square to win most of all. If you haven't seen director Jehane Noujaim's Control Room, you're missing out big-time. I'm sad to see Stories We Tell passed over. Sarah Polley's movie is magnificent, and different than what generally gets recognized as an "Oscar doc". Blackfish  is being mourned, generally in the same breath as commentary that it being nominated would have symbolically done so much for animal rights, or that SeaWorld execs must be dancing and high-fiving. The amount of attention it's gotten thus far has done as much as Hollywood awards would likely do for it. There's no way it would've won had it been nominated. It's a very effective television-friendly documentary, but on a completely different scale than the films that did get nominated. I wish it were aired on a US broadcast network during primetime on a weeknight. That would do exponentially more for its cause than an Oscar nod.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a great movie with an outstanding central performance by Oscar Isaac. It'll get latter-day appreciation and love. Will Forte will get the same for his performance in Nebraska.

Did Sony just not submit Evil Dead for Makeup? 

I Sang RIFIFI in College: A CineMemoir

Often, essayed recollections of what one did "back in college" has to do with an accountant revealing they were the percussive bass in an acapella group, or that they were "a militant [insert political belief group here]". I apologize for having been considerably less audacious and extreme. Very early in my freshman year at Florida State, I got involved in promoting, running, and building the campus screening series into a behemoth. One of my earliest firebrand crusades was programming Jules Dassin's Rififi as part of a week-long "French Film Festival". Nevermind that blacklisted director Jules Dassin was an American. The movie was in French and made in France, so it counted.

Oh, what a rebel I was. What a renegade.

Criterion's fully remastered and restored Blu-ray edition hit the street today in the US. In the first of a small series of bits reflecting on said lovely blu-grade, I offer a short story of success, failure, and ultimately...success with a side of crème brûlée.

By some stroke of luck, I was attending FSU on a scholarship that covered the majority of my undergraduate education as laid out on paper, plus a little more. The reality of higher education in this country is such that "on paper" and "in reality" are different by a quantum stretch of the imagination.

I chose to leverage the "plus a little", bit by bit, into providing myself with a film school worth of education to be found in special edition DVDs. I stretched my funds a bit more thanks to a discount card sold by the FSU Lacrosse team that offered a 10% discount at the Tallahassee Best Buy, even on reduced and sale items. Buying the then-new Criterion DVD of Rififi felt like an entirely legitimate (much smaller scale) diamond heist. I wasn't committing a crime, but I worked the system so hard in my own straitlaced way that I felt positively felonious.

Twelve years ago, watching a movie on a 27" Sony Trinitron TV was the closest thing to an absurd luxury that I had, and it's how I discovered hundreds of movies. For a 2001-vintage DVD, Rififi looked spectacular, particularly as compared to other five-decade-old black & white movies I'd seen. VHS copies of Chaplin classics and loads of others were dropping in price like crazy. Prior to the explosion of DVD, those tapes and Turner Classic Movies on cable were the only way I saw pre-color movies, and none were in another language that I recall.

Out of sheer serendipity, the week after I bought Rififi on DVD, we learned in our weekly programming meeting that we needed to program a French Film Fest. Amelie was available, and unanimously chosen as our centerpiece weekend movie over two nights. A new, goofy-looking Depardieu movie called The Closet was out (double entendre certainement intended). I thought it was a waste of an evening, but conceded and supported it for a one night only slot in exchange for getting Rififi booked as the first movie of the week, also for one night.

Rampant online piracy didn't exist at that point, nor did massive streaming network libraries. It was a microcosmic golden age in 35mm film exhibition. FSU had spent a ton of money the year before to build the 400-seat, stadium-format digital surround sound-enabled cinema. Previously, movies had screened in creaky, moldy old Moore Auditorium over in the Student Union. This was the most ambitious week of programming yet since the move to "SLB".

The big night for Rififi was sparsely attended relative to the size of the house, with maybe 70 or 80 people per show. Small an audience as each was, I sat in with them both. Their vocal reactions indicated the old movie still had it, from gasps in the still brilliant heist section to laughter and chuckling throughout. For those 150 or so people that night, they had discovered something. Qualitatively, it was a raging success, but attendance was king, and attendance had no clothes. I got bonus points from the boss because he really loved the film once he saw it, but the way he justified our budget to the university was butts in seats. Depardieu did a bit better than my "the hell is Ri-foo-foo?" movie, but not stellar. We expected they wouldn't fill the house, but a 20-25% full 400-seat cinema really feels underwhelming.

The truly amazing thing about working and and running that theatre in one aspect or another is overhearing what people say in the lobby. What I never expected, going into that week, was what I would overhear over the two nights of Amelie.

Everyone cooed and repeated lines upon exiting, or did bad jobs misremembering what a friend's friend told them about it while waiting to be let in for their screenings. This is what college kids did when trying to appear smart, attractive, or sophisticated (or all three) to their friends in the age before smartphones. What I didn't expect was that I would recognize so many people.

These undergrads weren't friends of mine or in my classes, but rather, repeat customers from the night we'd shown Rififi. Snippets of conversation I heard that weekend are still with me today:

"They had this really great movie on Wednesday, it was like, this Ocean's Eleven movie but like, way better and with less bullshit."

"This one was good, but I saw it already. I mean, it's ok, but the jewel thief one with the weird name wasn't all 'look at me, I'm so fuckin cute' and shit."

wearing a beret, red lipstick, and Audrey Hepburn pants: "Did you see [massive overpronounciation for effect] Rififi the other day? I love allll of [forced French accenting of an American's name] Jules Dass-enn's films, he's my favorite director"

I miss those days: evenings of screenings, sprockets, and loose conversation. Amelie's massive numbers made the whole week a screaming success in retrospect, and paved the way for crazy ideas I had with co-conspirators like counter-programming Iron Monkey on Valentine's Day.

A Hint of the Blues

I wanted to operate the site on the rules of black & white cinema (those two colors and shades of grey only) from launch until I started tweaking things in a focused way. I wanted to get the thing up and running and clean, albeit unideal and not as pretty as I would like. The time for refinement has come, and it will see a new logo/masthead alongside other things sprinkled in over the coming weeks.

As unspectacular and un-custom as this site has been thus far, you would never assume I used to be a web developer. Looking at current standards, that was the literal dark ages of web development. Back in those days, you were really daring if your links were a color other than primary blue. Blue text on a website still means "link" to me, and I hate underlining, the Cro magnon to italicized text's Homo sapiens. Hence, all-new, all-blue links (and therefore post headings).

I'm always interested in feedback as to what you respond to as readers. Based on my metrics, more people come here looking for a way to watch import Blu-rays than literally anything else I write about. The increased output this week has felt good, and I have a lot of things in the cooker, so to speak.

This Year: Complete Batman '66 TV Series on…Blu-ray?

In addition to this tweet from Conan O'Brien, I've reached out for confirmation regarding Blu-ray or DVD format ("no comment"), uncut/unedited ("no comment"), and new supplemental features ("no comment").

What I was told, that "everyone is going to be very happy", makes me comfortable placing a heavy bet that it will have been remastered from film source for Blu-ray, as the episodes originally aired (edited down previously for syndication), and with a boatload of extras. This is how WB can kick off their Batman 75th Anniversary Year in style.

Next on my wish list is giving Bill Finger long-overdue co-creator credit on the character and universe.

The reason this has taken so long is a longtime dispute between FOX (who own the show), and Warner Bros (who own the characters and overall license). I heard rumbling last summer that the two sides had finally settled on a split where one side would get toy licensing and the other home video and streaming rights, but San Diego Comic Con (which had Batman '66-branded bags yet again) came and went with no official announcement.

My baseless speculation upon prior rumor is that FOX somehow will benefit from SVOD/streaming rights, having relinquished physical media release and licensed product rights to WB. If FOX has good lawyers, they may still have some sort of interest or stake in the backend of both, but only lawyers and file clerks will ever know for sure.