Today on the 5: I'm a fan of Patrick (H) mWilems, and I generally think he makes great videos about film and opur relaituonship with movies. He recently made a video about his trip to Cannes, and towards the end he made a comment that I feel relfects an outdated way of thinking.
Ozone Nightmare
A Limiting Perspective
Welcome to your daily five for Thursday, July 4th, 2024! I've talked, I think, a couple of times about a individual on YouTube named Patrick H. Williams, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly, who makes some really great long-form videos talking about movies, filmmaking, and different aspects of entertainment. And in general, I think he often makes really, really great points. And as I said, I've talked about his stuff that I think at least once, if not twice before. So I was watching one of those more recent videos where he went to the Cannes Film Festival or Cannes. I don't know what it's supposed to be. I think I've heard it pronounced both both ways by him and the video, but I could be wrong about that. But anyway, he went to this French Film Festival. It's very well known. And he was going through all the different movies that he saw screened there. And he was talking about one called, I believe, Amelia Perez, which I'd never heard of. And it sounds really interesting. But at the end of his review of it, he said that he was talking about how it was going to be distributed by Netflix. And I'm paraphrasing here. I didn't bother to look up the exact thing. But he essentially said that it was a shame that Netflix was distributing it because he felt like if it went to theaters, that it would be a bigger hit and it could get more attention for the people involved because they did really good jobs. And he thought they deserved more attention. And that particular bit was one of the few times where I heard him say something and I thought, yeah, that's a very, very short sighted and regressive way to look at how movies are done now because I thought about it. And at first I went, yeah, that's true. If it's on streaming, yeah, it's not going to have as much of an impact. But and look, I've had no criticism and no shortage of criticisms of streaming. So this is not me being a pro streaming. I think streaming has a lot of problems more in their longevity of series and anything else, but many other things. But then I thought about it and I thought, huh, let me look at something. And I looked up what is probably Netflix's biggest modern hit, I would say in terms of series, which of course is Stranger Things. And the two people who come up as the kind of top billed cast of that are Millie Bobby Brown. I think it's Millie Bobby Brown, not Bobby Millie. Yeah, it's Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard. And I looked at the two of them as far as their filmography. And before Stranger Things, they had both done some TV and some spots here and there. But Stranger Things put them on the map, made them into bankable stars. Both have now starred in much larger theatrically distributed movies. And I mean, Finn Wolfhard was just in the most recent Ghostbusters film. So I don't really think I think it's a very, and this is, I feel like this is an attitude by people who feel like movies should always be a movie theater. So that's the true form of cinema that that is the only way to really be successful. And of course, that betrays a bias towards movie theatres that a lot of people have. And it's funny because the movie that Williams went to specifically see, which was Megalopolis, is probably Francis Ford Coppola's last film, Francis Ford Coppola, who numerous times tried to get outside of the studio system. And honestly, where he'd have the same attitude today, my guess is he would be focused on streaming and not releasing things in theatres because he doesn't want to be part of that system that he feels is, well, I mean, don't get me wrong, streaming is like this too. But in some ways, at least when it started was less against creativity. You could make the argument that any entertainment industry eventually becomes anti-creative because after it's been around long enough, it focuses on money and not the product that it's producing. But I just found this to be an interesting point of view because I think it's very limited. And I think it's very limiting. It suggests that anything on streaming can't catapult somebody to the same level of success as something in a movie theatre. And I think that becomes less and less true all the time. We've seen how many examples in recent years of films that did not do well at the box office, but are well-regarded, well-enjoyed, but they simply did not make the money that they would have in, let's say, 20 years ago. And that's because people's relationship to movie theatres has changed. And it has been changing. This is sort of a repeating theme. I talked about this when Chris Stockman said he was afraid that cinema was dying, that movies were dying. And I went, "That's nonsense. They're not dying. They're changing, as all things do." It's not going to be the end of cinema. It doesn't end creativity. Creativity figures out new avenues. It explores new options. It reaches new audiences. That's what makes it so powerful. So yeah, I thought it was interesting. I mean, the video is great. I'll link to it because I think it's largely a great video that covers a lot of movies I'd never heard of and probably never would have heard of otherwise. But yeah, that one little bit, where the inference was that Netflix could not lead somebody to become as big a star, as bankable as a traditional movie distribution deal in theatres could. Yeah, I don't think that's correct. I think that is an antiquated way of looking at movies and entertainment. And I understand it. If you grew up with that, that's what you defer to. But I don't think that it's correct. So, watch the video and by all means, if you disagree, I'd be happy to hear. But that's just my opinion on