Features

Over the past few months, Netflix has served as a paradigmatic case study in hapless corporate mismanagement. Between sudden price hikes, ill-conceived ideas (seriously, Qwikster?), and smarmy emails, no company has done more to alienate its customer base and squander an otherwise highly successful product. (You know, besides the NBA.) This is not, however, a post designed to excoriate Netflix. Rather, I’m extolling the service for its most valuable commodity: streaming TV series.

Look, streaming is the future. I confess that I maintain some elitist qualms regarding Netflix’s streaming service – the selection is pitiful, the audio/video quality is weaker compared to DVD (and dramatically pales versus Blu-ray), certain features such as subtitles are unavailable, the in-movie interface is pathetic – but for the most part, streaming gets the job done. That’s especially true in the Twitter-based Age of Instantania, where all we care about is doing whatever we want at the exact instant we want to do it. (That Twitter is gradually eroding the hallowed industry of journalism into a disgraceful, speed-obsessed circus is also a post for another day.) When people feel like watching something, whether it’s the latest Twilight movie or a classic episode of “Seinfeld”, they do not want to wait three days for the fucking disc to arrive in the mail – they want to watch it right away. Streaming is the future, and Netflix (and every other company of its ilk) knows it. Read More

I call it “December Syndrome”. It’s the strategy whereby movie studios, believing that Oscar voters have short memories, wait to release their best films until as late in the year as possible. Case in point: Of the 10 Best Picture nominees in 2010, four arrived in theatres in December, while only one (Toy Story 3) was available to the public at large prior to July. Similarly, of the past 14 Best Picture winners, eight were released in December, while only two (Gladiator and Crash) came out in the first half of the year.

It’s hard to blame studios for sticking with a pattern that works, and as long as voters keep paying homage to movies released late in the season, the months of October through December will continue to constitute a glut of cinematic glory. But the unfortunate byproduct of December Syndrome is that it turns the multiplex into a veritable wasteland for the first half of the year. If you crave high-quality entertainment prior to the summer solstice, you’d better be prepared to burrow into your Netflix account. Read More

I am not a music snob. I feel it’s important to declare this upfront, as the forthcoming list has the potential to brand me as a hipster indie fan who loathes mainstream pop artists because their music is too inclusive and caters to the low-brow cravings of the slovenly masses. And that honestly isn’t the case. My problem with modern music isn’t one of elitism but awareness. Following the Manifesto’s prior music post, my friend Chuck pointed out that my taste “rarely weaves outside of indie pop/rock,” and that’s typically true, but it isn’t because I don’t like mainstream music – it’s because I’ve usually just never heard it.

See, with movies, I watch so many that I’m generally able to maintain a comprehensive overview of the current state of cinema. Sure, I’m a bit lacking on the foreign film market, and there will always be a handful of obscure low-profile releases that evade my eye, but watching over 100 new releases per year grants me a reasonably informed perspective of the world of film. But with music, the market is so heavily saturated – literally dozens of new albums are released for public consumption every week – that I just don’t have the ability to keep up. (Life as a law student doesn’t help.) Furthermore, the two music websites I peruse regularly – the supremely arrogant Pitchfork Media and the only-marginally more welcoming Onion A.V. Club – tend to employ tunnel vision in championing burgeoning, underground artists at the expense of the Top 40. And while I frequently receive recommendations from my friends Brian and Maloney – both of whom are far more knowledgeable about music than I – their tastes, while not entirely insular, nevertheless tend to be indie-focused. Read More

A few months ago, my friend Brent sent me the following email: “Is Robin Hood worth watching for a guy who doesn’t go to many movies?” It was his last phrase that forced me to remind myself of a simple fact: Not everyone is obsessed with movies. Not everyone sees over 100 movies per year. Not everyone considers movies to be among the five most important things in his life, along with his family, his softball team, his PlayStation 3, and Kyle Singler.

So when people ask me whether or not I recommend a certain film, I need to recognize that many people demand excellence from movies in a way that I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I have high standards for movies – it’s just that, because they’re my preferred method of existence, I can feel satisfied after watching a perfectly decent one as opposed to a truly great one. But if I’m going to recommend a film to someone like Brent – someone who simply doesn’t watch that many movies – then it needs to pass a certain threshold. Read More

When we were growing up, my sister refused to watch foreign movies. I can’t recall her precise rationale for this, although given how childish we both were at the time, I’m not sure our reasoning processes could have been deemed to have anything resembling a “rationale”. I think she complained about having to read the subtitles, which didn’t make much sense given that she was perfectly literate. Regardless, whenever my father suggested watching a foreign movie, he was met with extreme disdain, not to mention occasional wailing.

Nowadays, armed with the power of a Netflix account, my sister probably watches 5-6 foreign movies each month. This victory over her earlier cinematic xenophobia can largely be attributed simply to growing up, but I’ll tentatively argue that it’s symptomatic of our country’s maturation toward foreign movies as a whole. Over the past decade, films like Amelie, City of God, and Pan’s Labyrinth have gained prominence not just abroad but within American cultural circles (all three earned major nominations at the Oscars, not just for Best Foreign Language Film). As a national collective, our moviegoing tastes have ever-so-gradually expanded, and subtitled pictures lack the stigma they once possessed. Read More