I decided to go the Asheville Film Festival today. I found one movie I wanted to see and paid the $8 to see this new independant masterpiece from Australia. The theatre was filled with the usual slice of Asheville's "Art & Croissant" crowd. The same people who vote for Al Gore every November whether he is running or not. It was the typical bar scene from "Star Wars". Like a Grateful Dead concert sponsored by the AARP.
About 20 minutes into the movie (just about the time I'm starting to get mildly interested in the characters) the DVD freezes up. They try to clean it up but somehow it won't play past the scratch. They didn't have a back up DVD. So there are about 200 vintage hippies staring at the same blue screen I can easily recreate in my living room. Now all the Traveling Willoughby's have to schlep four blocks down to the Fine Arts Museum for a refund.
I wonder if this happens at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival? Now if I got this DVD from Net-Flix I could spend a few minutes trying to fix the disc with alcohol and tooth paste. If that didn't work they would rush me out another copy. I'd receive the movie a week later because my local rural sub-contracting mail deliverer in her 1969 Mercedes diesel always previews my movies first; but I would eventually see how movie ended.
You can visit the site of the festival at www.ashevillefilmfestival.com and puruse all the movies you may be able to see. Just note that the cost of a 10 movie pass equals a year of Net-Flix. But alas you would miss out on the ambience of the Freakers Ball, which would be an award winning short in itself.
4 comments:
LOL @ paragraph 2 ...."the movie freezes up".... How upsetting is that? It took a lot to just go to the "movie house" and then to go wait in line for your money....
We have Netflix -- the 3-at-a-time variety -- Frank does all the queque-ing up. (He'll let me do it, but I'm not as interested as he is, so it is my fault, the kind of movies he gets)...(Is that how you spell the q-word?) He did get *The Sentinel* which was pretty good. He, Jo and I watched that last night. Pretty good. (We like Keifer of *24* fame and Michael Douglas was fine)...
But tonight I actually went and wasted our money at Blockbuster -- almost %5.00 for one movie! Otherwise all we had was a documentary that he had ordered (2 have been sent back in the mail)or our recorded stuff like Law and Order (again) 'n such. It's prolly a "chick-flick"...I don't know. It's called "An Unfinished Life" with Robt Redford, Jennifer Lopez, Morgan Freeman and Josh Lucas.
Now that we have HDTV (55-inch screen) and a DVR, I can't get Frank to set foot in a theatre... And the DVD's come out so quickly now.
Ta Ta...
I saw "The Sentinel" on the plane to Vegas. I thought it was good, too. Of course, it loses something when it's on a TV set 15 feet away and I'm using my own headset so I only get sound in one ear and I'm squished b/w Babba "I have to have the window seat!" Gi and a 6'2" guy.
That's a shame but please understand it's much worse for the filmmaker who spent years making it than the audience member who wasted an afternoon. I had a film that screened there and fortunately it went off without a hitch, but I was worried about that very thing the entire time because frankly, DVD's are unreliable. They'll work on one DVD player but on another they'll lock up. I am sorry it didn't go well for you though.
And I thought it was just our Walmart DVD player that did the freezing thing. Sometimes if we turn the whole machine off, take out the disc and start all over it will work again. We actually watched all of Bagger Vance (another Redford movie) last night and it didn't stop once.
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