caddyman | Movie Watch

We watched two movies over the weekend. Initially we thought we might go to the cinema and watch Red 2, but it appears to have been and gone and there was nothing else showing that

ellefurtle fancied watching and I didn’t check to see if there was anything that might ring my bell.

In the event, we may have accidentally crossed a Rubicon of some sort. I have rented a couple of cheapie movies from Blinkbox in the past – the terrible 99p specials that were always destined for the bargain buckets. They can be quite fun and at less than a quid a shot, why not? Anyway, as of this weekend, I paid hard cash for two movies that exist only in cyberspace. I have arrived in another part of the future, where people own data on the ‘Cloud’. I think that most of our movie purchases will still be of the DVD variety (and mayhap one day, BluRay), but an occasional impulse buy for immediate viewing is acceptable.

Blinkbox doesn’t necessarily have the best selection of TV and movies – it’s okay and they do do the 99p specials as I’ve mentioned, but you just pay as you view; you do not have to have a regular subscription, so you don’t pay for anything other than that you watch. I am reasonably sanguine about using it as it is owned and operated by Tesco so I don’t think it is likely to go under anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There are drawbacks, of course. Having coughed up the requisite golden splonders for these two movies, I can watch them as many times and as often as I wish, but I have to have access to broadband so that I can stream them and I am limited to a maximum of 5 devices to stream them on. So far that has not proven to be a problem, as all I have used is my iMac and my iPad, both mirrored onto the TV set so we can both watch the movie without clustering around a small screen. I shall probably link it to my Nexus7, too. It does mean, however, that I can only take these movies to friends’ houses if they have the capability to mirror from either an iOS or an Android device. Nonetheless, it adds a welcome new dimension to our viewing, particularly as we don’t watch enough movies to warrant a subscription to say, Sky Movies or similar.

So what did we watch, I hear you ask with baited breath?

Saturday, the pair of us plus Furtle’s sister clustered around the telly to drink wine, scoff snax and watch Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, a movie I’ve wanted to see since I saw the first stills. By rights, it ought to be a shoddily-made Asylum movie for SyFy, but it is remarkably well-made and acted. Most of the CGI is well done, though there is some that is rather ropy.

The basic idea is simple. It is based upon Lincoln’s real life diary, in which there are substantial gaps. So the scriptwriter just added in vampire hunting, set against the background of slavery in the South (Confederacy) and linked it in to Lincoln’s real life. It is very enjoyable, but don’t expect high art!

Last night we watched Argo.

As you will know, it is set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and the US Embassy hostage crisis. I’m not sure why we didn’t go and see it when it was in the cinema; I’m reasonably sure that we meant to. I know that Furtle’s Mum, who is something of a historian has been rather dismissive of it as she thought it downplayed the British contribution (by which I mean ‘ignored it completely’), but to be fair to the movie, the greater crisis was simply the backdrop to the quite specific story of the six members of the embassy staff who got out and hid in the Canadian Ambassador’s residence. Apart from news reports on TVs in the background and a couple of scenes showing what was happening in the embassy, the wider diplomatic background was irrelevant to the immediate story. I should check to see that the UK wasn’t involved in ‘exfiltrating’ the six escapees. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem quite like the hijacking of history that U-571 was, where an historical event that was purely British was restaged and filmed to be an American victory.*

Regardless, it is a very good movie. Ben Affleck is NOT boring. It looks and sounds like the late 70s and early 80s. And the technology is wonderful. Computers at the CIA and in the airports, yes – old, slow and huge by today’s standards, but there, nonetheless. Everything else is wonderfully analogue. The movie portrays a world in transition in more ways than one.

*It’s not as if they are thin on the ground, there’s no need to nab ours.