The Hot Blog Archive for August, 2019

BYOAutumn Movies

red leaf

89 Comments »

“Raise A Glass To Peter” Fonda

Peter Fonda

8 Comments »

BYO Break In Summer Dog Day Dog Movies

46 Comments »

BYO Anima: Trailering HIDDEN LIFE

1. The trailer is cut to suggest that the historical moment is not then, but now.

2. Those pull-quotes are…

3. Jörg Widmer.

11 Comments »

BYO Ides of August

Pendleton wildfire

54 Comments »

2 Key Issues From Disney’s Q3 Fiscal Announcement

Neither has anything to do with their making or not making financial projections.

1. The only thing really left from the 20th Century Fox studio that was operating for 84 years as a major is Fox Searchlight.

Aside from the indie arm, basically Disney purchased a big library (including IP rights), some cable positions, and a controlling position in Hulu. Yes, they have kept some of the Fox people and fired their Disney counterparts instead. Yes, Emma Watts is of value. And yes, they recover some IP segments they wanted (already noted).

But basically, they have Icahn-ed the shit out of Fox.

And the DOJ didn’t blink an eye. A major studio disappeared… and all we got was this lousy feeling of nostalgia.

2. Disney just slowed down the transition to streaming. A lot.

What went unsaid in today’s quarterly is that the integration of Fox into the digital future of Disney, which is the primary reason Disney moved on the Century City studio, is not going to happen in a hurry. There was an offering of Hulu pricing, but no real content pitch. The next quarterly will coincide with the launch of Disney+. No doubt, when Hulu get serious, it will be part of a price expansion by the company.

The studio dropped the ad-supported version of Hulu to $5.99, down $2 a month, in February of this year. Their announced price for Disney+ is $6.99. So, essentially, you get ESPN+ (normally $4.99 a la carte) for just 1 penny in the bundle announced today.

Why?

Because they are pushing for market share, not for as much revenue as possible, at this time.

Netflix is $8.99, $12.99 or $15.99. So in 2 of 3 situations, the full Disney package is the same cost or less than Netflix.

Netflix should have raised prices, but they also got pushed by Disney, as the “normal cost of streamers” will now be set at $13 for everyone. So expect WarnerMedia to follow suit and lower the cost of their streaming package from the previously announced $16-$17 a month.

But also expect the WarnerMedia offering to be less good at the lower price.

Comcast set their number at $12. Expect it to move to $12.99.

Bur back to Disney…

All of this suggests a strategy that is about withholding a good amount of content, looking to add clear value as these prices rise. And this will become the strategy that everyone starts following, at least for a while.

That means that Hulu will not be changing dramatically when Disney+ launches in November. (Dear Lord, I hope the change the interface.) I’m sure there will be some titles from the Fox library to spruce things up. But the library is more than 4500 titles deep. There is no question that there is a strong demand from film lovers (and some lovers of film junk) for most of that library. Some is tied up past this November in different ways, no question. But while I had hoped that Disney would load up Hulu with at least 1000 Fox titles, my guess is that they will now keep it around a few hundred.

Disney knows, as any smart company would, that once you give it away, people come to expect whatever has been available at whatever price, even if they don’t take advantage of that content. There is a thing about cycling content, which Criterion Channel is doing with its site, but even for the small group of movie lovers that subscribe to that great app, the question of “Why is there a time limit on Ace In The Hole?” strikes many subscribers, even if they have seen the film before and wouldn’t watch it again before it cycles back in. Human nature.

So expect the aforementioned Criterion Channel to remain a separate stream until WarnerMedia decides it can make it a $3 a month premium option with the overall service. And look for a fuller TCM service than they start with to make that $5 a month. Less than the $9.99 a month now charged, but a significant premium as part of a monthly stream.

Expect Disney to make a significant Fox package to add to the existing Hulu package by November 2020.

Look for UniversalNBC to start accumulating data to figure out how to move forward with their streaming package, still anxious about promoting cable/satellite while trying to find a way to add paying subscribers. I predict their eventual product will look the least like what they first launch next year.

And what of Sony and Paramount? That’s another column for another day.

2 Comments »

Review: Hobbs & Shaw

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with the The Fast & The Furious franchise. I remember seeing the first film in the run, directed by the ever-cinematically flatulent Rob Cohen, 18 years ago in a room somewhere at Universal that I can’t ever remember being in before or since. And it was flawed. But it was fun. And intimate. And weird. And it was great to see in-camera car stunts that we hadn’t seen in a while.

In 2002, Spider-Man launched the CG era of movie franchises, though the work seems primitive these near-two-decades later. It was truly revolutionary at the time.

But The Fast & The Furious was about real cars and real people (ha!) and the grit of it all. So 2 Fast 2 Furious stayed in that pocket. And when things went a little sideways and they headed to Asia for The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, the emphasis was still on what could be done in-camera (as was true of the other car action landmark of that period, The Bourne Supremacy).

Things changed with the Justin Lin era, starting with 2009’s Fast & Furious, which played it kinda close to the vest on the CG until it rolled a flaming gas truck over some cars. Fast Five and The Giant Safe that did things that are impossible in real life. Fast & Furious 6 went all the way down the CG rabbit hole. Furious 7 chased. Rinse, repeat.

As the F&F8 train smashed into theaters in the summer of 2017, David Leitch was going over the top with Atomic Blonde before taking over the Deadpool franchise from Tim Miller (whose Terminator reboot is due later this year) on his way to this spin-off from the F&F franchise, which leans heavily on Deadpool 2 as Leitch and Drew Pearce and Dwayne Johnson seem to want to lean into the silly, edgy, more R-rated tone, while being checked by F&F veteran writer Chris Morgan.

I think it worked.

There is too much movie here. No question. Two hours and fifteen minutes is just unnecessary. At some point, it all gets a bit blurry and repetitive.

But don’t touch the 7 or 8 minutes of cameos, please. They are silly and fun and smart.

There is a bit of the F&F problem of stunts in cities getting so elaborate that the reality that they are taking place in a real city gets lost. Guys like Dick Donner used to fix this kind of problem with recurring street characters who seemed meaningless until we saw them the third time when something crazy was going on. The intensity was heightened by them as much as by the stunts.

Some of the clearly CGed stunt effects with Idris Elba, however, are magnificent and better than we have ever seen before… however unrealistic.

This is a giant, dark cartoon. It’s a boy movie with two differently attractive men and a hot blonde and a superhero villain that almost out-watts them all combined. The stunts are huge. These four characters are compelling. But the story really, really tries to be complex enough to put us to sleep in between.

The storyline has a virus that will end all life on earth… but this line seems almost boring in context. Why not ramp it up a bit? Personally, I am sick to death of “we can save the world if only we kill most of the population.” This has become the Nazi-fighting of this decade of action filmmaking. Yawn!

There is the classic role of The Professor, here handled by Eddie Marsan, but somehow, he doesn’t get to chew the scenery enough. He seems realistic in this story of insane size. Marsan can rip up some scenery. Give the man a giant kink. Give him another layer of conscience. Something! Make it happen!

Leitch and Company don’t quite trust the “no guns… all family” bit when they end up in Samoa. And that’s a shame. There’s only so long you can sustain bat-to-bat combat, but it is the kind of compelling idea that makes movies great. In years past, Mama would be hitting someone in the head with a pot lid before going back to stirring her stew. And that would be a bit gross in 2019, yes. But instead of just avoiding it, find a modern-thinking alternative. Use the old racist tendencies against the new bad guys.

But I didn’t sit at the keypad to rip this movie. The stars are always fun to watch and they are fun together. Elba gets all serious when he is being reloaded with power, but most of the time, he is the Coyote to their Roadrunner… oh so close, but never quite close enough and he doesn’t go campy with it, but has some fun (which we share). Vanessa Kirby is attractive and believable kicking ass and outthinking her male counterparts, though she, like Marsan, could have used a few more colors.

I enjoyed the fights. I enjoyed the broken glass. I was good with the car stunts. And helicopter stunts.

And mostly, I enjoyed the tone. There was an element of the spoofs of Bond, like In Like Flint, but done with the highest end stunts and explosions. Great. If you had teamed James Coburn with Charles Bronson way back when, this would have been the kind of movie you might get.

But it would be 100 minutes long.

And it would have been great fun… but not as great as this movie almost is.

It’s the second-best action movie of the summer, after Spider-Man: Far From Home. And what keeps it from being an instant classic for which we would clamor for a half-dozen sequels instantly is that it won’t let the motor completely loose. Men in Black International and Godzilla: King of The Monsters and, in an odd way, The Lion King all suffered from the same problem. The pieces were there, but somehow, the will to rebirth was restrained.

Ya gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelet. And while the CG spends get bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s time for studios to wake up and realize that it was never the CG we showed up to watch. It’s a great addition. And in the case of comic book movies, the CG was required to make the unreality of comics come to life so we lose our resistance to looking at what is clearly impossible. But it is a tool used in the kitchen, not the meal.

What is frustrating about Calvin & Hobbs or whatever it’s called (what a horrible, unmemorable title) is that they seemed to get the joke. Big time. The 30 minutes of loosey-goosey silly joyous macho gay-subtext sexually frustrated madness was exactly what I wanted it to be (well… “exactly” is perhaps too much). But they (the collective filmmaking “they”) get the joke. But then they go back to the same old stuff that made me see and forget the last few F&F entries.

I liked. I want to love. And unrequited love is a sad thing.

29 Comments »

The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon