Venus, Black Snakes and Dirty OId Men

Two films I had the chance to see recently, back-to-back, were Venus (dir. Roger Michell) and Black Snake Moan (dir. Craig Brewer), two low-budget indie films from last year. I honestly hadn't intended to consider the two films together - they were simply two that were on my "to see" list and I happened to pick both of them up on the same night. What I didn't realize is that they shared so much, but differed in important ways.

Both films have the same general narrative gimmick - an older man (in the case of Venus, a cadaverous Peter O'Toole, in Black Snake Moan, Samuel L. Jackson) crosses paths at a crucial point in his life with a young, attractive, libidinous woman. Temptation ensues, eventually both characters learn "life lessons" in the tedious Bob McKee tradition and emerge healed. Of the two, I'd have to give Black Snake Moan the edge, simply because its setting (the deep south) and its metaphorical carpet (southern gothic blues) is less well-trodden ground than in the case of Venus's aging, Shakespeare-quoting, whiskey-drinking British. Both films, though, have an essential sweetness, an old-fashioned sense of romance and humanity that is enormously appealing.

What superficially drives the drama in both cases is the immortal question, "Will they or won't they?" Venus simply tosses the issue away early on, with O'Toole having prostate surgery that renders the question academic. Black Snake Moan toys with it a bit more seriously, but ultimately both films are playing past the titillation, and are more interested in treating the characters as lost souls in need of each other's rescue.

There's a darkness to both films, but ironically it's Venus that tells the darker story in the "lighter" surroundings of autumnal London, and Black Snake Moan that takes the more heartwarming route in the deep, myth-laden vernacular of the South. Venus is about O'Toole's character coming to know himself through the girl, having one last hurrah, but is finally about death. Black Snake Moan touches on death but veers away from it towards life. Where death hangs over Venus, it simply passes through Black Snake Moan. John Cothran's character in Black Snake, Rev. RL., articulates this explicitly in a moving, gentle speech about how religion has it all wrong in focusing on heaven, when really it should focus on what's happening day to day. In Venus, the characters learn how to die with dignity (a process which, ironically, involves a great deal of indignity), whereas in Black Snake, the characters learn how to live with it.

An interesting PS to my thoughts on these films comes from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops which, you may be surprised to hear, offers some perceptive and intelligent film analysis on their website, but in the case of these films, their objections are telling. Their take on Venus is that it is "morally offensive", whereas Black Snake Moan they simply rate as "limited", that is, appealing to a limited audience who may be turned off by the moral offenses in it. Their objection seems to essentially come down to, unsurprisingly, sex. The O'Toole character is offensive because he wants sex, but can't physically have it, where as Jackson's character is not as offensive, because he is capable of it, but chooses not to. The Bishops, whose opinion I generally respect, seem to have missed the point of both films, in that they are, neither of them, really about sex. Of course, the notion of "dying with dignity" doesn't seem to hold much water with Catholic dogma, either, so perhaps this is a part of their issue with Venus. Interesting, though, that desire is at the heart of it. I think it would make an interesting moral discussion, but in the meantime, feel free to enjoy both films.

The Problem with Downloading

Since we've established that the HD format war is probably going to wind up killing both disc formats for home video (see previous entry), the common belief is that eventually all disc formats will be replaced by downloading from some kind of legitimate video distributor, sort of like how Apple's iTunes Store works for music. It's certainly a tempting thought to make the leap from audio to video, particularly since many people seem to have climbed onto the legitimate downloading bandwagon. But there are major logical flaws to the argument "downloading will succeed DVD rental", and they all revolve around this notion of what the internet "should" be, and what the video market "should" be, and what it really is. Once you let go of those romantic notions, reality becomes astonishingly simple.

In a nutshell, downloading's not going to work until two conditions are met:

1. Adequate bandwidth
2. Familiar delivery models
   

Let's take the second point first. Last time, we discussed what killed laserdisc (no rental penetration, big discs, high price) and why DVD succeeded where it failed (familiar size, easily rentable, reasonable price). The key here is familiarity. Typical consumers don't want to learn a whole new paradigm every time the technology is incrementally improved. It just doesn't work that way - who wants to work to give companies their money? The only reason Apple has succeed where everyone else (including Rhapsody) has failed is that they made it really, really easy for the consumer. Their store is built right into their media player, which is cross-platform and easy to install and use.

But let's be honest - the Apple store (and iTunes) is very much a generational phenomenon. Young people (and I guess I'm still one of those...) find it a sensible and convenient way to purchase music legally. But I seriously doubt that older folks, including the world's largest single demographic (baby boomers) have bought into it with as much eagerness. For them, buying music means going to a store, picking out a CD/LP/Tape, talking to the clerk, maybe listening to a track and having their purchase rung up on a register. Yes, they're on the way out, but they're still the bulk of consumers.

Go into a video store on a Friday night and take a look at who's there. Is everyone 25 or under? Or are there parents with kids, couples picking out a movie to watch together on the couch and people just getting off work for the weekend? We understand what a video store is. We've lived with it for 15 years. Even my people my grandparents' age understand the business model. I simply can't see why the majority (and yes, majority does rule in the case of marketing) of consumers would abandon a model they know well for a model they hardly know at all just because some tech guru told them it was "better". Downloading eliminates the "store experience", the notion of browsing through shelves, chatting with friends you meet at the store, having something recommended to you by a human being. It seems highly unlikely that this model will change anytime soon.

Besides, downloading is never going to catch on in a big way until bandwidth is increased by an order of magnitude. Perhaps you've heard the old story of how the reservoir in most American cities is drained to dangerously low levels once each year during halftime at the Super Bowl, where tens of millions of people all flush their toilets at the same time. Now imagine a typical Friday night in New York or LA, where perhaps a million people would try to download the same movie at roughly the same time. If this were tried today, the internet would either crash altogether, or the download speeds would be such that a typical 7 GB DVD would be just about ready to play by the time you go back to work on the following Monday morning. (And this is not even considering the next-generation HD formats for which this hoopla is supposed to be the answer.)

Yes, I can hear the objections already: "But lots of people download using Bittorrent or Limewire!" (Peer-to-peer networks that are often unreliable and depend on sharing of files between users to artificially increase apparent bandwidth - I think we know what major record labels and movie studios think of those.) "How is this different from pay-per-view on satellite?" (Two ways: a very small install base and privately owned bandwidth delivery for which users pay a large premium.) "Apple's iTunes store seems to work fine!" (Audio requires about 1/10th the bandwidth of video - and besides, not everyone wants the same song at the same time.)

What this adds up to is a need for greatly increased bandwidth if the disc format and all it entails (video stores, etc.) is ever to be replaced. Who's going to pay for that bandwidth? The government? (Last time I checked, the right to download movies wasn't in the constitution.) Private industry? (Fine, if you want to pay $1000/movie, or some similarly outrageous price that would have to be charged to recoup the staggering upfront cost of re-wiring the world.)

The fact is that, until downloading as fast and cheap as jumping in the car and heading to the video store, it's not going to catch on. Period. As much as some would like it, as much as it seems like the elegant, 2007 solution, it's just not realistic. You can't always get what you want.

The take home message is a familiar one: DVD is here to stay.

The Buzz About HD Home Video

If your memories can possibly reach back through the mists of time to an era before DVD, you may be able to recall some dim notion of a home video format called "video tape". Sure, it wasn't digital (back then we didn't really even know what that meant), but it was cheap and common and we were all happy with it for around 15 years. Those who weren't happy with it invested in the horrendously expensive and marginally better "laserdisc", which was doomed essentially from the start by being a big, unwieldy, non-recordable, non-rentable video medium. Some of us still retain these dinosaurs in our collections, myself included, for various sentimental reasons. (Remember, it was the laserdisc that introduced us to the concept of "making of" documentaries on the disc, "audio commentary" tracks and, towards the end, soundtracks presented in digital surround sound.)

At a certain point (between 1997 and 2000), the industry did a big flip and embraced DVD as the standard bearer for home video technology. After flirting with a few other formats (VCD, SVCD, DivX), it was decided that DVD, with its MPEG-2 compression and built-in digital soundtracks, as well as CD-size, was the way to go. All major studios jumped on board, both discs and players came down in price and everyone suddenly thought video tape and laserdisc were fuzzy, blurry relics.

On what did we base this decision? Yes, DVD looked and sounded better, but was the public at large really that unhappy with the choices they had? I doubt it. It had a lot more to do with some simple market factors, such as penetration of the rental market (laserdisc never quite managed to do this), small, familiar size and price. I can imagine that the typical consumer (full disclosure: I don't think I was ever one of those) just thought that if they could get something better, as easily, for the same price, then why not make the jump?

These days, I have yet to encounter anyone other than a high-tech blogger who is truly displeased with the video quality of DVD. Even 73% high-end home-theatre owners, according to a recent poll, are satisfied with DVD as a video delivery medium. So, what's the fuss about HDTV? Clearly most people don't consider the DVD broken. What's the rush to fix it?

Even if there was dissatisfaction with the current format, the industry tearing itself apart over which "high definition" format to adopt, Blu-ray disc or HD-DVD, is only driving consumers further back into their DVD collections. I suspect, based on nothing but some info and some common sense, that neither format will come out on top unless the same factors that drove the eager adoption of DVD occur:

1. The new formats become adopted by the rental market.
2. The players become inexpensive.
3. HDTV's, which are necessary to see any benefit of either new format, become more numerous than "old fashioned" TV's.
4. The industry agrees on a format and promotes it as the logical successor to a format you already know and love. That is, they put an end to this silly "format war".
   

Those who are clamoring for the DVD to be retired had better ask themselves if any of those four conditions has happened, or will happen soon, because until they do, the DVD is here to stay.