The Middle of May and Streaming Devices (Poll)

Greetings all,

By the time you get this, I will be in the UK for a week. The film I worked on with Quin Mathiews will be showing at a festival outside of London, and we are going. If you have suggestions of things to do and see in London, let me know.

If you have not seen “Sinners,” go this week, and if you can go to see it in IMAX, please do that. The best experience will be at the Cinemark in Dallas. I will see it again.

In the current state of political insanity, it is a good idea to watch some classic films that can put our moment in perspective. Here is a good list from The New Republic. Here is one from the Hollywood Reporter.

Here is one from Rolling Stone. There is significant overlap on these lists. Many of these films are watchable. It would be fun to have a once-a-week screening with friends, with a film from these lists. A great place to start is “Idiocracy,” a 1999 film by Mike Judge.

It won’t make anything better, but it might change your mood. And we all need a mood adjustment.

This weekend, the Texas Theatre is showing “Jaws” on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

If you have not seen it in a while, it holds up and is a good ride. The Texas Theatre will have a special screening of the documentary “Sabbath Queen” with filmmaker Sandi DuBowski in attendance. This is not until Wednesday, May 28, just giving you a heads up.

“Dog Day Afternoon” will be screening at the Alamos this week and is also on the Criterion Channel. This classic is by Sidney Lumet, one of my favorite directors of that era. If you are not familiar with Lumet’s work, you can see this great documentary about him, “By Sidney Lumet,” which is on Amazon Prime and Kanopy (which you can get with a free Houston Public Library card.)

At the Angelika, please check out “ADA, My Mother the Architect,” which had a great screening at the Dallas International Film Festival. It is a good film about family, Israel, and of course, Architecture.

This Saturday at Spacy, Dallas microcinema at 1300 South Polk Street, suite 160A, they are showing “Queens of Drama.” An outrageous lesbian pop musical satire inspired by the pop frenzy of the early 2000s, “Queens of Drama” charts the rise and fall of new star Mimi Madamour and her passionate, rage-fueled love affair with punk icon Billie Kohler.

There is so much to see. If you want to have movie theaters, you need to go to them.

One last thing before I turn you over to Elijah and Ed. A friend sent me this project he was working on called “HI You Are Currently Being Recorded,” which I would like to share with you.

It is short and you can see it here.

Have a great week. I’ll take some pics of me getting fish and chips!

-Bart

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After digesting a voluminous new history of Watergate (see previous musing), I felt the need for a lighter lift. Shelby Foote’s 3-volume history of the Civil War is a non-starter for now. Even in the paperback version, it weighs in at 8.8 pounds on our digital scale. I got tired from just just toting it to the bathroom and back.

So I settled on “Saturday Night Live” mainstay Colin Jost’s “A Very Punchable Face” via a thrift store purchase. The title alone made me smile and the top-of-the-back cover blurb from Larry David made me laugh out loud. “I always wanted to punch his face before I read this book,” David wrote. “Now I just want to kick him in the balls.”

The book lives up to its self-deprecating title. There are entire chapters on Jost’s proclivity at soling his pants and on the numerous emergency room visits he’s made due to overall clumsiness. In contrast, there’s next to no mention of his wife, actress Scarlett Johansson. Perhaps that’s because they were just dating at the time and didn’t marry until 2020, the year in which this book was published.

In its final chapter, Jost writes that he’s ready to leave SNL after 15 years with the show, most prominently as co-anchor of “Weekend Update” with Michael Che since 2014. But May 18th marked the finale of the show’s historic 50th season (Johansson hosted) and Jost is now a 20-year veteran.

As a viewer of “SNL” from the very start, I’ve waded through all of the show’s “Weekend Update” anchors. And I now rank the Jost-Che duo as the best to ever do it, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler a very strong second and the late Norm McDonald placing third.

Jost’s “memoir” is an enjoyable diversion that can be breezed through in a week or less. Take it from Che, who praises “A Very Punchable Face” by writing in part, “It’s got everything I want in a book — a front, a back, a good spine. And it’s got some heft. Whoever wrote this book knew what she was doing.”

-Ed

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Howdy,

Last Wednesday, I woke up foggy-eyed, looked at my phone to check Twitter and actually thought I was being pranked. But in fact, Warner Bros/Discovery had done the unthinkable? inevitable? by rebranding their streaming service back to HBO Max. Just a few weeks ago we got the roll out of a new black and white Max logo. Before that, the name had gone through many well documented rebrandings from

• HBO (the cable subscription) to

• HBO Go (the on-demand cable streaming app) to

• HBO Now (standalone streaming app) to

• HBO Max (to not diminish the HBO brand with other Warner Bros owned media) to

• Max (to not diminish the HBO brand with Discovery+ media) to now back with

• HBO Max (because the HBO brand is prestigious.)

A recreation of a popular Spider-man meme

Luckily the executives at Warner Bros/Discovery at least realized what the reaction would be and let their social teams ridicule the rebrand reversal with endless memes and videos. More importantly, this was announced at the TV upfronts in NYC, where aside from the regular HBO programming, the company didn't have much to show to advertisers. As the legacy media companies like Warner Bros, Universal, and Paramount realize that they can't compete with Netflix, having a differentiating factor like prestige TV and new release theatrical films may be enough for HBO.

This is the same approach that Apple is taking. They recently allowed Prime Video to start selling their streaming service via Prime Channels and they even have a dedicated "Apple TV+" button on Roku remotes. Right now, Netflix is the only all encompassing service that has a little bit for everyone. Each of the streaming boxes is trying to make themselves essential by hosting not just the streaming apps, but what most of them call "channels" within their own interface.

The Apple TV app on the Apple TV device offers in-app subscriptions to not only their own service, but services like Paramount+ and niche ones like BBC History. Over at Amazon, their Fire TV devices prominently feature Prime Video of course, but also have over 100+ on device subscriptions. This is where, I think, the majority of people probably subscribe to services like Starz, which they can buy alongside a rental of "The Minecraft Movie" and groceries from Whole Foods. The Prime Video app on my iPhone, after watching the show "Etoile" a few days ago, popped up an offer to "Shop looks inspired by the show from Shopbop and more." Not interested, but not that surprising.

Google TV and Chromecast integrate a version of premium channels like Hallmark+ and others, along with the most-watched video platform YouTube and their fairly popular YouTube TV service, which is pretty much a streaming version of the classic cable subscription. Most interesting to me is the Roku offerings, which come preinstalled on a ton of low-priced TVs. Roku originally started as a streaming box for Netflix only, back when they were mostly a DVD mailing service. Now they have their own free streaming channel called The Roku Channel which streams ad-supported TV shows and movies, along with offering premium subscriptions to HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV and all of the others.

With a pretty dedicated focus on TVs, I was surprised to find out that Roku also has a smart home platform with Roku lightbulbs, Roku doorbells, Roku speakers and Roku cameras. From what I've read, they mostly make money from serving ads to users, so it would make sense to gather more data around the home. I doubt a Roku smartphone or laptop is in the works, but maybe one day? Still none of these boxes offer a way to just start playing CNN when I turn them on. That's all I want.

I am really interested to know what streaming boxes folks reading this use at home. We mostly use an Apple TV, but I've tried a bunch just for fun.

-Elijah