CineSavant Column
Hello!
We gravitate toward articles championing ‘physical media’ — video discs — and have not looked kindly on the articles that began 15 years ago predicting the demise of DVDs, Blu-rays, etc.. All are still very popular. The only threat to the future of Physical Media is the corporate desire to control everything, to make the public beg for whatever ‘content suppliers’ feel like letting us see.
Thus I was pleased to find that Richard Brody’s The New Yorker article from August 25 can be read online. It’s one of the best so far on what we’ll be missing if media companies really close down the spigots. Disney has completely squelched most of the film history of 20th-Fox. Titles not on hard disc can disappear into the ether with the drop of a corporate spat — for the same reason that the entire ABC network just disappeared from the Spectrum Cable service last week.
Richard Brody’s article is up here: What We Lose When Streaming Companies Choose What We Watch. The piece is optimistic — Mr. Brody says that Disney’s Bob Iger is ‘contemplating restoring physical media to the company’s offerings.’ A tentative Woo-Hoo to that.
The idea for most people should be to collect only movies you love, that you wouldn’t want to lose. We now have far too many discs to organize on shelves. It’s boxes for CineSavant central, and I plan to use some Labor Day writing time to digitally index and stash away a few boxes more. I think the system will work: a friend asked to see Houdini a few days back, and I was able to lay my hands on it in a few seconds. It’s not always that easy.
The informed Gary Teetzel dutifully reports that the just-issued official trailer for the latest Godzilla movie has now been given English subtitles. We’re actually curious to see if this installment will reverse a trend, the ‘political neutering’ of the franchise.
For them and those that can’t get enough of Big G, this is the link to the subtitled trailer for Godzilla Minus One.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson