It’s award season here in SoCal. It used to be theaters would be reserved for members of the Academy to screen potential Oscar nominees. So last century!
Now it’s all done on DVD (also last century, but beside the point right now). They are called ‘screeners.’
My secretive friend from the Valley, being a member of the Academy, has a pile of screeners on the dining room table. Think Bit Torrent, but with physical media!
Each DVD is visually encoded. Should a copy appear online in any form it can be traced.
No problem. I watched two on my laptop last night: Flight and Zero Dark Thirty.
Flight first. A disappointment to me. I wanted more a techno movie. Instead it was mainly about Denzel Washington’s character’s alcoholism.
Actually, both movies were somewhat disappointing because neither was what was sold in the trailers and commercials. You see that too often. They sell the movie that should have been made, not the one that was.
Zero Dark Thirty is a fictionalized account of the capture of Osama bin Laden. You know the Special Forces scenes in the commercial? That’s about three quarters of the way in!
The movie was a sales pitch for the efficacy of torture. Maybe torture works. I’d rather believe it didn’t.
Having read Peter Bergen’s excellent book I was ready for a different story than I got.
It’s a tall pile. I’ll watch more tonight.
Oh, and I’d like to thank the members of the Academy for this honor.