Strangely, also just free for everyone on regular YouTube right now. It showed up as a rec in my feed. And then when I clicked into it, I see a bunch of other great movies that YT is also offering for free.
FYI for everyone.
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Is that a full red status bar underneath Heat?? 
ItâŠlooks like it? I never really rent things from YT, but I watched it a couple of years ago and I canât remember how. Maybe it turned up free back in 2022 also.
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Other free streams on YT right now: Pride and Prejudice, O Brother Where Art Thou, Bridge of Spies, Hoosiers, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Donnie Darko, The Firm, Barry Lyndon, original Mad Max, The Grapes of Wrath, Point Break.
Anyway, people should go have a look around if interested, just dial any of these up and then the sidebar populates with a bunch more options.
Is Tubi ad supported? Because it feels almost like movie laundering
Saw this one a few months ago. Worth it just for young Frances McDormand.
After watching, I realized this meant Iâve seen all of the Coen broâs movies (not counting the recent solo ones).
Iâm not sure why that is the case as Iâm not specifically a fan but I guess theyâre consistent enough to have (almost) never made a bad movie (and of course many very good ones).
(Meanwhile thereâs still some Lynch, Cronenberg, De Palma, Mann, and a lot of Coppola I havenât seenâŠ)
Re:Tubi, arenât the ads a huge turn-off ? We donât have it here but have a similar channel (plex) and I watched a few movies on there as they have a pretty good selection of e.g. westernâs and random old horror movies (like Tobe Hooperâs âeaten aliveâ, which is like TCM but with a crocodile instead of chainsaw, and also sadly not nearly as goodâŠ). But having ads interrupting every ~10 mins really took me out of the movie (not to mention adding 15% runtime), so Iâve kinda given up on it.
Iâll forever be grateful to this board for motivating me into watching a bunch of Van Damme movies a few years back. Anyway I just watched Cyborg (1989) where Jean-Claude is moving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, hunting/being hunted by a crew of âpiratesâ and trying to deal with traumatic flashbacks.
Obv not the most plot-driven movie (although it was labeled âbrainyâ by the genius Prime Video A.I.), but fun enough, and a higher production value than I would have expected.
Thereâs one scene in particular which makes it worth watching, words cannot do it justice but here goes : JCVD is in the sewers, in rough shape, being followed by a villain. We assume the villain is closing in, and we see close-ups of JC who seems to be waiting confidently. He is preparing to strike, with his face and upper body fully under a light source, so why is Villain not seeing him ?
(also JC is an apt abbreviation, given that he is literally crucified by the bad guys at one point. Thankfully he got more tricks than his older namesake and he simply brings the cross down with strong footkicks)
The basis of the plot is a woman cyborg (2 mins of screen time) carrying the cure for a devastating âplagueâ (20 secs of screen time) to scientists. This ends with her looking at Jean-Claude (going back to the wasteland) and saying
âPerhaps HE is the real cure for this worldâŠâ
Shame this never got a proper sequel !
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Zone of Interest
9/10
Zone of Interest is one of those movies that youâll only need to see it once, and in reality, thatâs how itâs intended. It doesnât really have a plot nor is attempting one and the point of it is how uninteresting, boring, and bureaucratic the Holocaust was. Itâs not the first movie to attempt to say that, but because movies need tension, catharsis, and resolution, most of the times the bureaucracy of the Holocaust is 25% of the theme, while The Nazis were Evil is 75% of the movie, with the attending morality. This movie inverts it, with all the evil pushed to the periphery of the screen, and the âjust a working stiff dad trying to juggle work and the familyâ being the main theme.
Thereâs no moral resolution to the movie, it just ends, with the implication for history that thereâs no great morality at play, we attach or donât attach that morality to the banality of what we are doing, whether itâs committing the Holocaust or cleaning gas chambers at the museum remembering the Holocaust.
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Re Tubi and ads - Iâd obviously prefer no ads, but (a) Tubi has a lot of stuff that isnât on any other streamer, so Iâll deal with the ads if itâs something I really want to see (if Iâm just âchannel surfingâ or looking for a passive watch, Iâll head somewhere else first) and (b) most of the subscription services are sliding (some) ads in now, so, while Tubi probably has more, itâs less of a differentiator.
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Jean Claude never got to be an A-list star like Stallone or Schwarzenegger, but his old action movies really hold up when you want a cheesy movie, love Double Team and Knockoff so much.
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Bloodsport and Kickboxer are top tier.
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His bizarro movie Enemies Closer had a great JCVD payoff if you want to try to complete the canon. The movie poster is funny for something itâs trying to cover. I donât know if the trailer will show it, so donât watch that if you want to avoid something that will be amusing.
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Yikes really ? Feels like a service adding ads would be an insta-cancel for me (or so Iâd like to think, in reality i might just pay the few extra bucks for the âpremiumâ i.e. same as before version)
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I only use Tubi as a last resort because of the ads. It seems like itâs obviously an algorithm on when they play as they come at really weird times. But I love that it exists and has such a large library.
Last movie I watched there was « Ă lâintĂ©rieur » which I guess is going through rights hell here cause it was distributed by Miramax or something in the US. Pretty funny to me that any random could watch that movie randomly on Tubi as it is one of the gnarliest movies out there.
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There are often 2 plans one with and one without ads. But some services (Amazon and peacock) put all the ads up front and donât interrupt the movie. Hulu they play during a few times like Tubi
At least in the US Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney, Peacock and Netflix definitely have ad-supported tiers (you can pay more for an ad-free package). Amazon and Netflix are relatively recent changes.
The problem with the services that are just now adding commercials is that they arenât lowering the subscription price. Instead, you can pay more to go ad-free. So they made the service worse for the same price when one of the big reasons so many people signed up in the first place was for zero commercials (I donât mind commercials as long as they arenât during a movie).
Double Impact baby
And, at least with Netflix (and maybe some of the others), quite a bit of content is not even available on the ad-supported tier. So, someone could sign up for Netflix with ads because they saw that a certain movie was âon Netflixâ and then still not be able to watch that particular movie. The overall consumer experience of using these services feels like it is declining in many ways.
When you think about it, itâs quite amazing what a turn streaming has taken. Hollywood, of which I am a part, just canât resist its greed. When the industry was in its death throes in 1999 due to insanely budgeted movies and bad decisioins, DVD swooped in and saved the day giving hundreds of millions of extra dollars to many movies. So, what did the studios do? They double, triple, and quadruple dipped into the consumersâ pockets to try to get a little bit more money out of each title until the consumer became hopping mad.
Once much of the top tier catalog titles were mined two, three, four times, these new-fangled formats HD DVD and Blu-ray decided to show up when very few people had HD TV sets, just genius Hollywood ideaing at its finest. HD DVD was clearly the better format, but Sony was not going to have another Betamax vs. VHS battle on its hands and effectively monopolized the format to win a battle no one needed to have.
The Golden Age of DVD was from 2003-2005, just an unreal amount of money pumping in and great material being produced for DVDs. 2005 was around the time HD DVD/Blu-ray began being tested and I think the first ones came out in 2006. Trivia fun fact is the first HD DVD title I worked on was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it looked amazing. What the studios didnât seem to realize (or care) was that they were cannibalizing their biggest cash cow. It was very easy for a consumer to see and hear the difference between a VHS and DVD, but it became harder for a lot of consumers to perceive those same differences in HD.
What didnât help was that the consumer bought up DVDs voraciously, but when Blu-ray finally won the battle, the consumers had stopped buying in real numbers like they had with DVD. Blu-ray, like VHS, was a renterâs formatâŠoops. The secondary issue was that the benefit of Blu-ray was mostly with modern movies, maybe post-1996 or so and that catalog wasnât great Bob. If you want to go deep into Hollywood history, the dividends werenât really there except with epic movies.
From 2006-2009, after Blu-ray pushed DVD out, I watched the industry begin swirling the drain. It was always obvious internet was the next step in the industry but I donât think streaming was a word at that time, at least for large scale material.
Whenever it was that Netflix got into streaming was when the game changed. It wasnât great when it started, with not many titles, but it grew quickly. Then, the studios got mad at Netflix and pulled the plug on them saying theyâd do their own thing instead (studios are again stupid at this stuff). Netflix said, âfine, weâll use our billions to create and buy our own new shows and moviesâ. The studios probably laughed until Netflix became big enough to buy any of them. Thatâs when they got petrified and decided to begin consolidating to circle the wagons around themselves to save themselves from Netflix.
In the movie/TV industry, it seems like every â9â year is a massive upheaval in the industry as the industry loses its collective mind at the end of each decade wondering what to do next. Usually the answer is mass layoffs. This time (2019-2020), the problem was solved by the pandemic. I was beginning to work on a lot of 4K titles, but I have no idea whether any of that really took off and there was something easier for the studios to exploit right around the corner. Streaming, which was still a few years out from being truly viable was forced to the forefront by practically every studio that wanted to roll out a service, due to everyone being stuck in their homes. Itâs still a âVHSâ delivery format, with no bonus material in the vast majority of cases, but it was cheap for consumers and you got access to a lot of good library titles (and sometimes even brand new movies).
Now the studios, rampant in competition with each other, quickly realized that this whole streaming thing is not what itâs cracked up to be. Why arenât we just licensing this stuff? Itâs so expensive and people donât stay subscribedâŠahhhhhh. What do we do? Jack up prices? Check. Remove stuff from the services? Check. Create ad/no-ad tiers? Check. Get rid of no-ad tiers? Starting. Raise the prices of those? Probably.
But we keep buying. The dream consumer to a streamer is one who subscribes to a service and never uses it. If you do it for 5 or 6 services, youâre amazing to them. If you prefer ad-supported like Tubi? Well, weâll just add another commercial or two to on top of however many commercials there already were in every movie until people stop watching. Then, weâll rinse and repeat.
I still have no idea why streamers donât do bonus material like DVDs/Blu-rays other than finding out no one watches it killing the industry completely. Itâs relatively cheap to make (especially when not printing to a physical format), and some people do like them. I can think of at least two directors (one whose name I remember one who I donât) who mentioned growing up on directorsâ commentaries and using them as a film school. Thereâs a lot of value in that stuff when done right, but the studios screw up a lot while trying to chase the almighty dollar. Weâre witnessing them screwing up a lot right now and itâs not hard to figure out who the biggest perpetrators are.
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