Life’s tough for a pop culture aficionado. You can’t keep up with everything, and sometimes the buzziest properties aren’t available to you. I’m speaking specifically about HBO, home to a good many quality programs, which until recently I had no access to. The only series I’ve actually watched live on TV in the past three years is Season Five of Breaking Bad; otherwise there’s always plenty to catch up with on DVD or streaming.
But then — along comes a pop culture event so momentous that if you’re not in on it, you’re out in the socially irrelevant cold. And once you’re out, it can be very difficult to find your way back in again. Continue reading →
There are numerous reasons to lament the way cinema is heading — inflated ticket prices, needless 3D, the death of film projection, all leading to all sorts of problems that affect the quality of Hollywood’s output.
But let’s put that aside for now and focus on the positive changes. One of the great advantages of the advent of streaming video is that it makes small, little-seen movies as readily available as blockbusters. There are many films I would likely never have gotten around to if doing so weren’t so simple as clicking a button — The Arbor and Poetry are prime examples. These are the movies that benefit from being available when you’re “in the mood” for a rambling Korean film about an old woman taking poetry classes, or a pseudo-documentary about a foul-mouthed playwright. (Which, admittedly, is not always.) It’s less of an investment to begin a film with the option of turning it off and selecting another if it doesn’t captivate you. (Though I dislike this practice as a rule; many great films aren’t so obviously great within the first five minutes.)