Something weird is happening with Netflix. The CEO announced yesterday the division of their DVD mail service and their streaming service. They will be two separate businesses–the DVD mail service will be renamed “Quikster,” and the streaming service will remain as Netflix. This will take place in a couple of weeks. From the Netflix blog: “So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to ‘Qwikster.’ We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name ‘Netflix’ for streaming.”
Month: September 2011
Drive
This is an odd movie. I went assuming it was a smarter, cooler Fast and the Furious, and there are a couple of good driving scenes. But it is primarily an exercise in backward-looking noir, trying to re-create the look of 1970s driving movies, perhaps with a bit of Point Blank thrown in. The driver is Ryan Gosling, who is never given a name, and is practically affectless, with barely a change of expression except for a slight smile when he is around Irene (Carey Mulligan). Continue reading Drive
Contagion
Another enjoyable, sleek, highly competent, and controlled film from Soderbergh. [Apparently he is giving up directing to devote himself to painting. There was a trailer for his next movie, a good-looking action thriller with female lead, entitled Haywire, before Contagion.] Contagion examines the progress and response to a global pandemic from the outbreak through about nine months out, by which time a vaccine has been found and the virus is more or less under control. Continue reading Contagion
Meek’s Cutoff
Kelly Reichardt’s compelling anti-Western is almost like Gerry but with a wagon train instead of Damon and the more talented Affleck. I half-kid. She sets up some glorious but static shots of size and distance: clouds moving quickly in silhouette against the stars; the forlorn convoy trudging in miniature on the horizon. But despite the scope–even because of the sweep of the empty Eastern Oregon high plains–the visuals don’t “thrill,” don’t convey a sense of majesty or myth, but rather the opposite. It’s a big, flat, unmarked Empty–with muted colors. Continue reading Meek’s Cutoff