Monthly Archives: May 2018

Is It Time to Buy a Blu Ray Player?

I have avoided getting a Blu-ray player for years.

Why I Avoided Blu-ray All These Years

Almost a decade ago, I bought a laptop that just happened to have a Blu-Ray player in it and someone loaned me the first Despicable Me film on a Blu-ray disc, so I played it. Given the small screen size, the only thing I really noticed was that it loaded really slowly.

But there was another reason I preferred DVDs over Blu-Ray discs: DVD Shrink.[1] My preference is to put a disc on a hard drive and then just put the disc in my cabinet. I hate having to find any particular disc.

Is It Time to Buy a Blu Ray Player?

Digital Copies Don’t Cut It — Yet, at Least

I know: I can get digital copies. And as soon as digital copies come with all the extra features that the discs do, I’ll switch. But they don’t.

(Regardless, this is very important: don’t steal films. I could hardly give a jellybean for the lost revenue of Hollywood. But especially now, psychotronic filmmakers can only make films if we all buy them and don’t make or download illegal copies.)

As a result of this, Blu-ray was not a technology that I was keen on.

What Got Me Interested in Blu-ray

But I was at our only remaining video store (and the only one that was ever good), Video Droid. They were playing some film I don’t care for too much (which is unusual, because they have good taste). And I noticed that it looked particularly good on their enormous screen. So I asked the clerk, “Is that Blu-ray?” And she said, “Sure. The players are the same price as DVD players.”

That got me thinking.

There had been a little problem I’ve been running into recently: films on Blu-ray discs are often cheaper than films on DVD. And sometimes, you can only get things on Blu-Ray.

For example, Something Weird Video released The Blood Trilogy on Blu-ray (it says multi-format, but it isn’t — typical Amazon). That’s Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, and Color Me Blood Red on a single disc! And when I bought it, it was only $9.99!

Well, that was it! I needed to buy a Blu-ray player. So I went over to Amazon and bought a refurbished Blu-ray player for just $36.99.

My Personal Blu-ray Problems

It turned out to be a bit more complicated for me than I had hoped. I had a monitor with a VGA and two HDMI inputs. So I figured there would be no problem. There was — but just one.

My monitor was so old that it didn’t have speakers in it. So I could watch Blu-rays, but I couldn’t hear them. So I bought a better monitor, with sound, for half the price I paid for my old monitor.

Success!

I was happier than a psychotronic film fanatic with The Blood Trilogy on Blu-ray and nothing to do all Memorial Day.

The great surprise is that even on my little 20", the picture quality is notably better. The sound is not as good as it could be, but sound on the films I most watch is usually the lowest quality aspect.

If You Can, You Should Get a Blu-ray Player

If you are poor, well, you’re poor. But if you aren’t, it’s time to trade in your old DVD player for a Blu-ray player. (Make sure it also plays DVDs, because sometimes — very rarely — they won’t, given it does require an extra laser.) It gives you more options.

And if you buy as few as a dozen films on disc per year, you will likely make your money back within too long. For example, right now, a new release of Bubba Ho-Tep on Blu-ray is available for half-the price of the original DVD. And it has a number of new extras, including a commentary track with Joe R Lansdale, who wrote the original short story. The price difference is well over half the cost of my new Blu-ray player.

DVD Is King — For Now

But yes, you can buy used copies. I’ve just had problems with used discs. People treat them like hell and they often skip or won’t play at all. And there is no point sending them back, because if you purchased a disc used, it’s because it was cheap. Are you really going to spend all that time and effort to send it back just to net $2.00?

DVDs are still king. And for the time being, you can often get very good deals on used copies. Used Blu-ray discs are still unacceptably expensive, but that will change.

I don’t care what the format is. My main problem with VHS is that almost all films were panned and scanned (the edges were cut off on anything other than films shot in 4/3 aspect ratio). Also: very rarely did they have any extras. Otherwise, whatever. You still need a VCR!

The Future Is Blu-ray

But I’m afraid Blu-ray is the future. And it’s reached the point where it will often save you money or allow you to get a film that you couldn’t otherwise.

A Blu-ray player is a good investment. And if you need to replace a DVD player, there’s no question: get a Blu-ray player.


[1] Be very careful if you try to download DVD Shrink. Most sites are just scams. You can spend hours trying to find the link to the program and only be taken to every other site imaginable offering you every kind of software imaginable.

The last release is version 3.2.0.15, although the install program will just say 3.2. Even Wikipedia, as I write this, lists a scam site for DVD Shrink. It is free software. If someone is trying to sell it to you, it is a scam. They will likely take your money and there is no assurance you will even get the software.

The link I provided is good as of the day this was published (27 May 2018). There is a simple link to “Download DVD Shrink 3.2.” If that page has become spam, use the Archive.org link on The Wayback Machine.

Note that DVD Shrink stopped development back in 2004 for legal reasons. So there is no point paying to “support” its development. Also, there are discs it won’t work on. What’s more, it’s use is illegal in some countries. It shouldn’t be. People don’t outlaw garden rakes just because you could commit a crime with them. But this is typical of the power that Hollywood has and our totally out of control copyright system.

What Is an Exploitation Film? Most People Are Wrong

What Is an Exploitation Film? Most People Are Wrong - Sweetback Eats a Lizard

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song launched the genre known as blaxploitation (can anyone explain that term to me?), which brought a slew of heroic black enforcers and sexy black women to the screen for the mass consumption of a large, previously ignored black audience.Marilyn Ferdinand

I can! But first we have to discuss what an exploitation film is.

I feel silly even discussing this issue because it seems so obvious to me. But based on many conversations with normal people (that is: people who aren’t psychotronic freaks like me), I know that most people think exploitation films are films that take advantage (exploit) the people in them.

What an Exploitation Film Is Not

It isn’t surprising they would think that given the years of nudie cuties and their followers that seemed mostly thin pretenses at showing off naked women. But even that is absurd. Do these people think the naked actors were kidnapped and made to perform in the films?

As I mentioned in Troma and Economic Inequality, the star of the film made half as much money as his female co-star because she did a number of topless scenes. That was true then too. I’m all in favor of trading in our capitalist system for something more humane, but the system is what it is. Don’t blame the people who have no choice but to live under it.

What an Exploitation Film Is

So what is an exploitation film? It’s a low-budget film where the filmmakers exploit whatever they can to make their film’s successful (often to get them made at all). It’s like Babes in Arms, “My pa’s got a barn; let’s put on a show!” The filmmakers are exploiting, as Herschell Gordon Lewis put, “Something the studios couldn’t or wouldn’t do.”

So if you have a thick forest in your backyard and friend who owns a gorilla suit, you might be able to make something like Bride of the Gorilla (which is a really good film). Or if you’re in a biker club (I don’t think they call them gangs anymore), you could make a biker film. Or whatever.

The Best Thing to Exploit

But the best thing to exploit is your own creativity. Certainly that’s what Lewis and David Friedman exploited in Blood Feast. It wasn’t the gore that made that film half almost a 20,000 percent return on investment in its initial run. It was that no one had seen anything like that before.

And that’s what brings us to Ms Ferdinand’s question about blaxploitation.

What Were the Blaxploitation Films Exploiting

Perhaps no other form of exploitation filmmaking has as bad a rap as blaxploitation. This goes back to the bare chested women in the nudie cuties. People tend to think that black people were being abused.

Quite the opposite was happening. In the late sixties filmmakers started thinking that just as sex and gore appealed to people in the southern drive-in circuit, films that focused on black heroes just might appeal to urban blacks. And they were right.

Blaxploitation Never Ended, It Went Mainstream

It’s funny that people talk about blaxploitation films ending by the mid-1970s. That really isn’t true. They were simply taken over by Hollywood, which began making movies targeted directly at blacks. True, those films have no political resonance, but then the Black Panthers are long gone and Black Power is more quaint than threatening. (That’s not to say that whites aren’t still terrified of blacks; just look at the hyperbolic denunciations of Black Lives Matter.)

Another Idiot “Critic” Doesn’t Know What “Exploitation” Means

Interestingly, Roger Ebert wrote that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song wasn’t an exploitation film. As people who have read me a long time know: I hate film “critics.” They’re idiots who watch a film once and then presume to judge the work that was the result of at least dozens of people and months of work (more likely hundreds of people and years of work).

But Ebert was always held up as somehow a good critic because, I don’t know, he wrote a middling screenplay for Russ Meyer and read a book on film history? His claim that Sweetback isn’t an exploitation film is betrayed by almost every sentence in the article (it’s a “review” of Baadasssss!). He had a 13-year-old son he could use for a sex scene (that I think could have been a lot shorter — it is disturbing), so he did. He had black friends so his crew could be all black, so he did.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song Was Exploitation Filmmaking

The truth is that Sweetback simply as cinema is an art film. (It has almost no transitions; little plot; and is mostly interested in experimenting with the interaction between music and visuals. It is also brilliantly edited, but in a way that will confuse and annoy most viewers.) But it is an exploitation film because of the way it was made, why it was made that way, and how that affected the audience.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, Sweetback was not the first blaxploitation film. But to my mind, it is the most true blaxploitation film: a film by blacks, for blacks. Many blaxploitation films were made by whites. But white, black, or green, these filmmakers were exploiting the fact that a significant part of the country had been largely ignored by the film industry, because the Big Brains in Hollywood were too stupid or bigoted to realize that blacks might like to see movies that reflected their lives and dreams.

Exploitation Is a Good Word In Film

Exploitation films are made by people who are smart, creative, and driven. I’ll pick an exploitation film over a Hollywood film any day. That’s a big part of what this site is about. Hollywood has the money to buy all the professionals they need to make a film. Independents have to live by their wits. Hollywood just makes what it’s made before. And it depends upon the exploitation filmmakers to add some new DNA to their commodities — by stealing it.

So to answer the original question simply: “blaxploitation” is a genre of film featuring black heroes, made explicitly for black audiences, who had been ignored by the studios.

How to Count IMDb Credits: It’s Harder Than You Think

William Kerwin - How to Count IMDb Credits: It's Harder Than You ThinkI have highly mixed feelings about the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). I have since the beginning. Soon after it appeared on the web, I wrote to them, begging that they do credits properly. It bugged me especially that they didn’t list screenwriters in credit order. It also bothered me when they started adding a bunch of (uncredited) entries. That’s fine for a minor actor that you can see in the film. But just because a screenwriter was paid to write a draft or punch up a script doesn’t mean a single word or idea made it into the final script. Leave it to the WGA to work out. That’s a big part of what they do.

And there are other problems with IMDb. The biggest is just how cozy they are with Hollywood. All the ridiculous, overblown advertising. And it bugs me that now the studios just feed them their complete credits. Certainly, it makes the site more efficient and profitable. It also makes the site less human and fills it up with a lot of garbage credits (the Hollywood style). And the site has shown no interest and going back to old and odd films and filling them in and correcting errors.

IMDb’s Biggest Practical Problem

But the biggest practical problem I have with IMDb is the way they list credits. And I’ll explain with character actor William Kerwin, but this is true of almost anyone who worked in any capacity in television. If you check IMDb, it says he has 132 acting credits: films and television shows. And that’s the killer. Because a film is equivalent to an episode of a television show, not the whole series. I’ll come back to Kerwin in a moment.

Consider Robert Clary, the actor who played LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes. According to IMDb, he has only 22 credits! Yet he’s actually been in 219 films and television episodes. And in most of those he was a major part of the cast.

Now I know a lot of people think that television is very different than film, but it really isn’t. That’s especially true for character actors. Regardless what they’re in, they are usually going to be working for a day or two. So whether on film or television it doesn’t matter.

For the technical people, television is generally easier because the shows are shorter and they have established sets and so on. So directing for television shows is a whole lot easier. (Note: directing a television movie is in no way different than directing a theatrical film.)

I’m usually looking at actors and I want to have an idea of how much they’ve worked. And that “credits” number is often wrong.

How to Fix IMDb’s Credits Problem

But there is a relatively easy way to make the correct calculation. Scroll through all of the titles that the person has worked on. Make a note of any television show they were on more than once. In each case, note down one less than the number of episodes they were on. Add all these up and add them to the number IMDb reports as “credits” and you have the actual number of films and television episodes they worked on.

So returning to William Kerwin, we have Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (5), Play of the Week (2), Lancer (6), Blind Ambition (4), and Romance Theatre (5). So that’s 4 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 4 = 17. So we add 17 to the IMDb credits total of 132, and we get 149.

This Matters

I picked Kerwin both because of his association with Herschell Gordon Lewis, but also because he never starred in a series or played many recurring characters. So it was an easy example.

But this has always bothered me. In his case, it isn’t that big a deal: 132 vs 149. But in the case of Clary, it’s huge: a difference of almost 200: 22 vs 219. Or consider Valerie Harper, who has 70 “credits” but starred in 110 episodes of Rhoda alone. Or Julie Kavner with 69 “credits” but 110 episodes of Rhoda and 643 episodes of The Simpsons.

So this can be a very big deal. And since Psychotronic Review takes film (especially low-budget film) very seriously, we will always provide the right number and not just take IMDb’s lazy and offensive number.

James Cameron: No Actor’s Director

The TerminatorI have had various connections to Hollywood in my life. And I’ve come to see it as an awful place. It is offensive that “normal” (non-Hollywood) people get so excited about celebrities. I was once a minor celebrity, so I saw it from the inside. And it was pathetic. These people thought I was super cool, but I was just the same loner nerd I had always been.

So I thought that people in Hollywood would be lackadaisical about stars and directors and such. No. It’s the opposite. They are even worse than people outside that dysfunctional environment. If David Foster Wallace can be believed, the porn industry is much more mature. And most successful stars and directors (and studio heads and on and on) are very much in agreement. They’re great!

Normal People vs Hollywood “People”

But I never got that from Herschell Gordon Lewis or David F Friedman, men who actually changed the way films were made. They have a humility that’s, well, human. (They’re also assholes, but that’s another issue.) Maybe those people who believe in alien lizards living inside human “suits” are right. If they are, all those alien lizards live in Hollywood.

There are so many examples I could use, but today I want to talk about James Cameron because it really shows off not just his horribleness but also his conviction that he is never at fault. He’s like God, if it’s good, he gets credit. If it’s bad, it’s on someone else — maybe all of us.

It Came From a Commentary Track

I am something on a connoisseur of commentaries on films. Of course, most are quite awful because they are done by directors who are surprisingly ignorant of how movies are made (at least big-budget Hollywood directors). Generally, I would rather listen to a writer or a historian discuss a film. But when it is a director, you often get to see what jerks they are.

(I recently listened to John Carpenter do a commentary on the great In the Mouth of Madness with cinematographer Gary B Kibbe, and Carpenter was so nice about including Kibbe, it was charming. But then, Carpenter isn’t a Hollywood kind of guy.)

Enter James Cameron

Many years ago, I listened to the commentary for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It includes Cameron and screenwriter William Wisher. And during it, Cameron really shows the dick of Hollywood legend that he is. It is amazing to listen to Wisher play omega to Cameron’s alpha. I know they are friends. But that makes it even more sad, because Wisher is as much a professional in his field as Cameron.

I felt sorry for Wisher but mostly it just made me think that James Cameron was an awful person.

Cameron Blames Bad Actors

I think the problem is that James Cameron didn’t care about the scene and didn’t really try. So he blames the actors.

One moment in the commentary really stood out.

Cameron mentioned that there was a deleted scene at the end of The Terminator where two guys from Cyberdyne Systems pick up a chip from the remains of the terminator.

He said (more or less) that the scene was deleted, “Frankly, because the acting was terrible.” My first reaction was (and I’ve had this with many directors), “Doesn’t he fear that the actors he’s talking about will hear about this and feel bad?” In Cameron’s case, of course not! Who in the world matters but James Cameron?

My second reaction was: I’ve got to see that deleted scene. I had to see what God James Cameron thought of as terrible acting.

The Bad Acting Cameron Had No Control Over

Well, here it is, all 33 seconds worth:

He’s right: the acting is weak. But it isn’t bad. And I certainly don’t present it as, “Hey: look at the bad acting!”

Acting on film depends upon a whole lot more than just the actors. And most actors get it wrong a lot more than they get it right.

How the Acting Could Be Improved

This scene strikes me as awkward more than anything else. Certainly a few more takes and, you know, some direction, and a perfectly acceptable performance could have been squeezed out of these actors.

Notice something else about the scene: the blocking is terrible. The whole scene, in addition to everything else, is boring.

I think the problem is that James Cameron didn’t care about the scene and didn’t really try. The fact that he wants to blame the actors makes him a terrible person and it really makes me question him as a director. I get the idea he depends a lot on other professionals (especially editors) to make his films work (when they do).

Afterword

A similar dynamic is going on in a deleted scene from Remains of the Day. But James Ivory is enough of a man to place the blame on himself. He admits that he didn’t want to shoot the scene and only did it because Anthony Hopkins insisted. As I recall, he said, “I didn’t really try.”