Video-rental giant Netflix last week announced a two-year licensing deal with CBS that will make a host of recent and ancient series — including such CBS-distributed series as "Twin Peaks," which aired on ABC, and "Cheers" and "Star Trek," from NBC — available to stream. It joins Amazon.com, now offering "unlimited instant videos" to its Prime members (who pay a premium for free, faster shipping of solid objects) and Hulu's Hulu Plus, which makes available scores of current and back-catalog series from part-owners NBC, ABC and Fox, among others, in a brewing war of video subscription services.
The difference between a subscription service and the already well-established online shopping-cart model, where you buy or rent individual episodes of a TV series or movie instead of purchasing the DVD that contains them, is that the latter is a purchase that requires you to decide, in every instance, whether to put your money down, while the former buys you a general right to root around in the attic. Like cable television, such services, for which you pay at remote intervals, can create the illusion of costing nothing — and, indeed, that is no more than you would want to pay for much of what they currently offer. But these are early days.
In a way, this is just the latest chapter in a story that begins with the coming of television itself, when recycled theatrical features made their way onto the small screen, earning Universal Pictures money it never thought it'd squeeze again out of "Francis the Talking Mule" pictures, and keeping Humphrey Bogart and Busby Berkeley alive through the generations. Later, when cable crept in, the substance of broadcast TV was in turn repurposed and recontextualized, packaged with postmodern irony by the likes of Cartoon Network and TV Land, or aggregated according to theme into channels dedicated to mysteries, soap operas and game shows.
Consumer storage technologies such as record players and VCRs made what had been ephemeral arts — music, made of air, movies, made of light — into actual possessions. I come from a time when books and records and videos were valued as objects, as the bits and pieces out of which one constructed a private and even public self. But that wheel is turning again, back toward the insubstantial: Objects matter less now than information does, whether that information consists of an encyclopedia entry, a song, a movie, a television show or a photograph. What the Age of the Cloud sells is not stuff but access — access and abundance.
I myself still like a good book-shaped book, and prefer music packaged even in plastic cases, and will not surrender my "Faerie Tale Theatre" DVDs, even though their content is available on Hulu Plus. And yet I do think that there is something about these services that seems existentially more honest, truer to the facts of impermanent life: You can't take it with you. There are still DVD sets I will want to own, but already I want to own fewer of them.
There is less psychic and practical responsibility in possessing the digital reduction of a book or CD or DVD than there is in owning the thing itself, which not only requires care in the present but disposition in the future to other temporary stewards. And there is even less in watching a television show beamed in from some server that will not even occupy space on your hard drive let alone your shelves, closets and garage. What you need to bring to this party, as choice multiplies upon choice, is discretion. You become not what you own but how you choose: You live in the moment, you are what you click.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Critic's Notebook: With everything available, what will you watch?
'Blade Runner' Sequels, Prequels & TV Series May be on the Way | CinemaSpy
Some might consider it sacrilegious — though probably not those inside Hollywood — but a sequel, or prequel, to Ridley Scott's classic 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner could be headed to a multiplex near you. Moreover, a television series could be on the way, too.
Say whaa…?Yep, you read that right.
Alcon Entertainment (The Book of Eli) has set in motion plans to develop a franchise based on the 1982 film and are in final negotiations to secure the rights for development as sequels, prequels, a television series…or all of the aforementioned. What they cannot do is reboot or remake the original film (we hear the collective sighs of relief even now).
Blade Runner, of course, is based on the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", and is considered, along with Ridley Scott's other sci-fi film Alien, one of the seminal science fiction films of all time.
Here's how the studio press release describes the situation:
Warner Bros-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment (“The Blind Side,” “The Book of Eli”) co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, in the most significant property acquisition negotiations in the Company’s 13-year history, are in final discussions to secure film, television and ancillary franchise rights to produce prequels and sequels to the iconic 1982 science-fiction thriller “Blade Runner.”
Alcon is negotiating to secure the rights from producer-director Bud Yorkin, who will serve as producer on “Blade Runner” along with Kosove and Johnson. Cynthia Sikes Yorkin will co-produce. Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble, CEO’s of Thunderbird Films, will serve as executive producers.
Alcon’s franchise rights would be all-inclusive, but exclude rights to remake the original. The Company, however, may produce projects based on situations introduced in the original film. The project would be distributed domestically by Warner Bros. International rights are yet to be determined.
Johnson and Kosove stated: “We are honored and excited to be in business with Bud Yorkin. This is a major acquisition for our company, and a personal favorite film for both of us. We recognize the responsibility we have to do justice to the memory of the original with any prequel or sequel we produce. We have long-term goals for the franchise, and are exploring multi-platform concepts, not just limiting ourselves to one medium only.”
It's at least somewhat relieving to hear Johnson and Kosove openly state that they "get" what a big responsibility this franchise is, and that they want to do justice to the original material.
It seems as though Ridley Scott's return to the Alien franchise has cast a spotlight on the filmmaker's early, seminal sci-fi projects, though this could all just be coincidence. At this point there's no discussion about Scott's possible involvement with any future Blade Runner iterations.
As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell
The DVD isn’t dead yet, but it’s definitely looking a little peaked, at least in the eyes of the home-video industry. Sales continue to decline (volume is down about 40 percent from this time last year for the Top 20 titles, according to Home Media Magazine), the formerly ubiquitous neighborhood rental shops have all but vanished (Blockbuster, once the dominant franchise, has plunged into bankruptcy), and the major studios have drastically cut back on full-scale releases of library titles.
The days of the digital versatile disc may well be coming to an end, at least in its established form as a factory pressed, attractively packaged object of mass consumption. But there are several new formats competing to replace it, each with benefits and drawbacks.
As in comedy, watching movies nowadays is all about the delivery.
Blu-ray discs, introduced in 2006, offer 5 to 10 times as much space for data storage as a standard-definition DVD. They have superior sound and image quality as well as a range of bells and whistles — from social networking interfaces to elaborate games — designed to make the experience of watching a movie more “active” for twitchy 21st-century audiences.
Blu-rays are essentially pumped-up DVDs. The so-called MOD discs (for “manufactured on demand”) are the familiar DVD’s slimmed down, small-scale cousins: burned on computers, rather than pressed on machines, produced in limited quantities with generic covers, and generally devoid of elaborate menus, supplementary material and much in the way of restoration work. As pioneered by the Warner Archive Collection, and now adapted by other programs like Sony’s Screen Classics by Request and MGM’s Limited Edition Collection, MODs allow niche marketing of movies that don’t have the wide commercial appeal of recent theatrical releases.
For those who find physical objects too much of a burden, there is the new world of direct electronic delivery. Cable systems were there first, with on-demand channels that offer access to recent films for charges ranging from $3 to $10, though the heat has now passed to the Internet-based on-demand streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus (Hulu’s new premium pay service), which offer all-you-can-eat buffets for monthly fees in the $8 to $10 range. Other Internet services — like Wal-Mart’s VUDU, Amazon Instant Video and Apple’s iTunes Store — offer individual titles for à la carte download at prices from 99 cents to $20.
For the casual consumer of moving images these developments in delivery systems promise to make life a bit easier, and maybe a bit cheaper: no more red envelopes to mail back, no more late fees and perhaps a wider selection of titles than your store had to offer.
But if your interests range beyond recent Hollywood releases — into, say, older, foreign or nonfiction films — the prospect of another change in format brings a mixed sense of hope and fear. Hope, to the degree that the new distribution strategies may make it economically feasible for a broader range of movies to enter the marketplace; fear, grounded in past experience that suggests format changes invariably leave legions of once widely available titles in limbo.
In the beginning there was 35-millimeter film, the international standard for theatrical exhibition. In the 1950s most big cities had art and revival cinemas (and over on the wrong side of the tracks, the more humble and aromatic institutions known as grind houses) that simply drew on the stock of old prints that the studios maintained. After that came 16-millimeter, the narrower, easier-to-handle gauge that brought old movies to television (for the all-night late shows that were the first cinémathèques many of us knew) and later fueled the college film societies of the ’60s and ’70s.
In the ’80s VHS tapes commodified the movie so that it became a clunky staple of the living room and den. VHS also created an entirely new market for distributors and soon drove second-run theaters, revival houses and the nontheatrical 16-millimeter scene into oblivion. Vast numbers of films, once commonly available, were lost in that transition, but VHS offered the compensating advantages of convenience and affordability.
Later in the decade laserdiscs emerged as the preferred medium of collectors, offering a sharper image and digital sound, as well as multiple audio tracks that could contain alternate language versions or filmmakers’ commentaries. But the double-sided 12-inch discs were bulky and expensive, and relatively few titles were remastered from VHS to take advantage of the laserdisc’s technical superiority.
When DVDs first became commercially available in 1997, they combined the best of both worlds, offering the cheapness and convenience of VHS and technical specs far beyond even what laserdisc had to offer. But the higher-resolution images and improved sound quality of DVDs meant that many older films would have to be remastered to be brought to market in the new format, an expensive proposition that resulted, once again, in the disappearance of many titles.
Blu-ray ups the ante again. With its dramatically higher resolution the format can reveal flaws in the source material that VHS and DVD obscured. Ideally, preparing a film for Blu-ray requires access to the 35-millimeter camera negative or an early generation print. Even then, extensive and expensive digital and photochemical restoration may be necessary to bring older titles up to snuff.
That’s more of an investment than most distributors are willing to make in library titles, which is why so few classics have made it to Blu-ray. (If you’re wondering why “Citizen Kane” still isn’t available in hi-def, it’s partly because the camera negative was destroyed in a vault fire in the 1950s.)
By contrast, streaming video seems like a return to the low-tech past. As Eric A. Taub reported on The New York Times’s Gadgetwise blog, the quality of Netflix’s streaming video seems roughly on a par with VHS: tolerable on a small computer screen but painfully inadequate on an HDTV. But for many consumers that seems to be enough. The company’s subscription base shot up after its chief executive, Reed Hastings, announced in November that Netflix was phasing out “physical product” and would be “primarily a streaming video company delivering a wide selection of TV shows and films over the Internet.”
But downshifting to the tech-specs of VHS has an upside too. Where it can cost up to $40,000 to prepare a new film for a Blu-ray release, a distributor can take an existing master and deliver it to a streaming site for no more than $600. Because of these favorable economics, some hard-to-find titles have started turning up on at Netflix, Hulu and other sites.
Netflix, for example, now offers an intriguing selection of films from Republic, United Artists and Paramount that have been hiding in the shadows for decades. But don’t expect miracles. It’s great to be able to see Nicholas Ray’s rare 1955 “Run for Cover,” but not so great to see its original widescreen VistaVision format whittled down to fit the television standards of 20 years ago.
The advent of streaming has spawned some premature optimism. “This instant, sitting right here,” Roger Ebert wrote in a Jan. 22 article in The Wall Street Journal, “I can choose to watch virtually any film you can think of via Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, MUBI, the Asia/Pacific Film Archive, Google or Vimeo.”
We can only hope that this vision will become a reality one day, but right now it seems distant.
If you are interested, say, in exploring the work of John Ford, you can currently find only about a dozen of his more than 50 surviving features on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video combined, all of them titles widely available since the VHS days. (One truly rare Ford film, the delightful 1917 comic western “Bucking Broadway,” can be seen free at the excellent site Europa Film Treasures, a cooperative project among several of Europe’s leading film archives.) A search for Ernst Lubitsch turns up six films from his 36-year career in Germany and America; of Jean-Luc Godard’s more than 90 features and shorts, 9 are available.
The good news in this context is that things can only get better, both in terms of technical quality and available content. Since I began writing the DVDs column for The Times in 2004, I’ve concentrated, not surprisingly, on new DVDs. Now the scope will expand to include these newer methods of delivery.
In the short term I expect to be covering many more of the MOD discs that have been arriving in encouraging quantities from Warner Brothers (the studio that has done the most to keep its library in wide circulation), Sony, MGM-Fox and other new players, and, in the long term, doing my best to nose out the interesting and unusual in the dizzyingly vast, largely uncharted territory of the new Internet repositories.
It’s an eye-wearying job, but I’m thrilled that I get to do it.
Chicago Cubs Blog - ESPN Chicago
MESA, Ariz. -- Talking about Alfonso Soriano's strong work ethic, his quick start at the plate this spring -- including going to the opposite field more often -- and his eagerness to improve, led to Cubs manager Mike Quade reminiscing Sunday about once coaching Soriano in outfield play.It was the spring of Soriano’s second season with the Cubs, and it didn’t end well.
“We decided we were going to do some wall work and I ran him into the damn thing and he hurt his wrist,” Quade said. “You’re a young outfield coach for Lou [Piniella] and you’re going, ‘Oh man, I’m looking for work.’ He might miss a week and I might miss the rest of the year or years.”
Quade disputed the notion that Soriano is tentative at the warning track, but not that the ability to play the wall is vital.
“There are so many games decided at the wall,” he said. “Almost every night in every ballpark. As I taught outfield for years, I was never that conscious of the wall . . . and then with the unique shallow gaps at Wrigley and then the big well, there’s a lot of challenges I don’t think Sori had experienced before. Not [while] playing second base, not playing short as a young kid. The work was good [for him]. It just got carried away and I ran him into the wall.”
Friday, March 4, 2011
Be sure to check out my food blog
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss. One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish,
Black fish, Blue fish, Old fish, New fish.
This one has a littlecar.
This one has a little star.
Say! What a lot of fish there are.
Yes. Some are red, and some are blue.
Some are old and some are new.
Some are sad, and some are glad,
And some are very, very bad.
Why are they sad and glad and bad?
I do not know, go ask your dad.
Some are thin, and some are fat.
The fat one has a yellow hat.
From there to here,
From here to there,
Funny things are everywhere.
Here are some who like to run.
They run for fun in the hot, hot sun.
Oh me! Oh my! Oh me! oh my!
What a lot of funny things go by.
Some have two feet and some have four.
Some have six feet and some have more.
Where do they come from? I can't say.
But I bet they have come a long, long way.
we see them come, we see them go.
Some are fast. Some are slow.
Some are high. Some are low.
Not one of them is like another.
Don't ask us why, go ask your mother.Say! Look at his fingers!
One, two, three...
How many fingers do I see?
One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
He has eleven!
Eleven! This is something new.
I wish I had eleven too!Bump! Bump! Bump!
Did you ever ride a Wump?
We have a Wump with just one hump.
But we know a man called Mr. Gump.
Mr. gump has a seven hump Wump. So...
If you like to go Bump! Bump!
Just jump on the hump of the Wump of GumpWho am I? My name is Ned
I do not like my little bed.
This is no good. This is not right.
My feet stick out of bed all night.
And when I pull them in, Oh, Dear!
My head sticks out of bed up here!We like our bike. It is made for three.
Our Mike sits up in back, you see.
We like our Mike, and this is why:
Mike does all the work when the hills get high.Hello there, Ned. How do you do?
Tell me, tell me what is new?
How are things in your little bed?
What is new? Please tell me Ned.
I do not like this bed at all.
a lot of things have come to call.
A cow, a dog, a cat, a mouse.
Oh! What a bed! Oh! What a house!Oh dear, oh dear! I cannot hear.
Will you please come over near?
Will you please look in my ear?
There must be something there, I fear.
Say look! A bird was in your ear.
But he is out. So have no fear.
Again your ear can hear, my dear.My hat is old, my teeth are gold.
I have a bird I like to hold.
My shoe is off, my foot is cold.
My shoe is off, my foot is cold.
I have a bird I like to hold.
My hat is old, my teeth are gold.
And now my story is all told.We took a look. We saw a Nook.
On his head he had a hook.
On his hook he had a book.
On his book was "How to Cook"
We saw him sit and try to cook
But a Nook can't read, so a Nook can't Cook.
SO...
What good to a Nook is a hook cook book?the moon was out and we saw some sheep.
We saw some sheep take a walk in their sleep.
by the light of the moon, by the light of a star;
They walked all night from near to far.
I would never walk. I would take a car.I do not like this one so well.
all he does is yell, yell, yell.
I will not have this one about.
When he comes in I put him out.
This one is quiet as a mouse.
I like to have him in the house.At our house we open cans.
We have to open many cans.
and that is why we have a Zans.
A Zans for cans is very good.
Have you a Zans for cans? You should.I like to box. How I like to box.
So every day I box a Gox.
In yellow socks I box my Gox.
I box in yellow Gox box socks.It is fun to sing if you sing with a Ying.
My Ying can sing like anything.
I sing high and my Ying sings low.
And we are not too bad, you know.this one, I think, is called a Yink.
he likes to wink, he likes to drink.
He likes to drink, and drink, and drink.
the thing he likes to drink is ink.
The ink he likes to drink is pink.
He likes to wink and drink pink ink.
SO...
If you have a lot of ink,
you should get a Yink, I think.Hop, hop, hop! I am a Yop
All I like to do is hop,
From finger top to finger top.
I hop from left to right and then...
Hop, hop! I hop right back again.
I like to hop all day and night.
From right to left and left to right.
Why do I like to hop, hop, hop?
I do not know. Go ask your Pop.Brush, brush, brush, brush
Comb, comb, comb, comb
Blue hair is fun to brush and comb.
All girls who like to brush and comb,
Should have a pet like this at home.Who is this pet? Say! He is wet.
You never yet met a pet, I bet,
As wet as they let this wet pet get.Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.
If you never did, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good.Hello, hello. Are you there?
Hello! I called you up to say hello.
I said Hello.
Can you hear me, Joe?
Oh no, I cannot hear your call.
I cannot hear your call at all.
This is not good, and I know why.
A mouse has cut the wire, goodbye!From near to far, from here to there,
Funny things are everywhere.
These yellow pets are called the Zeds.
They have one hair upon their heads.
Their hair grows fast. So fast they say,
They need a haircut every day.Who am I? My name is Ish
On my hand I have a dish.
I have this dish to help me wish.
When I wish to make a wish
I wave my hand with a big swish swish.
Then I say, "I wish for fish!"
And I get fish right on my dish.
So...
If you wish to make a wish,
you may swish for fish with my Ish wish dish.At our house we play out back.
We play a game called ring the Gack.
Would you like to play this game?
Come down! We have the only Gack in town.Look what we found in the park in the dark.
We will take him home, we will call him Clark.
He will live at our house, he will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this? We don't know.And now, Good night.
It is time to sleep
So we will sleep with our pet Zeep.
Today is gone. Today was fun.
Tomorrow is another one.
Every day, from here to there.
funny things are everywhere.