Category: Film

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

“House of Cards,” which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don’t remember, Google is just a click away.

The story is here.  You can buy an entire book at once, as serialization — while not dead — has ceased to be the norm for long novels.  At MOMA they do not run an art exhibit by putting up one new van Gogh painting each day.  Coursera, you will note, still uses a kind of serialization model for its classes rather than putting up all the lectures at once; presumably it wishes to synchronize student participation plus it often delivers the content in real time.  Sushi is served sequentially, even though several cold courses presumably could be carried over at once.  Still, a plate in an omakase experience typically has more than one piece of fish.

For TV I do not think upfront bingeing can become the norm.  The model of “I don’t really care about this, but I have nothing much to talk to you about, so let’s sit together and drop commentary on some semi-randomly chosen TV show” seems to work less well when the natural unit of the show is thirteen episodes and you are expected to show dedication.

Ad-financed shows — still a clear majority of viewing — may prefer to have impressions from the ads spread out over weeks and months rather than concentrated in one long marathon sitting.  Furthermore the show itself relies more heavily on an effective and immediate burst of concentrated marketing, with little room to build word of mouth and roll out a campaign with stages.  That intense publicity can be achieved the first time this model is tried, as everyone will write about the novelty, but it will be harder to summon up interest for successive experiments in this format.

I do not myself enjoy the marathon approach to TV shows, as I prefer to ponder the episodes over weeks, months, or years.  I rebel against watching even two episodes in a row, no matter how much I enjoy the program.  Nonetheless I hope this model succeeds, as I have the self-control to watch only one episode a week or at some otherwise chosen regular pace.

Chris MacDonald asks me:

Should we expect stagnation, or continued improvement, in the action film genre? The new Bond flick, Skyfall, is getting rave reviews, with some calling it the best Bond film ever. Hyperbole aside, it is indeed very good. Should we expect the next Bond film to be less good (regression to the mean) or is this one of the fields — like baseball management — where mechanisms exist to facilitate further improvement on a fairly reliable basis?

I was less crazy about Skyfall (“M, pull out your cell phone and call for aid!”) but that’s neither here nor there.

As for the stagnation issue, there are two main developments.  The first is a resurrection of sorts, namely 3-D, which is a very real gain, but in my view it is a significant plus for fewer than ten movies, most notably Avatar.

CGI is a gain for some movies (e.g, Troy, Life of Pi, Lord of the Rings), though it often makes action scenes less visceral and more distant.

The main drawback for Hollywood action movies has been globalization, which leads to too many explosions and not enough subtle dialogue and characterization.  The other main drawback has been high marketing costs, which encourages tent pole franchises with prior name recognition with a core audience.  That often means too much clunky plot exposition, too many comic book characters, too great a need to heed the wishes of the hard core audience base, and too few surprises about the characters.  There is one very good Spiderman movie but overall I call this trend a negative.

Still, there has been major progress in action movies, at least if we are willing to accept a particular semantic switch.  I much prefer Goldfinger to the newer Bond movies, but I also don’t think of it as an action movie.  It doesn’t have much action, although I don’t think people at the time felt that way.  By my possibly distorted standards, the Bond movies start being action movies only with Diamonds are Forever.

King Solomon’s Mines is a very good movie, under-watched these days, as is Thief of Baghdad.  Nonetheless prior to the 1970s I think of the action genre as virtually non-existent.  I was stunned when I first (1981) saw the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, though these days it isn’t especially impressive, just well-executed.

One possibility is that each generation thinks it is the first to have had action movies.

To sum up, for all of the contemporary excess, we have been living in a Golden Age of Action Movies. Even a scorned movie such as Lara Croft is pretty awesome on the big screen.  And Asian action movies have reached their peaks only in the last twenty years, including early John Woo.  Call that the plus side of the globalization equation.

That said, a few impressive 3-D movies aside, the last five years have brought more negatives than positives, a’la “Transformers” and various overinflated, noisy, character-stuffed, and self-important Hollywood monstrosities.  We’ll get over it, but in reality stagnation is something we might have wished for instead.

Here is one list of the greatest action movies of all time.  Not many pre-70s movies can stand up to these for action.

The next trend will be RCT-like audience studies to find out exactly which action tricks, with which timings, thrill us and which do not.  Great directors have an intuitive sense for this but it could be made much more scientific.