[FairfieldLife] How do you manage your film habit?
I'm using too much time to manage my film addiction. I watch a lot of films, but I'm spending a lot of time just doing the research to know what to watch next. I'm hoping someone here has a better system than me. I have a Netflix account, Charter Comm's premium and HD channels. Every day, I scan the next 24 hours of cable-channel films looking for anything new and then setting up my DVR to record. That's hundreds of titles must be scanned, and there's about a 30% repeat dynamic, so my eyes have to see, say, the title Monkeybone five times in the day's scheduling, and I hated that film so much that it's a drag to have to have it -- even that briefly -- be brought to my attention. That's five times I have to be reminded of two hours of my life having been utterly wasted. I consult RottonTomatoes.com for all the new stuff coming out on DVD and theaters. And, best I can do most days is 1. find a film that I haven't seen in a while and bear another viewing, 2. get lucky with a new DVD release coming out for a major film -- one so hot I have to rent it from a local video store NOW NOW NOW! 3. find an oldie at Netflix that I've somehow missed 4. have a new release that simply must be seen now even though it means going out to a theater. I see about 10 - 15 films a week at home, but it takes something special to get me into a theater -- I have a 52 flat screen with a nice sound system, so I'm in heaven, but I do see the thrillers on IMAX -- the latest Batman was mind blowing. My problem is that it is such a time-consuming and boring chore to do all the research necessary to keep on top of media offers. Scanning ahead costs me about 20 minutes of very dull work -- basically I'm seeing the titles of films and have to have them all memorized like flash cards so that I don't have to click on them to get a plot summary. When I see a title that I don't recognize -- yay! -- but more often than not I see a title that I'm fuzzy about and have to click on -- only to find that this is a film I have decided never to see (or see again) but had not memorized the title well enough yet to avoid the clicking. This is a serious drag. Netflix's recommendation engine fails me in that its reviews are all bias and try to make the film sound much better than it is -- trying to get me to rent the thing, see? So that sucks. And, of course, anything hot will be on a long waiting list. RottonTomatoes.com is very helpful, but this is another 20 - 120 mins per week to scan the new stuff coming out and picking which reviews to read. There's so much dross out there that takes up my head-space -- for every film I really want to see, there's 20 others recently released that require me to have to comb through them enough to rate them as viewable or not. Help! Is there a system that doesn't cost so much time used in reconnoitering? Edg
Re: [FairfieldLife] How do you manage your film habit?
(Too long a post follows) I watch quite a few movies a week too but most are from the local Hollywood Video store which fortunately is one that generates revenue so is still in business. Compared to Blockbuster, HV tends to get more second tier films, i.e. foreign and independent. I have a flat rate subscription there. I can rent two DVDs or Blu-Rays at a time. I could even just take those home, watch them and return them and get a couple more in the same day. My preference is to rent on Blu-Ray but only limited titles are available. Some of those being for the national stupid I have no interest in. If HD-DVD would have been the winner there would be two to three times as many titles available because it was cheaper and easier to get titles into production on that platform than on Blu-Ray. However I only make two runs to the video rental place a week. The rest of the week can be filled watching some of the few TV shows in HD I watch: BSG, Heroes, 24, Supernatural, Damages, US of Tara, CSI, Burn Notice, etc. I'm sure some folks have some favorites that they think I'm missing but I'm pretty particular. And the titles I mentioned are ones currently playing so there IS a larger list. 24? Well, it's like going to a film classs and having a professor ask the class what was wrong with the scene he just played. Very badly written and almost hilarious. I was an early Netflix user but then the local mom and pops (now gone) started renting DVDs and I like to pick out something I feel in the mood for rather than something that Netflix can send me. So I haven't used them in years. I stay pretty much on top of what is going on in film. I am on the www.avsforum.com and watch the Blu-Ray release section as well as the discussion section for films in theaters. I have a nice 8 screen digital theater a few blocks away. It mainly plays big titles but I go see some of those. I also have a Cinemark Cinearts theater about 8 miles away with 5 screens including a big dome screen that plays all indies and foreign films. And they have $6 Mondays for us old fogies. If I want to watch the latest rage on Indian DVD I rent from the local Indian grocery. I kind of have a rule not to watch anymore than 2 to 3 hours a night of TV. So I have to be selective. There is a lot of trash being produced these days due to the writers strike which set some projects behind and now the economic crunch where producers are having a hard time finding financing for films. Then we have the studios making producers of horror, sci-fi, thrillers and action films (my favorites) be PG-13 rated for a broader audience though the story lines could have used an R rated treatment. Usually the latter means of little interest to people under 17 instead of just nudity and violence. IOW a story done in an adult treatment. There have been remakes of Asian films such as Bangkok Dangerous which were originally R but redone as PG-13 and lose something in the process (the Pang Brothers even did both versions). A bitch I have is that the bigger rental places having driven out the mom and pops don't have many of the old releases. For instance after renting Death Race I wanted to watch the original. IMDB said that it was released on DVD in 2005 in a special edition on an anamorphic DVD. Very difficult to find and none of the chain rentals have it in their older libraries. A friend who used to have a mom and pop got all kinds of titles including importing ones from Mexico and South America. There were some real gems there. He would have had that title. I am a big fan of 1970's movies because they are so honestly done that it is almost the most recent golden era of film because filmmakers were breaking away from the studio scene and making movies elsewhere including Seattle where I made the acquaintance of James Caan and Mark Rydell at the cast party which my group played for the film Cinderella Liberty. I have in my DVD collection that film which was released little while back on DVD. What we need is full blown VOD where anyone with content they want to rent can make it available that way. For small studios or DVD companies they often will do a run say of 10,000 copies and when those are gone there's no more unless it makes sense for them to release it again. Then you have to go the Barry route if you dare here in MPAA ruled USA. Frankly if you called one of those small companies inquiring about a copy of some film they released years ago they might even tell you to go ahead an download it as a torrent since it makes no business sense for them to re-release it. It would if it was cheap and easy for them to make it available VOD that would solve the problem. Comcast has some oldies in HD on their free OnDemand. I watched the first Mad Max film which few Americans have seen on the Impact section which has a some older films. My problem with the network
