Following on from my last post, there was only so much
'micro-sanding' rust in millimeter-tight spaces that I could cope
with, so after a few hours I tended to go inside and watch a movie
while my finger-tips recovered. As a result I've made a decent dent
in all the second-hand movies that I picked up recently. DVDs are a
stupid technology, by the way, I try to be careful and yet I still
get occasional ones that are unwatchable due to scratches. Give me
a nice old VHS tape any day, even a bit of noise in the picture
from a worn-out ex-rental tape is a hell of a lot better than a
sudden "can not read disc" in the last third of a movie.
But storage medium aside, buying second-hand from op-shops and
garage sales I usually end up with an equal mix of big-budget
Hollywood productions and dodgy low-budget American movies from the
80s and 90s which Australian VHS and DVD publishers such as
Flashback Entertainment* used to push out either individually or in
bulk packs (I recently found a copy of Flashback's second pack of
10 really bad action movies, for $4 - just the third one to go!).
It's funny though that I do quite enjoy the bad movies up to a
point. Usually not the bad Hollywood ones where they
unenthusiastically try to pack in a bunch of stars with a
meaningless script on the assumption that it has to make money, I
can find those unwatchable. Nor do I really go for the ironic ones
that have become popular in more recent years, deliberately trying
to be cheesy. But an old bad low-budget movie is usually made with
a real intention to be good, just let down by a general lack of
talent and good judgement.
But the thing about them is that they're different. Sure the
differences usually don't work, but that's what makes them
interesting to someone like me who watches too much of the standard
Hollywood stuff, or maybe just pays too much attention to it.
Mainstream movies are actually all a lot of the same. Sure there
can be innovation, but at heart there are certain things that work
on film and things that don't, and at a point just seeing some
stuff that's a bit off is interesting in itself, simply because
it's different.
Not that a movie with a big budget can't be truely innovative and
good, but it's a very high-risk strategy which the industry
(especially the American one) only occasionally entertains. One
example that I watched recently is the movie Revolver - a
philosophically themed violent crime/action movie. I really liked
it. Not an all-time favourite, but one of very few films that I
think really would benefit from watching all over again straight
away. But by mid-way through I already suspected that it couldn't
have been a box office success. Looking at the Wikipedia page
showed it did even worse than I thought, attacked by critics and
making a significant loss (based on box office results at least),
though it seems the director recovered from it alright. Eye of the
Beholder is similar, a film with an intimate theme of obsession
that I can get into more than anything, but it doesn't seem to have
gathered even so much as a cult following.
Not all are commercial failures, but the skill required to make a
movie that really does new things and yet appeals widely enough to
make money seems to be exceptional. Still, between dodgy low-budget
productions and over-ambitious Hollywood flops, there's plenty out
there which escapes from the standard mould, though it isn't always
easy to find.
There are also 'foreign' movies - anything made outside the US I
give extra consideration - which in English mainly means UK films.
But the Australian broadcaster SBS is also an excellent source for
seeing foreign-language films on TV, which is good for me because
they rarely appear with second-hand VHS/DVDs. They're another topic
though.
- The Free Thinker
* Who I recently discovered have now switched to offering a free
(with ads) online streaming service at viewlorium.com, for people
willing to pay for much more internet data than I am.
