Rant Alert: Movie Rental Industry 4 Years On

So four years ago I wrote this blog post.  For those of you who weren't aware, I work in the movie rental industry.  An industry that has supposedly been dying for the past 10 years.  I have decided on this four year anniversary to take a look at the state of affairs in the Australia rental industry.

As it stands currently, the physical rental industry is on its way to an ice age, one that will see the physical rental stores dissipate and be replaced by the ever evolving move to on-demand or streaming services.

As with any ice age though, the change is not immediate, and will see a number of years of transitional weather as the industry comes to terms with exactly what it is going to do.

In Australia DVD rental is still a popular form of entertainment, and for many, it is still the only way to get access to the latest movies to watch in the comfort of your own home. 

Why?

Well, despite the many options for streaming or on-demand movie rentals available, the majority of new technologies rely on the internet. A technology in which Australia currently ranks number 40 in the world, even Israel, Bulgaria and South Korea have internet access almost 10 times faster than our average!

Ah, but the NBN I hear you say!  Despite having commenced or completed NBN access to almost 1 million premises as of this year, Australia was one of only 3 countries to register a decline in national broadband speed averages. (A decline of 13% no less!!) 38 percent of Australians have internet access at or above 4Mb/s, whilst a paltry 4.1 per cent have speeds 10.1Mb/s or higher.  Compare that to South Korea (Number 1 on the list) with 86% coverage at speeds over 14.1Mb/s

In movie terms, it would take the average Australian over an hour to download a standard definition movie from iTunes.  Not exactly “on demand”.

The other hindrance to the take up of online services is their very nature.  Most of the popular web based rental services are subscription, meaning you must sign up to each of them individually and in some cases pay a monthly subscription fee in order to rent titles.  There is not a single service that offers movies from all studios and distributors as each movie studio generally wants to control its own content and will not license it to other vendors.  As a result, most services offer a restricted selection of new release or back catalog titles and while this may change, presently the easiest way to get access to the largest selection is still on physical DVD.

Pay TV is in a similar situation, with monthly subscriptions as well as “on demand” rentals at a fixed cost.

As with my previous post. there is still the argument for quality.  With flat panels getting bigger every day and projectors becoming more common place in homes the compression used by most online services will become more and more obvious. In the U.S services like Netflix are offering HD streaming, but it is still a paltry 10-12Mbp/s vs Blu-ray's upwards of 32Mbp/s

So as it stands, 4 years after the so-called death of physical media, DVD is still by far the winner in the home media format front.  Blu-ray a close second and streaming media still bringing up the rear!

It will be interesting to see how things play out in another 4 years time!

The Call (2013)

Jordan (Halle Berry) is a 911 call centre operator, she is very good at her job, gets along with her peers and is dating a local police officer.  She takes a 911 call from a young girl whose house is currently being broken in to, after telling the girl to find a room, lock herself in it and hide, the call drops out. This is when Jordan makes a grave mistake, she hits re-dial and phones the girl back, this gives the intruder the girls location and costs her her life.

Flash forward 6 months and Jordon is no longer an operator, but a teacher of want to be call centre operators.  That is of course, until a call comes through from Casey Welson (Abigail Breslin) who has just been abducted and has managed to call 911 from the boot of the car she is trapped in!  The film actually has some genuinely tense moments during this race against the clock as the police frantically try and track down the car, but alas the tension is short lived and the film takes a harsh nose dive into the pit of stupidity and absurdity.

Clearly not content with continuing the downward spiral of her own career, Halle Berry has decided to try and take a piece of Hollywood's youth with her....Oh to have been a fly on the wall when Abigail Breslin's manager called to tell her of an awesome project he thinks she should do! To her credit, director Brad Anderson has done some fairly decent work over the years with films like The Machinist, Transiberian and Session 9, not to mention his many TV works, but here we are presented with the bulk standard cliche serial killer thriller.  A movie that you will be spending far too much time yelling at the stupidity of the characters on screen than actually caring about them. And one for which Halle Berry must exude every facial expression in her repertoire in reaction to events unfolding countless miles from her location and via telephone hook up!

On the whole, the film is not awful, it is just exactly what you would expect it to be.  Speaking of which, I would normally provide a trailer for the film reviewed at the bottom of this post, however the trailer for the call takes the unusual step of presenting you with the entire plot of the film, ending and all.  So if you did have any thought of seeing the film, don't watch the trailer, however if you are a busy person with nary 94 minutes free in your life, you could always just watch the trailer and be content that is it possibly the most tense 2 and half minute film you will see in a while!

Spring Breakers (2012)

Spring Break in the United States is probably the closest real life equivalent to the adage Sex, Drugs and Rock N Roll you could get!  Here in Australia the closest thing would be schoolies week up on the Gold Coast, either way, it is not a culture that this reviewer understands in the least.

The opening of Spring Breakers is basically a 10 minute segment lifted from the deplorable Girls Gone Wild Series before introducing us to what will be the main plot.  That is, we meet four childhood friends, Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine), who are desperate to go to spring break and escape the mundane routine of their lives, so desperate in fact that they are willing to do just about anything to get there!  This includes three of the girls holding up an all night diner and robbing its patrons.

Once they get to Florida they partake in many of the expected Spring Break traditions before things soon take a turn for the worse and the girls wind up getting arrested and put in jail.  Soon after their court appearance one of the local drug bosses, Alien (James Franco) bails them out.

His motives are a little unclear at first, but after a quick visit to a strip club, they soon learn that Alien is one of two main players in town, his ex-best friend Big Arch (Gucci Mane) being the other.  They are soon caught in the middle of a drug war and things are quickly spiraling out of control.

I was not really sure what to make of this film whilst I was watching it, I am still not sure what to think writing this now, it is quite honestly unlike anything I have really seen before and is definitely not the sexy no brain comedy that some of the promotional material makes it out to be.  Yes, the girls spend almost the entire duration of the film in bikinis, yes there is plenty of sex and drugs, but it was more uncomfortable than it was titillating or enticing.

Artistically it looks fantastic, but then I would have expected nothing less given the cinematography is by Benoit Debie who has amazing visual presence in all of the films he has worked on.  The score is by Cliff Martinez and Skrillex, so bascially the score to Traffic being remixed into Dubstep.  The film barely takes a breath as far as the soundtrack is concerned with music basically under every scene.

The performances from the cast are great, of course much has been made of the two former Disney girls taking on these more adult roles, but they perform very well in their character shoes (They have little else to perform in...).  James Franco steals the show however, in an almost unrecognizable role as Alien, proving yet again that he is certainly one of the most versatile actors currently working in the industry!

On the whole the experience was certainly different, and whilst I wouldn't say I enjoyed myself, I was at least entertained and certainly intrigued by almost every aspect of this film!

Film Central

Well, as most people have probably noticed, the blog has been a little unattended lately.  Hopefully all of that is about the change as I will be forced to write reviews for the features I see.  I am joining the ranks of Film Central, a weekly community radio show dedicated to film.  Whilst I have been co-hosting the show for a while, I am now going full time every week for 2 hours discussing all of the latest releases in cinemas and on DVD or Blu-ray.  I will be posting my reviews to this blog as well as maintaining the Film Central Facebook page.  (Feel free to like it, but don't feel obligated ;) )

I will also work on podcasting the show, but there are a few rights issues to work out, so once that is all sorted hopefully you will be able to listen retrospectively!

Firefly Steelbook

This is the JB HIFI Exclusive Australian steelbook release of Firefly on Blu-ray:

Return to Nim's Island (2013)

Directed By Brendan Maher (Spooks, SeaChange, Farscape)

Return to Nim's Island is based loosely on the second Wendy Orr novel Nim at Sea.

It stars Bindi Irwin in the role previously inhabited by Abigail Breslin and possibly one of the weirdest recasts known to man where Matthew Lillard takes the reigns off of Gerard Butler.

The film is easy going enough and sees Nim trying to protect her island from both the Buckaneer Cruise Company who have recently purchased the island to turn it into a resort and from a bunch of lowly poachers intent on stealing some of the islands rare wildlife, including Nim’s best friend Selkie the Seal Lion.

The film does centre around an environmental message, but it was not as in your face as might have been expected and tied in quite nicely to the overall plot and character development. Bindi Irwin has clearly found the perfect platform to get her conservation message to a wider audience and at the same time do it in an entertaining way.

On the whole Return to Nim’s Island is a light bit of family entertainment with a well meaning message and enough toilet humour to keep the kids entertained during the school holidays.

Here be updates...

Here are a number of my Blu-ray collection additions over the last month or so...

Brave Futureshop Exclusive Viva MetalPak

Finding Nemo Futureshop Exclusive Viva MetalPak

Resident Evil: Extinction (not even sure where this hails from?)

Rashomon Criterion Collection

The Lady Vanishes Criterion Collection

Rosetta Criterion Collection

It has been a rather quiet year thus far....

Playing with Cinemagraph

I recently upgraded my phone to the Nokia Lumia 920, a fantastic piece of technology!

Anyhow, whilst playing with features etc I came across the cinemagraph feature that lets you take gif images directly from the phone... here are a few samples of photos I have taken thus far: (More after the break!)