Bingewatch

Quote: Nareed

That may or may not matter.

It may not, but people tend to watch episodes in order on streaming services. I find that either I watch them all in order, or I watch a few and drop the show.

The Sinner is 8 episodes of 42 minutes or 336 minutes. So leaving out a few minutes to summarize previous episodes and credits, you essentially have a 5 hour movie to tell a complex story. Many filmmakers are obsessed with length and the directors that want to make a quality film often go over 3 hours.

Dunkirk is a rare exception for such an ambitious film at only 106 minutes. Christopher Nolan also directed
Batman Begins 140 minutes
The Dark Knight 152 minutes
The Dark Knight Rises 165 minutes
all of which were great movies but a bit too long.


Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet was 4 hours long, and the subject of a famous Blackadder time travelling gag.

Quote: Pacomartin

all of which were great movies but a bit too long.

Have American theaters done away with intermissions as well?

I think intermissions kept longer movies more easily bearable. really long movies like Gandhi (3:11) had two intermissions.

Quote: Nareed

Have American theaters done away with intermissions as well?

I think intermissions kept longer movies more easily bearable. really long movies like Gandhi (3:11) had two intermissions.

Gettysburg 8 October 1993 had a runtime: (3:31) with Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Stephen Lang was the last movie with an intermission

Quote: Pacomartin

Gettysburg 8 October 1993 had a runtime: (3:31) with Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen, Stephen Lang was the last movie with an intermission

I've heard it explained here that the audience prefers no intermissions. But I wonder if that isn't counterproductive for the theaters, as they miss a second chance to tempt the audience with the concession stand.

The VIP theater I like, and ll other premium theaters like it, have seat-side service. You press the call button, and someone comes and takes your order. You can even pay cash. but regular theaters, by far the bulk of all screens, don't offer this.

Either I'm wrong, or it's a case of one chain tried it and then all copied it.

There is a company in the USA called MoviePass that is 6 years old. It was started by a co-founder of Netflix. They went through multiple pricing schemes in the last six years, but recently dropped their price to $10. It functions like a MasterCard, requires a Smartphone, and you decide you want to go to a movie (up to 30 a month, 1 per day), and they download the full price of a movie ticket to your card, and you go to the movie.

The important thing is the movie chains have no say in this club as they are getting full price for the movies. The original business model seems to be a similar one to health clubs where people spend up to $100 for price that includes 3-D movies. Health clubs make money because people have good intentions when they join, but they don't actually go as often as planned.

It is not precisely clear how MoviePass is going to make a profit with the very low price, a majority stake in MoviePass was sold to the analytics firm Helios and Matheson which claims they will build a database for targeted advertising.

One assumption is that once MoviePass becomes popular enough, they will be able to shake down the movie circuits for money. Another theory is that this $10 is a promotional price, and it will be raised to the point where MoviePass can make a profit. Yet another theory is that MoviePass will go bankrupt very quickly.

https://www.moviepass.com/

AMC made an attempt to block this pass. They seem to object to it based allowing consumers to think that they can go to a movie every day for the price of Netflix. Basically it undermines the value of their product.

Movie tickets peaked at 1.5757 billion in 2002 and have lately been hovering around 1.3 billion. MoviePass might increase ticket sales by hundreds of millions of tickets.

Quote: terapined

Binging on Fortitude
Looked interesting.
Small town way way north by glaciers.
Up to episode 5, pretty good as I am trying to figure out WTF is going on
Watching now. Should be working but my computer connectivity to work network is down

Loving Fortitude
Just about finished season 1 in just a few days.
Looking forward to season 2 with Dennis Quaid
Really neat premise
A small isolated town of about 200 by the artic circle next to glaciers
Hardly any crime due to everybody has a job.
Now bodies are turning up
Really well written.

Just finished season 2 Westworld
Wow
Where it went was pretty wild
Some of the stories were so moving such as the Geisha story
The best story was the one the Indian Warrior told the little black girl.
Really blew me away. What great writing

I may look into this. I liked Bosch but all those skanky whores with perfect Hollywood dentition shows a lack of effort, even the set dressers used largely empty containers.

Lynda La Plante of BBC fame started this with serialized shows featuring alcoholic incompetent cops more concerned with promotion than solving the case.

Another moving Chernobyl episode
The soldiers tasked with killing all the local dogs. So sad as the soldiers deal with the psychological consequences of their job
They had the clear the reactor roofs of deadly radioactive graphite. Most dangerous place on the planet
Amazing heroes. 3 min on that roof and you die. You are given 90 seconds to do whatever you have to do then get off that roof
So incredible that this dangerous job was done by humans
This series is so riveting

Quote: terapined

So incredible that this dangerous job was done by humans This series is so riveting

I will try to catch it but you do realize the current iewpoint is do not evacuate, accept your losses and stay put.