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Life, Reviews

A saga of cinema, 2018 style: MoviePass, Sinemia, and beyond

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Because 2018 has to be #extra in every way, today’s post centers on the rise and fall of the cinema discount services….as experienced by me. 😉

A Saga of Cinema,
OR How I Wish MoviePass Had Actually Worked because Sinemia is Trash

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ACT I: MoviePass, Enter Stage Left

Oh, MoviePass! How you stole our hearts a year ago with your discounted dreams and your completely unrealistic, unsustainable business model!

netflix-for-movie-theaters-f8018310f6279e8dThe wonder of an idea truly too good to be true: $9.99 a month for all the movies you could see (1 per day, with no repeats). The promise held for the first half of 2018. We saw 10 movies in January alone, most of them Oscar contenders. It was a new age of cinema in our little corner of South Carolina!  We saw art films, indie films, action movies, cheap thrillers, and stupid comedies I would have never set foot in a theater to see.

Vice ran a really neat farewell piece a few months ago, offering anecdotes from MoviePass subscribers who detailed how they’d used the service to fill lonely times in their lives or escape the crushing poverty of urban life in an expensive city.  The stories resonated with me as I scrolled down the page on my iPhone during a late evening media binge.

Vice: MoviePass is dead but not forgotten

I remember the thrill of seeing that red, shiny card when it appeared in my mailbox after an excruciatingly long wait. (Seriously, it took like 2 weeks to get the thing.)  The app was a bit fiddly, but when it was ON, it was great.

Our local Regal regarded us with suspicion, demanding a driver’s license for any ticket purchase. Why? We were handing the theater $16-20 in ticket sales every time we went to see a movie, and that money was 90% coming from MoviePass rather than my pocket. In fact, we bought more beer and popcorn at that Regal in 6 months than I’ve ever bought (or ever will) because we weren’t dropping $20 just to walk in the door of a theater.

If American cinema chains die off in the next 10 years, it won’t be due solely to Netflix and home theater installations. Chains will die because they refuse to lower the costs of entry.  MoviePass proved that people will come see movies in droves if you make the ticket affordable. The profit margin on popcorn and soda is IMMENSE compared to the profit on an individual movie ticket.

A few theater chains realized they could adapt this model for themselves, but one of the joys of MoviePass was its agnosticism. It didn’t matter if the movie I wanted to see was playing at Regal or AMC or the oddball local chain with three theaters in North Georgia. As long as it was on the app, I had only one thing to manage. And for the most part, MovePass’s app and card worked well.  Until….

Act II: Exit MoviePass, carried on a stretcher

Nothing gold can stay, as Emily Dickinson wisely observed.

MoviePass’s demise this summer was one of my favorite social media disasters.

Perhaps the only good entertainment given to us in 2018 comes from watching angry Twitter users light companies on fire for poor customer service. And so it was with MoviePass, when the pile of cash finally burned down (seriously, I didn’t know there was so much money to burn, and I don’t know why I can’t get access to it for my own business ventures, you know?) and they had to cut people’s options.

This went about as well as you’d expect, and at least we all got to laugh about it…..while crying a bit, because the days of “all you can eat movies for $10/mo” was coming to the exact conclusion we all foretold.

Our movie binge slowed down in July, which was ok since honestly, nearly everything playing in the theaters was crap. And we had lots of Netflix to catch up with…..

Act III: Sinemia, maybe to the rescue?

So what is a MoviePass lover to do after the breakup? How do we assuage the sadness of bleeding $9 a ticket for any local movie showing, unless you happen to be free at 2pm on a Tuesday?

There aren’t many other subscription options out there, but after doing some research, we decided to try Sinemia.  The Family Plan offered 12 months of service, 3 pairs of tickets to any movie at nearly any theater (2D), for about $22 a month. That’s $3.67 a ticket plus surcharges (which, turns out, are $2-3 per ticket every time). Still a bit cheaper than our local theater for evening showings, and definitely cheaper than big-city prices when we roll up to Greenville for movies that don’t open near us.

Cool.

Except…..

My Sinemia Experience: A Side Story

Round 1: September Signup

Basically simple. Downloaded the app. Bought a subscription plan. Logged in, set up account, checked theater listing.

Can’t use the service till I’m set up for Sinemia “Cardless,” so we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

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It took like TWO WEEKS for Sinemia to set up our account for careless use, which is the only option provided for subscribers these days. (I think. It’s pretty hard to get real information from Sinemia due to general disorganization in the app and a shocking lack of detail on their website.)

Round 2: Let’s try it out!

Early October.  Movie #1 of three goes down just fine, and we watched something….can’t remember what….hadn’t been to the theater since mid-August.

The user experience was clunky, but it worked. You buy a ticket in advance using one of the other ticket services (atom, Fandango) and Sinemia generates a one-time-use credit card number for the transaction, then bills your card on file for the “convenience fees” and “service charges.”

I’m beginning to realize the pain of advance ticketing. Is it really worth $2-5 just to buy a ticket on my phone instead of with cold, hard cash at the theater? Why is convenience so damn expensive? Get with it, America!

Round 3: I knew that was going too well …

And then it all went to hell. lol

IMG_0145In late October, I tried to buy tickets for movie #2 of the month (we had to use our 3 pairs of tickets by 11/2 or they’d expire). No ticket service would accept my Sinemia number, and my own credit card company panicked when a bank in Turkey tried to charge $3 (for the convenience fees).

Wait. Why is Sinemia using a bank in Turkey?

Um, no. International charges are death. My bank and credit card companies would rather lower my interest rate than ever let me buy something with an international origin. You should see the gymnastics I go through if I back a non-US project on Kickstarter.

Email #1: late October

There’s no Sinemia support. It’s laughable, really. If you click the “Premium Support” button in the app, a pop up tells you to email their support account. It’s not even a live email ink!  Hilarious AND infuriating AND incompetent -all at once!

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So I emailed them and asked for a refund. I’m not paying for a service I can’t use, and their app is a literal mess.

Crickets.

Email #2: The Saga Continues

A month later (last week), I emailed again with a firm “refund the rest of my annual subscription because your service and app are crap.”  THAT got a response. (I was nicer in the actual email, but my patience is wearing thin.)

The CSR explained a couple things to try and I decided to give it another whirl for some movies last weekend. (I gotta see Ralph Wrecks the Internet!)

Round 4: A continued failure

We tried twice last weekend to use the Sinemia Cardless option to buy tickets in advance (because that’s really our only option, since I don’t have a physical Sinemia card).  In both cases, we got a payment-not-accepted error at the vendor sites.

This was happening to a bunch of people this weekend – Twitter was full of folks trying to reach out to Sinemia for support.  Sinemia emailed back to me (and said on Twitter), “wait 20 minutes before using your virtual card number.”

What? 

I’m in another round of emails with support….because this just isn’t working.

Update, 12/5: Sinemia just announced the return of their physical debit card, thanks to subscriber outrage over the failures of their careless system.  Downside, it costs $15 to order one of those cards, so it’ll take about 5 movies before subscribers see the savings (from convenience fees at atom or Fandango). Also, given the snail-pace that Sinemia support seems to follow, I can’t imagine having this card in my hand anytime before January. :/

Still, if their card will work like the MoviePass card did, this might make Sinemia a valid option for us – though I’m not sure the savings are worth the hassle.

Epilogue: After Sinemia & MoviePass

With MoviePass dead and Sinemia a hateful mess with poor customer support, what’s an aspiring moviegoer to do as we head into a new year? What lessons can we learn?

  1. I wish MoviePass and Sinemia would merge. Sinemia should run the subscription models – because they’re not bad – and broker contracts with theaters.   MoviePass should take over the app and card/payment management.  I know MoviePass had some outages, but overall their app and user experience were 10,000x better than the Sinemia app.
  2. App designers and UI/UX professionals should study the Sinemia app as an example of horrific user interface design.  It’s some of the worst I’ve dealt with.
  3. The market is ripe for discounted theater ticket subscriptions. If anything, the MoviePass social experiment proved that we common folk are tired of shelling out $10-$16 PER TICKET to see a film at the box office.  I would love to sit in a theater full of people, sharing an experience and laughing (or cringing) together. But I’m not going to sacrifice the grocery budget (or future vacation funds) to do so.   Takeaway:  MoviePass put a lot more butts in seats at the theater in the first half of 2018, and theaters should take note and lower prices
  4. The TomatoMeter — which distributors hate — is more important than ever. Under MoviePass, I saw all kinds of films that I wouldn’t have paid full price for.  I didn’t care if the Rotten Tomatoes score was meh, because I wasn’t out a wad of cash. Theaters should learn from this – maybe offer bigger discounts on movies entering their last release days.  Seriously, the theater industry deserves whatever pummeling they get.  MoviePass was a gift and they reacted with acrimony.  And film production companies should note that RT isn’t responsible if their movie is too crappy to earn my dollars. *coughs* Robin Hood *coughs*

 

As for us, we’ve pared back our theater expenditures again and I’m likely going to fight Sinemia for a refund unless their service improves.

And sigh a sad sigh about the one good thing that happened in the first half of 2018 that we lost anyway.

Update: February 2019

We’ve had another run-in with Sinemia’s “customer service,” though I use that term lightly. It’s painful to use that term for an email address that no one seems to check.

We ended up keeping Sinemia in November because they finally updated their app and the service sort-of worked.  It all went to hell again a couple weeks ago when I checked in for a movie in the app (as requested) and saw it confirm. The WiFi/reception was spotty because it’s a theater, but I did check in.

Cue my surprise two weeks later when I’ve been charged a $22 penalty for not checking into a movie. WTF.  I *did* check in.  And even moviePass with its ridiculous “take a photo of your ticket” ploy to annoy people out of using their service (I’m not kidding; they admitted it) issued a warning in the app if you didn’t upload the stub. They didn’t slap you with the equivalent of a month’s service charge. This is bullshit.

Fighting again for a refund of the charge and/or the service. Pretty sure anything we save through Sinemia is not worth the effort.

Reviews, Story

Finding Flannery among the Three Billboards

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Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Sermon on loving your enemies  (link)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a top contender for an Oscar this season,  in a field with several other great films like Get Out (perhaps the best horror movie I’ve ever seen) and Dunkirk (chilling sound design + interesting manipulation of the timeline in the storytelling), this festival darling has gotten a lot of attention since the turn of the year.

Three Billboards has sparked controversy too regarding whether it exhibits blind spots about race and police brutality. I figured I’d have to wait for rental since the film is completely off-market here in the South for the types of movies that open at our theaters, so I was pleasantly surprised it finally opened here.

Three Billboards is a raw film, a brutal and unflinching observation of human nature at war with injustice.  ]

Briefly (spoilers): the plot centers on Mildred, a working-class single mother whose teen daughter was raped, murdered, and burned seven months ago in a little fictional town in Missouri. Mildred gets the idea to put up three huge billboards calling out the town’s police chief for not cracking the case, leaving her daughter’s killer at large and herself with a gaping hole and a lot of anger.  The film is told through the perspectives of several characters, mostly Mildred and the police chief Willoughby and his deputy Dixon.

In an early shot, a supporting character reads from Flannery O’Conoor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The homage to Flannery’s work in this film is unmistakable.  Martin McDonaugh, the writer and director, is Irish, but he’s clearly a fan of Southern Gothic themes.  And I’d say her stamp on this film is critical to understanding the story rightly, lest the viewer misunderstand the layers of irony at work. Were Flannery alive today and writing film scripts, I’d easily say this one were hers.

Why is the film controversial? Well, language for one. Mildred in particular is quite unhindered in her vulgarities, caring little whether her language or behavior offends her audience. For her, the injustice of an unsolved brutal crime makes social “rules” irrelevant.  In one scene, she screams at high schoolers who mock her son and wear their parents’ judgmental stance as their own. Her words escalate to physical violence. It’s a “balls to the wall” moment, but not without cost. When grief and anger drive one’s actions, a lot of people get hurt who don’t actually deserve it.  That’s a central point of this film, one that the writer put on a billboard so you couldn’t forget it.

Some have criticized the film for offering only a white woman’s POV of crime and injustice, when the narrative repeatedly refers to Deputy Dixon’s racism and brutality as a cop without providing details. Several times he is accused of or admits to “torturing” a black suspect in custody but this part of his story is left unexamined. Some have suggested this is a flaw: Is not the systemic injustice of police racism worse than an individual mother’s loss? Black bodies are threatened with violence almost constantly, yet we are asked to watch this particular white mother rage at her daughter’s murder.

I think that criticism is missing the point here. In Flannery’s Southern Gothic storytelling, the reader is usually presented with a whole set of character flaws to consider, operating as a backdrop to egregious evil that’s not always showing up holding a sign to announce its presence. In Three Billboards, the problem driving the story is Mildred’s relentless drive for justice. But that’s not the only problem in Ebbing that needs to be addressed.  I don’t think it’s a flaw in the writing that McDonaugh expects his viewers to recognize evil when they see it (like a racist deputy) and draw their own conclusions – all while wrestling with whether individuals suffer more because of individual crimes or systemic ones.

Those same critics suggest that Dixon is offered a cheap redemption arc in the second half of the film and this makes his racism all the more inexcusable for the writer to gloss over. Dixon isn’t a good man – indeed, any good man (or woman) is hard to find in this town.  He’s also a product of a racist and uncaring upbringing (highlighted via the scenes with his mother, who seems more hateful and racist and cruel as Dixon). But every human possess the power of choice, and Dixon uses his in the second half of the film to express a bit of sympathy, perhaps a desire for real justice for Mildred’s daughter.

Again, I think the viewers who charge that Dixon is given a redemptive arc he didn’t earn  are missing what McDonaugh is trying to do – and why he made sure we saw Flannery O’Connor’s name and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” on the screen at the very outset of the story.  In the end, Dixon and Mildred drive off to execute vigilante justice – should they even get that far.  Is that actually justice?  Another great question, one that we aren’t allowed to ignore.  As a viewer, I do feel better about Dixon, a bit, by the end, but by no means do I like him or sympathize with his unemployment and broken  life. Nor do I feel comfortable with Mildred, who so thoughtlessly injures the people around her as she lashes out. Her suffering does not give her permission to inflict pain on others.

Mildred’s actions don’t solve the murder. They just bring more pain. At first, we stand with her against the townspeople who hate her for making them remember this crime. They hate her for implying it’s the police chief’s fault. Woody Harrelson makes Sheriff Willoughby  pretty likable without letting us forget that he’s not without blame here too. Like Mildred, his own story is both tragic and sympathetic. His suicide complicates matters for Mildred, after her public shaming of him and disregard for his terminal cancer diagnosis. In his final words to her, he seems to forgive her for it. Should his daughters be so gracious toward her? Or would that be cheap mercy?

O’Connor’s unflinching and brutal stories of Southern self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and Grace are not for the faint of heart. While I would say her themes are some of the most Christian that we can find in early 20th century American literature, many of my Christian friends cannot stand to read her. They find the violence and grotesque characters in her story too off-putting to be “proper.”  They miss – as do some of the viewers of Three Billboards – the truth that Grace is sharp. It has teeth and claws and a backbone. Real Grace, the kind that can undergird Cross-death and self-sacrifice, changes the receiver as well as the giver. It’s nothing like the cheap religiosity which permeates Southern culture, where God and guns and college football and family pride are worshiped at individual shrines. Cultural Christianity – the fake kind – has little beyond platitudes to offer Mildred in her aching grief and searing anger.

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a dysfunctional family goes on vacation, gets lost thanks to the self-centered and foolish grandmother, and falls prey to a murderer on some backwater Georgia country road. The killer and the grandmother engage in one of the most memorable fictional discourses about existential good vs evil and human choices. She all but begs for the killer to find the good in his nature to spare them. He’s far more prepared than she to identify her Pharisaism and denies her mercy. The story title warns us there won’t be any good people in this tale, and there aren’t.

In Three Billboards, Mildred seeks justice for her daughter because it’s been denied thus far and she’s desperate. Does she also see her own flaws and own them honestly? We see flashbacks that any parent could relate to- and feel guilty about. She’s not really a great parent, before or after her daughter died.  But she also didn’t ask for her daughter to be raped, murdered, and burned. Nobody deserves that.

We see Mildred at the outset of the film as heroic. We’re expecting a to like this “nasty woman” on her quest, hard as nails and relentless. McDonaugh turns our expectations sideways, making us squirm as we realize we can’t feel entirely sympathetic for anybody on the celluloid before us. The dividing line between good and evil runs through us, not around. Southern Gothic writing – even when written by an Irishman – is always at its best when holding a mirror before our faces, forcing us to see humanity as it really is.

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Biography

The Backstory: Reborn for the 4th of July

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My Backstory series offers stories about my upbringing and background. You can find the whole series under the category “Biography,” if you’re interested.

When I was a teenager, I watched Born on the Fourth of July when it finally showed on TV. I doubt my parents would have let me watch it if I’d asked them for permission, but they weren’t around at the time and I thought it was a war film, so I watched it. The story disturbed me deeply for a long time.

I gaped at the screen as the soldiers shot up a Vietnamese village in the haze of war (and bad decisions). I watched as Ron Kovic, the central character, fell apart after the war was over, screaming in rage at his disability and his broken life. We didn’t talk about PTSD in my household. My dad considered the Vietnam vets ‘soft’ – too fragile to handle war like his Korean buddies or World War II relatives had done.  I didn’t know how to process Kovic’s protest at the RNC – in my life, Republicans were good guys (though my parents’ relationship with the political parties was a lot more complicated than I realized). It was a provocative film that hit me when I wasn’t at all used to being provoked.

I was raised in a sheltered environment by parents with strongly conservative viewpoints on most issues. B4J challenges the American mythos surrounding war, military service, and veterans even as it plays into the stereotype of Vietnam vets as baby killers and mentally ill.

At the time I had no background or preparation for handling the ideas that I had encountered, whether it was the sex, the language, or the attack on the simplistic view of America as entirely good and right (always on the winning side, always the righteous side). And I didn’t feel like I could really talk to my parents about it, since some of what bothered me so deeply was the content that they would have banned me from seeing in the first place.

So it lodged deeply in my mind and I tried not to think about it, though the ideas would surface occasionally and create an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It would be decades before I learned enough history to come to grips with how Vietnam altered  American consciousness of the late 20th century; how film is its own rhetorical form, demanding assessment and critique and a recognition of the storyteller’s own bias; and how Americans tell ourselves myths about our own heroism to bury our national guilt that we should be feeling about our own nation’s imperialism and oppression.

Kovic reminded me of one of my brothers’ friends, a man whose name I’ve since forgotten, who showed up at our house one day in a black T-shirt, aviator sunglasses, and a cowboy hat.  Visitors were rare, so this hard-drinking, hard-smoking man stood out. He was older than my brother by at least a decade or two, and nothing was ever quite right for him after his Vietnam service. My dad closed the door after they left and felt sorry for the guy, hoped he’d find his way eventually. The vet was dead (as I recall) a few months later, the victim of a collision with a semi that sheared off the top of his convertible.

My relationship with America grows complicated as I grow older. A nation is more than the sum of its citizens.  I now begin to understand those few places in the Gospels where Jesus talks about evaluating nations (dividing sheep from goats) as if that is a separate process from judging individuals.

I choke up at a booming fireworks display overtop “God Bless the USA” even as I tremble in anger at our callous destruction of Native peoples because our leaders believed God and political power were on the side of our “manifest destiny.” We like to paint ourselves as the hero in every picture, perhaps because America is barely a teenager in nation-years, and we’re too stubborn or arrogant to listen to the older nations around us.  My Italian grandfather fled one of those old nations to start anew in America a century ago, where he drank heavily and beat his wife and abused my dad who grew up in abject immigrant poverty. Yet here I am, a college graduate, thanks to the sacrifice of my parents.

With the upstart hubris of a Silicon Valley start-up whiz kid, America  blazed forward in the 20th century – and we’re unwilling to admit in the daylight that we might have gotten a head start over the rest of the developed world by not hosting two bloody and destructive world wars on our own soil, as if our own wisdom and not geographical realities had the most to do with it.

I’m proud of my nation and appalled, and those two feelings churn in my stomach – ever more so in 2017, this ridiculous, stupid year. Perhaps I’ll rewatch Born on the Fourth of July this holiday weekend to see if its effect stemmed from my adolescent naiveté or the power of its story. This time around, I know too much about the world to be shocked. I’ll just be sad.

Reviews

Age of Ultron. Go see it.

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The newest Avengers movie. There’s been banter about how it stacks up to the last one, whether you should go see it.  Here are my 5 reasons you should go see Avengers: Age of Ultron.

  1. Joss Whedon directed and wrote the script. Therefore, the plot holds together well, the snappy and funny dialogue makes you enjoy the quiet scenes, and the overall pacing is spot-on. With Joss, you’re never sitting there thinking, “Man, my butt is kind of getting tired.” [That’s the best test for story delivery in a long film: If I realize I’ve been there long enough for my butt to get tired, it’s too long. Or too slow. James Cameron and Avatar, I’m looking at you.]
  2. Nothing on this planet is as snarky and delicious as Robert Downey, Jr. playing Tony Stark. The swagger. And in this movie, Stark really effs up. So it’s snark with a shot of “Oh shit,” a position of vulnerability that makes snarkiness really defensive and (in this case) interesting.
  3. James Spader portrays Ultron, who is digitized in the film by mo-capping Spader (and it’s him delivering all the lines of course). Pure delight. Perhaps the only person in the world who can out-snark Tony Stark. If it weren’t a superhero action movie, you might find Ultron a little kitchy…. but it IS a superhero movie.
  4. For a second film in a trilogy, this is a very strong story. It’s thoughtful, delving into the back stories of some the lesser known characters, delivering more empathy for Bruce Banner/The Hulk, and forcing everyone to ask questions about intelligence, creation, and the way we humans react irrationally to our fears. And how fear of terrorism can often trump good sense. In other words, there are brains behind all the special effects actions scenes of New York getting wrecked.
  5. Everybody walked out of the first Avengers movie saying, “That was awesome!” and also “Who is that Hawkeye guy and why is he an ‘Avenger’ if all he’s got is a bow and arrow? What is this, Legolas from LOTR gets transported to the 21st Century?”  And as someone who never read the comic books, I said all of those things. Age of Ultron acknowledges the army of us who like Hawkeye (it’s Jeremy Renner after all) but wonder if he was the charity addition to the Avengers to meet some kind of weird affirmative-action quota for the superhero world (“Your stories must include 10% non super-people!”)  Joss knows this, and he gives us a rich story for Hawkeye, a contrast between the super-people with their detached lives and the rest of us.

I don’t expect to see this installment 3 times in the theater like I did with the first Avengers movie, but it’s worth a second watch on the big screen and later on Blu-Ray or Netflix.

And all of us need to drop to our knees and thank the Fates that Joss Whedon got to put his hands on these films. All of the Marvel films have to live up to this standard now of excellent writing, pacing, and dialogue. They’ve got a decade’s worth of stories laid out, so even with the departure of Whedon from the series, I’m hopeful.