Remember the old Netflix? Where the DVDs would show up in the mail, and you’d spend hours each week carefully managing your rental queue? Because if you didn’t, you’d inevitably hit those runs of films added when drunk or otherwise altered and now five months later you have to deal with your “I’m going to get really into Norwegian film” impulse.
You know, the Good Ole Days, back when you’d see a post on social media that says something like “we all died that day” and the image would be from something mainstream but good, like Tom Cruise’s scene at his father’s deathbed in Magnolia and not something with Anne Hathaway in it. The days when we had a film culture. The days in which we had standards, because we had easy access via these little red envelopes to things we not only wanted to watch but wanted to want to watch, and we didn’t have every pathway clogged with the bile and slop of mass produced without any care or thought content.
Anyway, if you didn’t know, Scarecrow Video does DVD and Blu-ray rentals through the mail, like old school Netflix. Also, they really need money right now, because everyone does. I have a package heading to me right now with some Costa-Gavras, some Kiyoshi Kurosawa, some Cristi Puiu. I forget what else, it’ll be a delightful surprise. If you are not lucky enough to live in a city with a wonderful rental place, like the good folks of Beyond Video in Baltimore, this is your next best option.
With a million streaming services it might not seem to make a lot of sense to go back to physical media, except that things keep disappearing into the limbo of licensing squabbles and terrible people buying back catalogs. Like what happened to John Woo. They are making a sequel to 28 Days Later and no one can watch that original film anywhere, it’s completely lost online and out of print on Blu-ray. I get mad every time I try to rewatch Carlos — a masterpiece — and I find there is only the “condensed” version and not the 6-hour wonder. There’s a whole generation that probably hasn’t seen the Vincent D’Onofrio episode of Homicide because it hasn’t been available anywhere, and that is just unacceptable. (If someone would release all four seasons of Halt and Catch Fire so I can buy it and never lose access to it again, that would be great, thank you. It is simply the only good show.)
It’s not great to fetishize physical media. All the commoners fall to the ground to scream to the heavens, “Why is vinyl so expensive right now?” and the answer appears before them, “Because it can be.” But the cultural custodians of the moment are all drunk on power and inflated stock evaluations, so we have things like MGM+, which has nothing good on it. An archival collection, with thoughtful curation and exploratory videos and interviews and historical documentation, as well as a comprehensive and well maintained database that shows us what film studios could and did do when they weren’t getting their stars hooked on pills or chasing the Chinese market. Show the kids Buster Keaton, they desperately need Buster Keaton. Instead, it’s just “here’s a bunch of stuff, pay us monthly but forget you even have a subscription so we can just keep charging you until the world burns.”
So if they aren’t going to do it, they being the executives who would rather delete the entire history of film if it made their tax bill go down a little, we should try to support the people who do. Like Scarecrow. Rent some movies from them. Buy a T-shirt. Make a donation. Tell your friends. Etc etc. Tom Cruise cannot save the entire film industry all by himself! We don’t even really deserve Tom Cruise, but he’s out there, doing it for the culture. We have to make ourselves worthy of Tom Cruise. It’s a tall order, I know. But it’s worth giving it a shot.
Recommended:
I have not recovered from Scotland v Hungary. Everyone was crying, I was crying. Varga is stable, it looks like.
I had someone recommend a writer to me recently, so I did a little search and the first thing I found with her name on it was an essay about her time working at McKinsey, and lol. No. Why is our literary world tolerating the presence of consultants? By the way, McKinsey is freaking out because all of their gold-plated Harvard grads are incompetent. They are trying to spin it as “we believe in a meritocracy” but it seems more like their elites just aren’t smart enough to drain every cent from the lower 90% of the world anymore. Sad!
I really liked this Folding Ideas video about how YouTube became the top platform for failed film school grads, how getting trapped in the influencer space prevents you from growing or advancing, and how an audience will eventually turn on you, and how maybe the whole YouTube essay video thing is creatively a dead end. A lot going on here, it’s great.
I was asked to review Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin for the Telegraph. I didn’t like it.
And Michael Scott Moore wrote about The Rushdie Narrative, the changing shape of free speech on the political left, and YouTube radicalization. But he got very mad when I suggested we use this image as the illustration:
Anyway, his Bono-less piece is here:
Streaming isn’t even a good business model, it’s anathema to profit. You can only have so much subscriber growth. So if all of these media conglomerates are still jumping into it headfirst, there’s another reason. They want to essentially moot the end of the Paramount decree. They want absolute control over all aspects of distribution. They want to be the only ones that benefit from the making of a movie. That’s worth more than “line go up indefinitely.”
Also, thank God I picked up a copy of 28 Days Later on DVD for $1 at my building’s stoop sale yesterday. I did that before I read this.
need a true crime TCWD Podcast spinoff where the hosts hunt down the six-hour Blu Ray version of CARLOS. (it was on the criterion channel for a minute.)