Robert David Sullivan

Who needs old movies when you’ve got HBO Go?

This week HBO announced that Americans will soon be able to watch the premium cable channel without subscribing to cable TV, getting good shows and awful movies through the Internet. Good news for me, since I already get only the most basic cable package plus HBO, foregoing sports, Duck Dynasty, and seizure-inducing news channels. (Did you hear that Crossfire got cancelled again?) Soon I can get rid of cable TV forever and only pay for channels and shows that I watch!

Still, I kind of wish Turner Classic Movies were being offered à la carte instead. I’m the last person to disrespect new TV; I love John Oliver and Veep, and I’m enjoying Netflix shows like Orange Is the New Black. But access to older movies (and, maybe, older TV shows) may be the big casualty of the move to streaming entertainment.

I’m one of the dinosaurs who still subscribes to mail-delivered DVDs through Netflix because that’s the only way to get most classic films after video stores disappeared. Last week I watched Taxi Driver for the first time on a Netflix DVD. Before the movie started, I had to sit through a commercial for a product of “the future,” called the DVD. So one of the most highly regarded films in history was on a piece of plastic about 20 years old. When someone steps on it before mailing it back, will Netflix replace it? How long before Netflix completely sheds its bothersome DVD service anyway?

The bargain bins in the few stores left that sell DVDs are eventually going away, Netflix is showing little interest in putting classic cinema online, and cable channels that show movies written for people over 12 may not be able to survive without being subsidized by customers who never watch them. Better get through that movie bucket list while you still can.

Not up for debate: Good TV has a better delivery system than good film

Slate's David Haglund has a #slatepitch-y piece titled with the imperative "Stop Saying That TV Is Better Than Movies These Days," and he's not just bugged about what has become a cliché. Haglund is a film buff, and he's touchingly protective of the cinema, a place that where I spent a good chunk of my childhood but almost never visit these days.

Haglund can't dismiss TV outright, so he instead charges critics who champion the box with an "attempt to narrow the range of what sophisticated viewers feel obligated to watch" (abetted, I assume, by magazine and website editors who are giving these critics more and more space.) TV critics, he writes, are not only intolerant, they're predictable:

Critics who claim that TV is better than the movies now would generally, it seems, prefer that there only be one [ascendent medium]. And when it comes to quality, TV remains, for the most part, a great simplifier. Ask nearly any professional critic — not to mention many amateur ones — for the best TV shows of the last decade or so, and you will get a very familiar list, starting with The Sopranos and ending, probably, with Breaking Bad, or maybe, say, Homeland or The Americans. You will almost certainly have heard of every show. You are not likely to encounter the sometimes bewildering variety that a collection of film critics is likely to present you with.

Elementary, The Following, and violence on TV: Is there a "CBS gene"?

New research suggests that conservatives and liberals use their brains differently, particularly in how they assess danger. That would help explain why they seem to just talk past each other on issues such as gun control. Maybe it also explains why people have different reactions to violent movies and TV programs. Is there a biological imperative — let's call it the CBS gene — to watch shows about serial killers?

Two studies released this winter make a connection between fear and political ideology. The gist is that "conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals." (See "Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans.*) So a violent crime drama may be a roller-coaster ride for a conservative but a snoozefest (or a comedy) for a liberal.

It's possible that these studies overstate things, but they make intuitive sense given how rarely people seem to change political views based on new information. ("The new research should make us more tolerant, not less, of political difference," Chris Mooney says of the born-that-way theory.)**

Boring Game of Thrones; luckless Lawrence, Mass.; missing out on culture

UPDATE: Hello, Game of Thrones fans! You've made this my most-viewed post of the year, even though I hardly say anything about the series. Take a look at my other TV posts and you'll see I don't hate everything. I even watch a lot of stuff before writing about it!

• HBO has already renewed the epic fantasy Game of Thrones, despite unimpressive ratings for Sunday's debut episode. Vulture reports that HBO is hoping for word-of-mouth to boost the ratings, as it did for True Blood. I skipped the show myself (instead catching up on The Killing and Justified), partly because fantasy is a tough sell for me and partly because of awful publicity photos like the one at right. Most people watch TV series for interesting characters (either fictional ones like the vampires on True Blood or historical figures like the ones on Rome), not for costume design or horse training. Everything about the marketing for Game for Thrones suggested that the show is about spectacle, not character, so I'm not surprised that it's having trouble reaching viewers unfamiliar with the books it's based on.

• Gabrielle Gurley has a good piece about the cursed city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the new issue of CommonWealth. What strikes me is how many of the mill city's disadvantages can be attributed to its small geographical size (seven square miles). As Gurley points out:

The wealthy men who made their fortunes in Lawrence did not invest in the city by founding museums or universities, or even by building mansions in exclusive pre­cincts like the elites did in Boston’s Back Bay or even in nearby Lowell’s Belvidere neighborhood. Immigrants un­wittingly followed this pattern. Since Lawrence, a city of about seven square miles, did not have many areas with the spacious homes and yards that newly successful workers wanted, those that made it moved to Andover, North Andover, Methuen, or elsewhere.

Lawrence's bite size also means that it's stuck with a very weak tax base, heavy demands on social services, and increasing ethnic segregation (it's now about 70 percent Latino). It's a core with no apple around it. The sensible thing would be to consolidate Lawrence with some of the surrounding towns to create a city with a more stable economic base, but such a thing is unthinkable in New England, so Lawrence has to rely on state aid (including the recent "rescue package" of up to $35 million in loans).

• NPR's Linda Holmes tells us to just accept the fact that we're never going to consume all the culture that's expected of us:

Surrender ... is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn't have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, "I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I'm supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn't get to."

Holmes prefers this sense of surrender to what she calls "culling," or ignoring entire art forms or genres as part of an "well, I don't care about that anyway" defense mechanism against missing out on stuff.

I suppose I do some culling; I just don't care about reality TV shows or sci-fi fiction, and I'm never going to get into heavy metal music. But if someone whose judgment I trust raves about a particular example of an art form I don't care about, I'm going to watch or listen to it. So I love the movie Tremors and Janelle Monáe's dance song "Tightrope" (to take two very random examples) even though I'm poorly versed on horror flicks and contemporary R&B music. It was just fate that I stumbled onto them, and I'm fine with that.

"Waiting for 'Superman'": The feel-bad-about-being-American movie of the year

Last night I saw Waiting for "Superman," the documentary about education reform that officially opens in Boston this Friday. Unlike most American films, it's not a chore to sit through and it's full of memorable images. A few impressions:

--Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim uses frequent close-ups of the colored balls in a lottery machine, and it's not just a metaphor. Most major school districts in the US have a handful of innovative schools that offer escape from the "dropout factories" that predominate in urban areas. They go by different names (charters, magnets, KIPP schools, and even boarding schools), but they all have many times more applicants than desks, so kids are usually selected at public lottery drawings. In Superman, we witness a few cheers and a lot of shell-shocked faces at these events. It's like watching the steerage passengers on the Titanic draw straws to see who gets one seat on a lifeboat. But I suppose this ritual is a good thing for state governments: It sends the message that the best way for families in poor families to turn their lives around is through sheer luck. So keep buying those scratch tickets! 

--The film has a great animated sequence on the annual "Dance of the Lemons" in one urban school districts. This refers to the end of the school year, when principals try to transfer their bad teachers to other schools -- the risk, of course, being that their replacements will be even worse, since they were the lemons that other principals were trying to get rid of. This is an argument against the practice of tenure, under which it's practically impossible to fire teachers in public schools who have logged a minimal amount of time on the job. Guggenheim does not show a lot of sympathy for teachers' unions, but people who don't have the benefit of tenure -- that is, practically anyone who's not an educator, a Supreme Court justice, or an occupant of rent-controlled housing -- are likely to share his prejudice.

If a movie isn't worth seeing twice, it's not worth seeing once

PEN America's David Haglund has some thoughts on the rules surrounding "spoilers" in critiques of movies and TV. Here is the last line of his piece on The Awl:

And if a work of art can be "spoiled" when we know the ending, it can't really have that much to say about life, can it? 

I agree, and he makes a good point about Citizen Kane, though I want to give Orson Welles the benefit of the doubt, preferring to see the ending as something of a joke on moviegoers expecting a tidy resolution.

I avoid spoilers for TV series that are buzzworthy among critics or among my acquaintances because it's fun to speculate, between episodes, on where the series is going next. For movies (and plays), I almost feel at a disadvantage not knowing the ending because I can't tell how effective the filmmaker is at reaching that ending. I can forgive a boring film more easily than one with a twist ending that, upon reflection minutes after leaving the movie theater, negates almost everything that came before it.