All The World's A Stream
Am I seeing this right? Has movie stardom been
sacrificed on the altar of Netflix? I recall $20 million paychecks, plus gross
participation, for biggest names of the 80/90’s. How they must long for that
now, at least those who remember back that far. It looks to me like the star
system is all but kaput. And how do you define a Netflix movie? Some insist it
isn’t a ‘real’ movie at all, owing to absence from theatres. An entrenched
system prefers to deny the very existence of Scorsese’s The Irishman, even as viewers
call it 2019’s Best Picture. Purists say film is meant to be projected onto a
screen for delectation of a filled house, but look how often digital delivery
fouls up, and how dim the picture looks when downloads work. I saw The Irishman
at home, on a big screen, in a recliner, and am hanged if any theatre can match
that. The “audience experience”? --- I’ll take vanilla.

We know how movies were
convulsed by changes in the 50’s. Veterans on both sides of the camera felt
lost as their system took sleds. Transition is toughest for those used to,
dependent on, things as they were. What is happening now is beyond ordinary or
expected change. Scorsese says it’s a biggest switch since talkies came. He
also claims certain movies, very popular ones, “aren’t cinema.” That was taken
as an insult to not just shows in question, but their viewership. He was
dismissed by these as an old man out of touch. Never mind his just delivering a
could-be career best, and for Netflix. How much more “in touch” do you get? There
are others who ride the tide and prosper. Clint Eastwood, approaching ninety, does
fine work as a matter of routine, and reliably makes at least one out of any
three a surprise hit (and none a loss). Tom Hanks seems to have unerring sense
of what a modern audience wants, or at least what his mature fanbase prefers. I’ve
enjoyed Robert Redford’s latter work and was sorry when he announced finis to
acting. Despite these still bright lights that inspire us all to push on, I
can’t help thinking they, and all of talent still at work, will do so under net
that is streaming services, movie goers going no further than home seating or what
they watch in the palm of hands. But hold … isn’t that just variation on
nay-say going back to talkie transition, and endless points of perceived crisis
since?

It is understood that The Irishman would not
have been made had not Netflix kicked in. The necessary $159 million was
theirs, plus consent to length and bleak epilogue a bygone industry would not
have countenanced. Imagine if a Netflix had been around when Orson Welles or
Erich von Stroheim needed them, The Magnificent Ambersons welcome in whatever mood Welles chose, EvS free to let breathe his ruined masterpieces (Hey
folks, let’s order out pizza and binge-watch Greed tonight!). Appropriate then
that Welles would benefit from policy change that looks to guide most all of
filmmaking now, his The Other Side Of The Wind a rescue that would not have
happened any other way than it did (look at decades of attempt under the old
system). Forces, weakening ones, resist stream-product being nominated for
awards, or being recognized in a mainstream, accepted sense. To tremors we’re
seeing, add that of casting out of a Twilight Zone of trick effects, old actors
young again, DeNiro, Pacino presumably able to rat-tat forever, though sharp,
if pitiless, eyes, insist that while they look like forty, they move like
eighty. But here’s the essence: Actors don’t have to age out anymore. They may
not even have to stay alive (witness James Dean’s promised comeback). So has
the trick been tried on women? Think of actresses from the 80’s, 90’s, earlier
even, that could be back playing romance leads, maybe with partners
twenty-thirty years younger, born long after their leading lady. I’d gladly
drive out to see something like that, but again, are bells tolling for
brick-mortar spots to see movies?

Streams, it seems, have
become the Great Equalizer. No need for stars big enough to “open” a new film. Chances
are we’ll sample whatever Netflix premieres sometime over a given week, or months
(Julia Roberts has done a series … let’s sample five minutes). Last month was
bow for a new Eddie Murphy, My Name Is Dolemite. It is the most enjoyable time
I’ve had with one of his since 48 Hours and the first Beverly Hills Cop. Again
we can figure no one would have supported this project pre-Netflix, let alone
pay Murphy cash he used to get. But when did a lamestream industry last give
him something good as this? Plenty beyond Netflix are making films for phones
or whatever thimble we watch on, once super-names aboard for feature-length,
limited series, half hour comedy, each supplying employ where an obsolescent
system will not.

Old-timers need not sit home with scrapbooks …
I liked Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin in The Kominsky Method, two seasons so far, and there’s
Jennifer Aniston, age fifty, doing her thing on a stream galaxy I’ve not yet explored
(idea: make her twenty-five again for a quarter-century more of rom-cons, or
better yet, ten more Friends seasons with the principal six re-purposed
to former selves). Who can say “No TV For Me” as Gable or Bogart once did (boy,
do they seem more and more like ancient pharaohs), where television itself is so
fluid as to frankly need a new name (for all of time, as in none, watching, I
could wonder if the three “major” networks even broadcast anymore). We are heir
to truly democratic times, the level field so many in Hollywood profess to
want. Is there still big money in this game, other than the occasional supe-hero
that strikes lightning? (Answer: Yes, and Netflix is earning it) Change makes content-delivery of even recent past seem like
Sanskrit, but I suppose all of “old” media cries into a same bucket, and yet
it’s an exhilarating thing to be witness to. In view of what’s happened in a short
ten years, imagine where viewing will be after a next decade.