What We Learned This Week: October 19-November 1

Posted on October 30, 2020 by everymoviehasalesson.

LESSON #1: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR…— Netflix announced it is raising its subscription rates to national customers by a dollar for the standard plan and two dollars for the premium plan. It’s their first price hike since January 2019. When your annual budget keeps climbing ($18.5 billion in 2020), you’re going to squeeze for more money at some point. Face it, though. They are the top brand and they know it. People are going to pay it because, even when bundled with a few other services, it’s all still cheaper and better than a cable TV plan filled with fluff. Above all other streaming providers, they are putting their money (which is your money) where their mouth is by continuously churning out new offerings and acquiring Oscar-level properties. Sure, the bit rate is being cheapened, and the algorithms narrow scrolling vision making people think that there’s nothing to watch on there, but what they have beats their nearest competitor, hands down. Compared to those theater tickets and Blockbuster rentals we all used to pay, $14 a month remains a steal.

LESSON #2: …AND OTHER TIMES YOU DON’T…— On the other hand, there are people throwing their money away elsewhere on stuff they don’t even get to keep. Pressured by a pending lawsuit citing unfair competition and fraudulent advertising, Amazon pounded their multi-billion-dollar fist on the table declaring that purchases to “buy” film titles is actually “limited license for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time.” Translation: You don’t really own them. You get them as long as you’re around, but you never know if a platform switches or the license goes away. That’s the opposite of getting what you paid for. That’s why you’ll hear folks like me and others preach the value and permanence of physical media. Be wary of that $5 4K digital download. It’s cute and convenient and all. I get that, but cover your butt and just straight up by the disc for $10. Screw minimalist Marie Kondo decoration and joy questions. Bring back the library walls and stock up some keepers.

LESSON #3: THE SHELF-LIFE OF SHORT FORM ENTERTAINMENT MATCHES ITS NAME— What was Quibi again? Yeah. I didn’t remember either. As it turns out, the platform backed by former Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is shutting down barely six months after its start. Even with a little bit of starpower here and there in their creative offerings, audiences didn’t come. People aren’t going to pay for short-form entertainment when the entire world of YouTube is free.

LESSON #4: IT’S TIME TO UPDATE YOUR BUCKET LISTS— Plenty of us Feelers are Letterboxd junkies who love their data and the completist challenges of fulfilling those lists. The ultimate list of all lists remains the “1001 Movies to See Before You Die.” The master list was just updated recently with new entries from 2003 to the 2019. Start here on page 27 to see the new additions in chronological order. The new entries are bold and comprehensive. Start clicking those boxes while still chasing the historical oldies you’re missing. Someday, you’re going to get them all!

LESSON #5: IF YOU NEED THE BEST, ASK THE BEST— In the usual final lesson spot of recommendations, I offer a Halloween special. October has traditionally been a month of binges and rewatches of horror movies. For a stupendous list, look no further than the master himself Stephen King. The list of his 22 all-time favorite films is diabolical, decadent, and delicious. Check those off your list with the 1001 from Lesson #4.

DON SHANAHAN is a Chicago-based and Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic writing on his website Every Movie Has a Lesson. His movie review work is also published on 25YL (25 Years Later) and also on Medium.com for the MovieTime Guru publication. As an educator by day, Don writes his movie reviews with life lessons in mind, from the serious to the farcical. He is a proud director and one of the founders of the Chicago Independent Film Critics Circle and a member of the nationally-recognized Online Film Critics Society. As a contributor here on Feelin’ Film now for over two years, he’s going to expand those lessons to current movie news and trends while chipping in with guest spots and co-hosting duties, including the previous “Connecting with Classics” podcasts. Find “Every Movie Has a Lesson” on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium to follow his work. (#143)

What We Learned This Week: October 5-18

Posted on October 16, 2020 by everymoviehasalesson.

LESSON #1: WARNING LABELS CAN EDUCATE AND ARE BETTER THAN EDITING— Media giant and streaming player Disney has started to add on-screen warning messages in front of some of their Disney+ selections that include antiquated and misrepresented depictions of racial and ethnic stereotypes. I’ll gladly add my applause to that effort for two big reasons that aren’t mentioned in the cited news article. First, Disney has gone a wonderful educational step further with its connected “Stories Matter” website that presents company goals as well as individual descriptions of the “what/why” for each label film and its content. That has tremendous value. Second, they’re leaving the content itself alone and not tinkering with edits, cuts, and corrections (at least for now). That’s honorable integrity from a company that sometimes looks to just be about optics only. Now that they’re asses are covered, it’s time to release Song of the South already.

LESSON #2: BOUNCING BACK TAKES A COMBINATION OF DEATH AND SURVIVAL— Immediately after my last #WhatWeLearnedThisWeek column was posted, the huge and unfortunate news broke of the permanent closure of Regal Cinemas theater locations. Their demise has forced fellow chain AMC Theaters to consider bankruptcy with the prospects of running out of money in six months. We all hoped this wasn’t possible, but the astute among us saw this coming since March. You cannot sustain a business, large or small, that needs a steady stream of people and product offerings. Not enough of either are there right now, and the money was going to run out. Higher help is not coming. Unlike economy pushers like the auto industry, there is no leverage or advantage for the government to bail out the movie industry. Classic want vs. need there.

That said, I don’t buy all the bleak extinction talk, no matter how bad Tenet failed as a savior. Sad as this news is, moviegoing will survive this. It has made it through worse times than one bad year. What I do buy is change. The industry needs to adapt to the times and change for their survival. Beer companies changed their products and practices during Prohibition and they returned just fine. Movies need to do the same. If switching gameplans towards streaming as that vessel for the foreseeable future, just as Disney has suggested with Soul and their whole future, so be it. Maybe we need more drive-in theaters that allow spacing. Maybe we need to take those 30-screen multiplexes and turn them into 15-screen venues instead with more spacious seating and less contact surfaces. This is like a forest fire that spurs regrowth through destruction. Some of this shit (i.e. price gouging and bad practices) needed to be burnt to the ground.

LESSON #3: YOU CANNOT CUT QUALITY AND CONTINUE TO CHARGE EQUAL OR MORE FOR SAID MISSING QUALITY— Maybe I’m just a perceptive former fat kid, but it just me or have the portion sizes of fast food burgers and candy bars gotten smaller in the last few decades? The reasoning most often cited is meeting stricter nutritional caps with less so-called sticker shock with calories. The prices, though, sure haven’t changed for getting less. That’s not supposed to happen with the movies. Size, noise, and bandwidth can and should keep improving if premiums are being paid to get them. That’s why resolution snobs and tech experts are squinting and calling early BS on Netflix’s plan to cut 4K bitrates on their streaming platform. You can’t sell diminishing results (as reported in the cited article) for the same extra charge. Check your wallets and maybe trim that bill down for a bit until that gets tuned better.

LESSON #4: HOW F’N BROKE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?— Speaking of wallets, how much poorer are all of you movie consumers after the last month? Between Amazon Prime deals, Target bundles, a few Best Buy drops, shocking deals from the mysterious GRUV coming through, a recent Criterion sale, and little sales from Deep Discount, Olive, Arrow, and Shout, the bounties coming home for the physical media shoppers among the Feelin’ Film Facebook Group has been glorious to witness and join in. We’re all going to pay for this with crackers and soup for the rest of the year. But hey, we’ll be enthralled and entertained while starving!

What We Learned This Week: July 13-19

Posted on July 20, 2020 by everymoviehasalesson.

LESSON #1: COOK YOUR OWN NUMBERS TO GET THE DATA YOU WANT— Judging by that lesson title? No, I promise this isn’t about hospital COVID-19 virus stats going through The White House instead of the CDC, but one makes you wonder. Anyhow, Netflix recently updated its all-time Top 10 list of “most watched” movies. Leading the way was April’s Extraction reported in 99 million households with the new The Old Guard impressively debuting in sixth with 72 million. It makes you wonder if these movies had a crack at the actual box office, because even a buck a household is a nice rake. Imagine $10 per household. Shout out to Feelin’ Film Facebook Discussion Group member and Canadian hero Dave Courntey on these follow-up questions. What constitutes “watched?” Is it a click? Two minutes? The whole movie? It should be the latter. Who’s cooking this Netflix report? Kind of like our Commander-in-Chief, pass me the side eye and a tin foil hat.

LESSON #2: WE’RE ALL GOING TO NEED MUCH MORE PATIENCE— Between the first lesson and this second one, this is where I’ll go back to trusting industry analysts. A new report on The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Cowen analyst Doug Creutz and looked at the outlook of movie theaters. The gut punch quote for me was “We now expect domestic theaters to be largely closed until mid-2021, in part because we don’t think studios will be interested in releasing their largest movies into a capacity-constrained footprint.” That’s saying something, and that’s coming from a Disney arm too. For them to admit that is very telling.

LESSON #3: PREDICTIONS ARE FASCINATING THINGS TO FOLLOW— If the studies of analysts are too stuffy for you, listen to these artist opinions from a recent Washington Post piece that interviewed five writers and actors: Thor: Ragnarok screenwriter Stephany Folsom, X-Men: First Class screenwriter Zack Stenz, prolific actress/host Aisha Tyler, Happy Endings actor Adam Pally, and actor/comedian Paul Scheer. The semi-Chicken Little hyperbole of “change Hollywood forever” is sure there in the article’s title, but their collective ideas are highly intriguing. They include predicting the comeback of paranoid thrillers, body horror, a turn of weird pop culture, the influx of new talent that can work to this new industry environment, and the need to reassure anxieties, especially with children. They are fascinating and fresh takes. What does your internal crystal ball think about all of this time and the societal effect that will trickle into art?

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