They are not movies, but they are not called movies, but I am calling them movies. I did not watch them any differently than I watch movies on my computer. They are movies, as far as I am concerned.
First I watched Kevin Spacey's House Of Cards. I was mesmerized. There is no way you could do justice to the material in a two hour movie. It had to play out. I binge watched. Then I watched Amitabh Bachchan's Yudh. I will watch anything with Amitabh Bachchan in it. And I just finished watching 24, Season 4, all 24 episodes of it. I binge watched. Such superb treatment of the material.
Hollywood is society's imagination wing. It helps process scenarios.
I have become a huge fan of 20 hour long movies. Bring it on.
GigaOm: For Netflix, a Risky Bet on Original Programming: Netflix is reportedly in talks to score its first original programming, bidding against cable networks like HBO for the rights to a new project called House of Cards that would star Kevin Spacey and be directed by David Fincher. ..... ected, that still put the price tag for a single series at about half the amount that Netflix has been paying for entire libraries of long-tail content ...... Instead of relying on premium cable networks like Starz and Epix to stream their on-demand content, or waiting years for popular titles to fall out of the pay TV window, Netflix bet big on a deal with indie studio Relativity Media that would give it exclusive access to the indie studio’s movies. It looks like that bet will pay off, as The Fighter, with Academy Award winners Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, will soon appear exclusively on Netflix, rather than going to one of the cable networks....... The overwhelming sentiment in Hollywood seems to be that Netflix will get the scraps that no one else wants. “What used to be called ‘reruns’ on television is now called Netflix,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes has been equally dismissive in the past, saying that he believes Netflix will be a place for low-value content that networks and studios can’t syndicate anywhere else...... One of the arguments that cable networks and distributors like to make about the effect that Netflix — and online video in general — has on the broader TV ecosystem is that by disrupting current business models, Netflix is essentially destroying the engine through which high-quality content is created. ..... could be good news for the future of what we think of as “TV programming.”
Netflix always needed to be about original programming. Netflix needed to be about indie movies. Netflix needed to release movies. As in, you make a movie, and you release it on Netflix. Like Apple has the iPhone app store, Netflix needs to become that place where you place your movies once you make them. If people watch your movies, you make money.
The idea of having to beg old movie houses to run their old movies has been weird. First of all, they don't seem to get the technology. Should be the case that business models chase technologies, but instead we have technologies on a lookout for business models. Image via CrunchBase
Better late than ever. I am so glad Netflix is getting into original programming. This is the way it always needed to be.
I walked out. Spent some time in the bookstore next door. I had quietly noted down a time slot that might work. It was close to 7PM.
I walked in again about 15 minutes before that. I bought a ticket. I am glad I did.
This actually is a very well made movie. It is a movie. It is a fictionalized version of what happened, but there are too many parallels.
It is good drama. Kevin Spacey is the executive producer. That adds to the weight, I believe.
Facebook has become too big a cultural phenomenon to have been able to avoid a movie like this made. Too many people who will not pick up a book on the topic want to know what happened.
The dramatizations aside, I did not feel Zuck got demonized or anything like that. The lawsuits were but harassments posssible in murky legal environments.
Mark Zuckerberg did not steal the idea from anyone, those guys should never have received any money. Those were bogus lawsuits. He got blackmailed, and the system allowed that.
The best line of the movie is when Zuck says: "You have a part of my attention."
The guy presented as cofounder was not a cofounder. Zuck wrote all that early code.
A big omission in the movie is Zuck's steady girlfriend of so many long years. She is not shown at all.
And of course the movie totally misses out on the engineering behind the phenomenon called Facebook.
But then movies perhaps are supposed to be drama, and hence the total focus on the lawsuits. Lawsuits make for friction make for drama. Image via Wikipedia
The movie is well made, it is not accurate, was not meant to be, although most people will believe most details.
Facebook the company has no big reason to dislike the movie, really. There is much dramatization, not much demonization.
The basic movie ingredients are actually in top form. I can see this movie making a lot of money worldwide.
