Hunting for something good to watch.

Anyone who’s been visiting this site for a while probably knows that I’m a Luddite. I’m inclined to think that the Internet was a wrong turn, and I’m convinced social media has been a disaster. Despite still reviewing new books regularly, I don’t have an e-reader and I only buy “real” books, which not only furnish a room but fill up an entire house.

When it comes to movies I’m the same way. I watch movies on DVD. Not Blu-Ray, but DVD. And I’ve never signed up with any of the streaming platforms.

But streaming is, clearly, the way studios want to go. They’ve given up on cinemas, are grudging about DVD releases, and want to shepherd as many viewers as possible into their proprietary pens, paying monthly fees. This has led to some curious results. Like, for example, how expensive DVDs have become. I would have thought that as they became out of date they would fall in price because nobody wanted them, but instead I find most titles on Amazon (the store, not the streaming platform) now running anywhere from two to five times as much as they cost five or ten years ago. Is it because they aren’t making them anymore? Luckily, I already have a pretty good collection and get almost all the new DVDs I watch from the library. I think I’ve only bought a couple in the last few years.

But another result of the studios switching to streaming is that some movies, including major releases, aren’t coming out on DVD at all, so that I can’t see them. I’ll just take two examples from last year: Prey (a.k.a. Predator 5) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Both of these were what I would consider to be big titles: one the well-received latest instalment in a popular action franchise and the other a sequel to a popular star-studded hit from a few years earlier. I would like to see both, but still haven’t seen either because they haven’t been released on DVD and I’m not sure if they ever will be. Prey was released on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. Glass Onion was a Netflix original. These companies want subscribers, they don’t want you buying DVDs. The latter is a market, and a technology, they’ve declared war on.

I don’t know how this will play out for future audiences. Effectively everything is turning into pay-per-view, and I’m not going to go there. But then I’m getting older, and I’m comfortable with what I have. There are more books and movies in my house than I’ll ever be able to re-read and re-watch. As for the new stuff, well: I didn’t give up on movies, they gave up on me.

Update, January 3 2023:

Prey finally did come out on DVD over a year later. I reviewed it here.

Nice place for a shootout.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching several of the more prominent Hollywood versions of the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral. A couple of these, My Darling Clementine (1946) and Tombstone (1993) are classic Westerns. Wyatt Earp (1994), on the other hand, tries harder to be a classic and I think largely because of that fails.

Stellan Skarsgård working overtime.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been looking at the two attempts made at an Exorcist prequel: Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning. What a two-car pile-up. Schrader was first man up, but the studio hated what he did and told Harlin to fix it. He ended up making an entirely new movie, which the studio didn’t like any better so they got Schrader to rejig his version.

It’s interesting to look at the two movies side by side just to see what two very different directors did with the same basic material. Both movies are terrible, but I can’t think of any other examples of something like this happening.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve posted yet another of my year-end round-ups of what I thought were the best (and worst) new movies I saw this year. Kind of a pointless exercise given what I watched in 2022, but it’s become a tradition so . . .

Taking aim.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve just posted my 200th movie image quiz. It’s a follow-up to my 100th quiz and has lots of pictures of people pointing guns at you. Get down! Find cover!

To date, none of the quizzes has been completed, so there’s still lots of work in the archives to do if you want to test yourself. I’ll be taking a break from posting quizzes so this is all there’s going to be for a while.

Can’t remember this guy’s name. He’s a talking raccoon.

I grew up on Marvel comics, and still have some old favourites stored in my basement. I don’t think they’re worth anything though because they’re not in the best of shape. But despite this background, I was never a huge fan of the way Marvel/Disney took over the movie business in the twenty-first century.

It’s hard to overstate just how central these movies have been. Their box office success ensured countless imitators, and the Marvel style became ubiquitous. What this meant, primarily, was: (1) the creation of a totally plastic, CGI “virtual” reality, making nearly every blockbuster movie over into a cartoon and every action star a superhero, and (2) the evolution of franchise filmmaking into various “universes,” given over to an even more assembly-line serial format. This latter development would, in turn, help with the transition away from cinemas to streaming platforms in need of a constant supply of new content. The comic-book form was particularly well-adapted to all of these developments, something the triumph of Marvel clearly underlined.

Meanwhile, the Marvel formula in terms of writing didn’t change much. Scruffy, ordinary-guy heroes with self-deprecating senses of humour and bulging biceps save the universe from supervillains intent on world domination (or world destruction). Lots of A-list talent. Lots of big action. Lots of CGI.

Some of the movies were entertaining, but the formula started to feel played out by the end of the 2010s. This is something I think everyone was aware of. Spinning off into the multi- or metaverse was one attempt at trying to make things new, and it worked to some extent. But my bottom line is that I really don’t want to see any of these movies, even the best of them, again, and I’ve already forgotten some of them completely. I was surprised, when compiling this list, to see that I’d reviewed Ant-Man and the Wasp. What had that been about? I have no idea now.

In any event, here’s the line-up of the Marvel movies (not all of them MCU) that I’ve written notes on over at Alex on Film. I’ll keep this index current with new postings, but I think it’s going to be slow on the Marvel front from here on out.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
The Avengers (2012)
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Ant-Man (2015)
Fantastic Four (2015)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Deadpool (2016)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Black Panther (2018)
Deadpool 2 (2018)
Venom (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Black Widow (2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Venom: Let There be Carnage (2021)
Eternals (2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Morbius (2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Thunderbolts* (2025)

Been there.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching some film adaptations of the work of Anton Chekhov. He’s not a writer who gets the big-screen treatment very often, at least in English-language productions. And the films that have been made tend to be very stagey. Still, they each have their strengths.

Uncle Vanya (1957)
The Cherry Orchard (1962)
Three Sisters (1970)
Three Sisters (1970 BBC)
Uncle Vanya (1970 BBC)
Uncle Vanya (1970 Mosfilm)
The Seagull (1978)
The Cherry Orchard (1981)
Uncle Vanya (1991)
Days and Nights (2013)
The Seagull (2018)
Drive My Car (2021)

Taking a really big bite out of Mother Earth.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve posted my thoughts on the Edward Burtynsky film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Well worth seeing, with stunning visuals carrying an important message. One of the many showstoppers was seeing a ginormous bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) operating in an open-pit mine in Germany. If this is the Bagger 493, which is used at this mine, then it’s the largest BWE ever made, and the heaviest terrestrial vehicle according to Guinness.

Impressive, but depressing too when you think of its job.