Matthew Botos

Dating always seems to make good movie fodder, though most stray far from reality. Here are a few favorites that were bouncing around my head this morning:

40 Year Old Virgin seems to have it all: bad advice, the bar scene, and a send up of Speed Dating. (Some of the best speed dating bits are actually in the extras.) Way too many good lines to quote, as IMDB’s list goes to show.

Nice Guys Sleep Alone is lesser known, but twists the romantic comedy to shows what happens when a too-nice Southern teacher stops being nice. The best quote from this one is easy:

Friend: You should totally hit that.
Carter: She’s my sister!
Friend: By marriage! In Kentucky they’ll arrest you for playing rap music before they arrest you for sleeping with your sister.

Other bonuses: unintentional sex ed for his class at the horse ranch, and a Netflix connection.

40 Days and 40 Nights starts off as a romantic comedy with Josh Hartnett being a guy whose life is being ruined by all the women that fall into bed with him, so he decides to completely abstain. From there it quickly turns into a cruder movie and more entertaining movie as his guy friends start a betting pool and all the women in his life try to regain the power they’ve lost. It sets the tone that the first line to come to mind is Horatio Sanz’s (of Saturday Night Live Fame) reply to his suddenly masturbation-crazed boss having done it three times before lunch: “Two more and you break my company record!”

Kevin Smith gets two honorable mentions for the following two lines:

• “Did you love every woman you slept with?” “No, some of them I downright despised.” - Chasing Amy
• “You know how when you spoon with someone and you can’t find a comfortable place to put that other arm? That was like a metaphor for our whole relationship.” - Mallrats

The Wall Street Journal had an interview with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today, in which he comments on the future of his business:

If one thinks of Netflix as a DVD rental business, one is right to be scared. If one thinks of Netflix as an online movie service with multiple different delivery models, then one’s a lot less scared.

Our view is we should get to every Internet-connected screen over the next two years, as we also grow the title selection.

And on competing high definition DVD formats:

We have all the titles on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They’re running neck-and-neck, but the total volume is less than 1% of our volume. Consumers want high-def, but the perception of a format war is freezing consumers out. Until that perception stops, very few consumers will try the new high-def discs.

He also mentions YouTube and Internet video as not intersecting with Netflix’s subscription market, and recommends Animal House as a leadership movie.

Asking Why Does DVD Cover Art Suck So Much? turns up some pretty cool movie posters and comparatively lackluster DVD covers. To throw in my own two cents, I think the two serve two different purposes.

Posters, like teaser trailers, can be minimal and artsy to draw you in and create buzz when you see a handful walking into the theater. DVDs, on the other hand, are on an endless shelf with hundreds of others, long after the buzz has died and people have forgotten who was even in the movie. Throw a few big pictures of the stars on it and hint at the plot with the background in a very basic design, and maybe you’ll grab that nanosecond of someone’s attention it takes to spur the purchase of your movie over all the others.

Tivo sent me an email touting their new pairing with Amazon’s Unbox service, and even managed to take a swipe at Netflix in the process:

With Amazon Unbox on TiVo, you’ll be able to purchase or rent movies and TV shows to be delivered through broadband directly to your TiVo Now Playing List, so you can watch them on your big-screen TV. (C’mon people, it’s 2007: Renting movies through the mail is so pass�!)

Renting movies through the mail may be passe, but at one point, Netflix was moving more data per day than the Internet, and certainly more movies than all the online offerings combined. So why aren’t we just downloading our movies in the modern world?

• A monopoly or duopoly for high-speed Internet to the home exists in most areas, and without more competition or innovation, cable and phone companies will be slow to roll it out. That goes double for cable companies, which already have an established and (for the time being) still profitable pipeline for movies.
• The movie studios spend much more money on vicious lawyers and congressional “contributions” than they do on visionary engineers or marketers to take movies online legally and profitably.

When Amazon and Tivo conquer those two problems, then maybe I’ll consider giving up my Netflix subscription. Though maybe not; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has long hinted at downloadable movies, noting the company is called Netflix, not Mailflix.

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch a movie on the new DVD player and HDTV Sunday night. It was a much better test that watching isolated clips or freeze frames. Some scenes aren’t as clear or detailed as others, and watching a whole film gives you a better balance.

The result was pleasing; the upconverting on the DVD player did a good job of filling in higher resolution and large size of the TV. Keeping up with action sequences was no problem, and the text in the menus looked clearer. It should be good enough to keep me from thinking about HD DVD and Bluray for a while…

Ever buy a DVD, put in the player you paid for, and have it tell you that you can’t do what you want? A wonderful “feature” called User Operation Prohibition (UOP) lets the disc enforce restrictions such as not skipping the FBI warning, or more sinisterly, the movie company’s previews. While it’s easy enough to find software players that ignore these artificial restrictions, doing it in a hardware player is a bit tougher.

Fortunately, dedicated hackers are on the job; Tom’s Panasonic firmware site offers firmware updates for several Panasonic players that disable this annoyance as well as free you to watch DVDs from other regions of the world. It works like a charm; I bought an S52S player this afternoon, burned a CD, and now have total control of my DVDs!

The documentary Why We Fight looks at the history of our country’s military-industrial complex and how it has shaped our current situation. It’s well done, not only because it covers many facets of the subject, but because it leaves you thinking at the end.

As a regular employee at a contractor in the military-industrial complex, I have mixed feelings. As an individual, my actions are far too regulated by rules, process, and policies to do anything nefarious. Yet at higher levels, the revolving door between government and industry is constantly turning. With the influence, contacts, and stock holdings some of these people have, it’s difficult to imagine they’re truly free from conflicts of interest.

An even more disturbing concern raised is that foriegn policy is increasingly influenced by think tanks and carried out with greater corporate involvement (such as outsourcing military food service to private contractors). Neither of these entities were elected or will be held accountable by the people, but will instead pursue their own interests.

History has already shown our natural tendency to engage in a major military conflict every decade without undue influence. Eisenhower saw the danger long ago; hopefully some of today’s elected officials are equally vigilant.