MOVIE LOTTERY

Online movie rental, particularly in the “old school” way in which we still do it, can be a bit of a lottery sometimes. Unless you are so terribly focussed upon such things that you are constantly bothering to check the site in that manner which might suggest that you’re quite possibly suffering from some form of “media disease” yourself, in general, you are unlikely to know which film you are watching until the envelope pops through your door and onto your doormat (if the postie is behaving himself at any rate) and you tear open the envelope to be faced with a shiny disc that either prompts you to say “I can’t wait to watch that…” or “Oh, I don’t really fancy that…” or “Did YOU put this one on the list, dear…?”

Still, it’s our own fault. If we had the equipment or could be bothered to make the switch, I’m sure things could and would be far more to our liking, but we don’t and we haven’t and so this strange twice-weekly (and relatively harmless) game of “Russian Roulette” continues, and there really is no-one else we can blame. After all, all of the choices which eventually get sent to us are choices that we have made and added to the list, but, well you know…

Moods change. Ideas can transmute over time. Something that sounds “interesting” can suddenly seem less so when you are faced with the prospect of spending an actual evening sitting through the thing.

In the old days things were both far simpler and far more complicated. Simpler because we had video rental stores and, if you fancied watching a movie one evening (because “there was nothing else on worth watching…” on the three, four or five other channels available to you), you strolled around to the store, flashed your membership card and walked home carrying your box of delight, watched it, and then had the tricky little problem of remembering to return it – rewound – early enough to not incur some kind of a penalty.

It was also far more complicated because of the sheer vastness of choice. You would scan the various display shelves and either find far too many films that you fancied watching that evening or absolutely nothing at all that you wanted to watch or hadn’t already seen. This could turn into a very long process indeed if there was a group of you and the needs of the many seldom trumped the opinions of the one. This could lead to very long and heated debates and could actually end up being a “night out” in itself.

But “online movie rental” has changed all that. You can “surf” the lists at your leisure and add to them, and you can even “prioritise” them, but for those of us still dependent on the “postal” version of this game, there’s still a bit of vagueness about when you will actually get to see those choices and what’s actually going to turn up next.

When it does, well… Sometimes you really “aren’t in the mood” for a film, even if it’s one that at some point you decided that you really wanted to see it. Sometimes they are just too long and the “school night” you’re currently living through is already too far gone for you to sit down and watch three hours of a film unfold.

This can lead to a couple of additional issues. There’s the knotty problem of “Rental Guilt” when the envelope sits accusingly in front of the TV for weeks reminding you that you haven’t watched it yet and time is ticking away, or the grudging “I suppose we’d better watch it then…” evenings where nobody gets the best out of someone’s epic… and which can lead to the harshest of judgements like “What did you think of that?” “Oh, it was all right, I suppose…” and so on…

Another phenomenon of this kind of rental scheme is the strange need to feel as if you are “getting your money’s worth” by dropping all of your other plans and watching the films as soon as you get them just so you can send them back the very next day and be sure that another one is on the way at the earliest possible opportunity.

Anyway, the point of all this, I suppose is to let you know that, whilst the rest of the sport-watching world was obsessing about the middle “Golden Weekend” of this year’s Olympic Games, we had delivered to us the movies “The Woman in Black” starring Daniel Radcliffe, and “Coriolanus” starring and directed by Ralph Feinnes.

Both were, of course, perfectly fine and, dare I say, impressive movies and both had roots, at least, in theatrical productions. Whilst I know that Susan Hill’s novel is the main source material for the former, it is the spooky stage version with which I am most familiar.

I’m not quite convinced that the movie version of “The Woman in Black” is quite as effective or disturbing as the theatrical version, to be honest, which rather surprised me, as, well, if you usually compare hokey old stage effects to big budget movies, the former seldom holds up all that well.

All I can say is that I felt genuinely disturbed by the stage version for days after the two occasions on which I saw it and, whilst the movie version did find me looking at shadows more warily and creeping into the dark attic a little more cautiously that night, I slept pretty soundly afterwards.

“Coriolanus” was just a very impressive, effective  and, in part disturbing piece of work “based upon” the original play by William Shakespeare and keeping a lot of the dialogue intact, even when spoken by Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow. Setting it in a modern war setting just made it resonate all the more somehow and it passed a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon quite, well I shouldn’t say “happily” but, ah, you know.

Both movies certainly passed the “It was all right that…” test and are now tucked back in their envelope and ready to be posted back.

I wonder what we’ll get next…?