November 13, 2004

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  Thank You, Shara, for the Excellent Site Award. It’s really pretty. Shara is Ladyintime and she really has an imaginative, ever changing blog. I’m putting my “award” in the block below my links to the left with my oscar.

  
  

  

  
  

  Only kidding. I don’t have an oscar. (Oscar ® is the registered trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) But I am planning another MikeVideo “internet movie”. (Actually, it’s a full size version of a previous MikeVideo “internet movie”) This one will be relatively long, at about 45 minutes or an hour. I don’t know how I’ll host it. I can’t afford any more space on the net, but I’ll figure out a way. It will eventually be written to dvd. The previous internet movies were only warmups. The subject will be revealed in a later post. I’m in the middle of redesigning one of my website sections, and have four complete pages so far. This is just an “interim post” to thank Shara for the award, but I must admit that I haven’t designed a series of web pages in a long time. I use Dreamweaver, which is a very expensive and fantastic program. The version I have is a few years old, but I learned long ago that I just can’t afford to keep up with computer software since they seem to come out with one or two new versions a year.

  
  

  Speaking of movies, I was looking over the ElectricMovies site again the other day, noticing that it is another of the AllThingsMike websites which never got updated (at all, except for the ElectricMovies Diary blog, which I stopped writing when I set this blog up as the “AllThingsMike” blog.) I wanted sections for “Coming Soon” and “In Theaters Now” I set up the templates in 2001 but never added any content. Here are the logos for the “Coming Soon” and “In Theaters Now”.

  
  

  

  
  

  I haven’t seen a film in a theater for the longest time. I sort of stopped going when the matinee prices were raised to $8.00. And they make you sit through 30 foot tall television commercials played at ear shattering decibels. I’m enjoying my HDTV and my netflix subscribtion nicely.  Everything seems to be ridiculously high priced these days (like, gasoline, for instance) Yet our company has downsized and I haven’t had a raise for four years. I would like to see Taylor Hackford’s “Ray”. The biopic about Ray Charles. The buzz is on Jamie Foxx for an Oscar nom. Hackford directed one of my favorite films about music of all time, the excellent “Idolmaker” with Ray Sharkey. I predict that sometime in the near future, films (digital movie files) will be available simultaneously on  home theater, “beamed” through the internet, on conventional movie screens, and on video pay per view, all on the same day. The “media” will all be released at the same time.

  
  

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  “Back in the day” in the 60s and 70s, films were “exclusive” to one or a few theaters. If the film was popular, it could “play over” at the same theater for a long time. Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” stayed in the same theater on Hollywood Blvd for over a year.There also was no such thing as “home video” until the 80s.  In 1974. “Jaws” changed the way films were marketed. Blockbusters are meant to saturate the marketplace, hopefully take in a ton of cash the first weekend, and then show up again regularly as DVDs. (And DVD’s haven’t been around long. Laserdiscs were EXPENSIVE, and nobody collected movies on VHS tapes. In fact they were priced at over $70.00 a tape before the concept of “sellthrough” was engineered.) I think it’s time that the DVD version of a film is available at the same time as the theatrical release. I’ll probably get back into a theater in a while. It’s just than now that it’s been a couple of months, it looks like this is something else that I have had to ”give up” in order to maintain my budget.

  
  

   

  • 5:14 pm
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