Marking 20 years
of bold journalism,
reader supported.
Entertainment

What Has Digital Done to the Movies?

As '2046' proves, everything’s available, for better or worse.

Dorothy Woodend 12 Aug 2005TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

She has worked in many different cultural disciplines, including producing contemporary dance and new music concerts, running a small press, programming film festivals, and writing for newspapers and magazines across Canada and the U.S. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University and film animation from Emily Carr University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. She won the Silver Medal for Best Column at the Digital Publishing Awards in 2019 and 2020; and her work was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2020 and 2021.

Woodend is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She was raised on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake and lives in Vancouver. Find her on Twitter @DorothyWoodend.

image atom

Wong Kar-wai's long awaited new film 2046 opens this Friday. In 2004, the big joke at Cannes, when the film premiered, was that it wasn't actually going to be finished until 2046. "Oh, ha, ha! You critics think you're so funny," the director was heard to mutter under his breath as he left the press conference. In fact, the version that screened at Cannes was only partly finished (it was still missing special effects) and the final incarnation is just now making its way into theatres.

But if you live close to Black Dog Video on Cambie Street in Vancouver, where it's been sitting on the shelf for the past while, you didn't have to wait that long. This isn't the only film to show up in the local vid shop before it has had a theatrical run. On more than a few occasions, the DVD has appeared in stores even while the movie is just dipping its toe into the theatre.

The dawn of the DVD has been coming for a while, and now it appears the digital sun is high in the sky. It was inevitable. DVDs are insanely cheap to produce, people buy them by the bucket and they allow smaller films to make up their money over the long term, unlike blockbusters which are supposed to make the bulk of their earnings in the opening weekend.

Whether it's the slump of '05 or the fact that big movies die extremely big deaths (and that's not counting the explosions or shoot-em-ups that take place on screen), you'd think the success of the DVD insurgency would be a producer's dream come true.

But is it?

There be pirates

The New Yorker recently ran a feature on the merits of watching the DVD over seeing movies in the theatre. While it's true that the advent of DVD success may push Hollywood to think about making movies, or at least marketing them, in a different way, not all is sunshine and roses. As long as people have been making movies, other people have been complaining about them. DVDs are no different. Witness the poor sales for Shrek 2 DVDs that have resulted in red ink for Dreamworks. Many films that have been expected to do well on DVD haven't.

There are also larger issues at stake.

A sea change in technology can bring on other problems, like pirates! Why are pirates called pirates? Because they just ARGHHH! Recently Kim's Video store in New York hit the headlines when it was raided by NYPD. A few too many pirated disks floating about and finally the cops descended .

It used to be that straight-to-video meant "large piece of poo in movie form". The worse the movie, the faster it appeared in the video store. But that too has changed. The turn around time between movie theatres and home theatres -- for better movies -- is also getting shorter as a recent Washington Post article pointed out.

'War on Digital Generation'

After the raid at Kim's, debates popped up in chatrooms all over the place. At www.darknet.com, they've put this debate into book form with Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. Like it did with music, technology has outstripped the way studios have done business. It is now possible even to play a movie (hi res) from your iPOD. While hackers release movies free into the technology jungle, large studios are a little justifiably afraid of sharing any piece of their baby dears.

For cineastes, it's all good; more movies equal more good movies, as well as more bad. The dark side, however, is that the directors and people who actually make the films may never see a cent of this money, and may find strange copies of their films floating about, including things that an audience was never meant to see.

This unfortunately applies to the inestimable Wong Kar-wai's newest film. 2046 is the sequel to In the Mood for Love, and like that film, it stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Chow, a womanizing journalist, living in a grimy Hong Kong hotel, and loving and leaving a series of women. Interspersed with Chow's own story are the stories that he writes. One, in particular, called 2047, concerns a man on a train and beautiful android attendant with delayed reaction. Fictive future or the past, it doesn't really matter. 2046 is breathtakingly gorgeous. Shot (perhaps for the last time) by long time cinematographer Chris Doyle, the film has had critics swooning all over the place.

Digitized bloopers

But if you rent the DVD, are you watching the film that Wong Kar Wai intended for you to see? Perhaps not. While at Cannes, the director said "Obviously if you give me the means to continue the post-production for another three weeks then the film would be different. But today, Friday, May 21, my film is finished - but there will be lots of extra scenes on the DVD." The film is stunning, unbelievably exquisite, and in the DVD version in the final moment, when Chow makes his final penultimate statement, there is a typo in the subtitle. A big one. It took me a long moment to realize that something was terribly wrong with this sentence. It also detracted from the final moment of the film, so that a confrontation between two characters fraught with meaning and poignancy, got a bit goofy.

Somewhere, behind his ever present dark sunglasses, Wong Kar-wai was probably rolling his eyes. Despite the fact that being able to see the film is important, it's also important to see the best of all possible versions. In the end, it might be best to wait to see the movie in the theatre. It deserves to be seen large: sensuous beautiful women, smoldering men, colour, sound, and magic: everything you go to the movies for, and everything larger than life.

It used to be that films were released in theatres, sat there for a while, and then if you were extremely lucky or connected in some way, you might see them again, in a repertory theatre or on TV, elusive creatures they were, fleeting, like deer in the forest. Now of course, you can have them anytime you want them in the safety and security of your laptop. No need to yearn for something you saw once, almost like in a dream; you can order it off the internet in about five seconds flat. So either way, any access is a good thing and access is a bad thing, and the future, as Wong Kar-wai is happy to tell you, is an extremely unsettled notion.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films on Fridays for The Tyee.  [Tyee]

  • Share:

Facts matter. Get The Tyee's in-depth journalism delivered to your inbox for free

Tyee Commenting Guidelines

Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion.
*Please note The Tyee is not a forum for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, denying its existence or minimizing its risk to public health.

Do:

  • Be thoughtful about how your words may affect the communities you are addressing. Language matters
  • Challenge arguments, not commenters
  • Flag trolls and guideline violations
  • Treat all with respect and curiosity, learn from differences of opinion
  • Verify facts, debunk rumours, point out logical fallacies
  • Add context and background
  • Note typos and reporting blind spots
  • Stay on topic

Do not:

  • Use sexist, classist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language
  • Ridicule, misgender, bully, threaten, name call, troll or wish harm on others
  • Personally attack authors or contributors
  • Spread misinformation or perpetuate conspiracies
  • Libel, defame or publish falsehoods
  • Attempt to guess other commenters’ real-life identities
  • Post links without providing context

LATEST STORIES

The Barometer

Do You Think Naheed Nenshi Will Win the Alberta NDP Leadership Race?

Take this week's poll