TOP GUN, OBI-WAN, and STRANGER THINGS all serve up pipin' hot nostalgia

Plus let's do some Quick Bites and talk about 4K

It’s Tuesday, May 31st, and here’s where we are…

If you’re subscribed to The Last ‘80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need), thank you, and I hope you enjoyed the wrap-up to November 1980. On June 15th, I’ll kick off my coverage of December 1980, wrapping up the first year of this experiment, and as proud as I was of ‘80s All Over, I think this is the superior product in every way. The show offered you a quick mention of things, but the newsletter is a real review of every single title of the decade, big and small, and it’s been a real stretch for me as a writer. I think it’s a clear-eyed look back, and there’s some autobiography built into the framework as I talk about how I first encountered these things. It’s also an interesting exercise to have a batch of films I have to write about every month, no matter what, no matter how interested I am in each individual title.

Since this is a newsletter, let’s kick things off with a little news. There’s a new TV in the house. I know that doesn’t seem like a big thing, but it’s been brewing for a while, and it really does impact pretty much every aspect of my daily work. I got my first 4K TV around two years ago, and it was a lower-end model. I loved what I saw, but it was clear that I wasn’t really getting everything out of the format that was possible. I figured I’d wait for the right time to buy a new machine, but that moment came quicker than anticipated when that first TV started to break down. It was just a single horizontal green line on the screen at first, a line so faint that my girlfriend wasn’t sure she actually saw it. Then it was a few lines. I called Best Buy to come to check it out, but the day they showed up, it wouldn’t reproduce the problem, so they told me to buy new HDMI cables. Over the next four months, the problem got increasingly worse. More green lines appeared and then, at random moments, a green pattern of interference would appear as a sort of overlay on the lower third of the screen. Then the lower half of the screen. Then two-thirds of the screen. It would stay onscreen for a few minutes, then vanish again. At first, it happened a few times a day. Then almost every hour. Then, eventually, on a cycle where it went on and off pretty much continuously.

The final straw was when the machine would only turn on one out of every four times you tried to turn it on. That’s not really a viable way for me to be watching and reviewing things. I knew I’d have to make the update eventually but eventually turned out to be Tuesday of this past week. I went with the LG OLED C1, and I had a neighbor help me hang it that night. Since then, I’ve put the machine through its paces, playing 4K Blu-ray discs, watching streaming services on a few different devices, and I can honestly say that everything I published about 4K until now was wrong. I genuinely didn’t know what the format was capable of, and now that I do, I’m a little bit embarrassed about my previous raving and ranting.

I’ve been a home video fanatic since 1981, since I first got a machine in the house, and I have gone through dozens of different display set-ups in that time. VHS, laserdisc, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray… I’ve watched it all, and I’ve bought it all, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this feels like an evolutionary jump. While I don’t think this is the endgame of home video, I think we’re butting up against it for the first time. All we really have to do at this point is get over the compression issues that companies are still embracing in the way they author these discs. All it takes for consumers to end up with a reference-quality copy of a film they buy is the right size disc and an uncompressed file. The scans that are being done at this point are jaw-dropping, and the right HDR mastering can create an effect at home that is, honestly, better than many of the theaters where I worked. As much as I always prefer the theatrical experience, it depends on which theater, and these days, I am depressed by the state of most LA theaters. If I’m not going to a specific IMAX screen, I’m going to the Drafthouse because at least I know they’ll have a certain standard of sound and picture. What are my choices? The Grove? Century City’s AMC? The Burbank screens? I think they’re all aggressively mediocre as theaters, and there’s a shabbiness to AMC that seems to be company-wide at this point.

With home set-ups that can look this good, it is small wonder people are not returning to the theatrical experience. Not in the numbers the industry would like. It is distinctly possible that there are viewers who have unlearned the habit completely and nothing’s going to get them back in theaters. There hasn’t really been a killer app, an undeniable cultural event that drove people back. Is that Top Gun: Maverick? It’s huge, certainly, but will it continue to be huge? Or will it follow the new model of front-loading all the people who wanted to go to the theater with a quick drop-off? Will it be Avatar 2? Is there anything that can do it at this point? I’m not convinced the answer is this pathological embrace of All Things Familiar. It used to be possible to generate excitement with the announcement that something was coming back, but nothing ever goes away at this point. You can’t even call it nostalgia anymore because nothing goes away long enough for us to become nostalgic for it. This is the opposite of nostalgia these days. This is Perpetual Cultural Engorgement and it is numbing us.

I get it, though. There is a very strong temptation to simply retreat into the library that I already have, especially since the last couple of years has radically changed what that means. In addition to my own library, I’m part of a community of archivists now and it’s safe to say that anything I want to see, I can see within a few hours, if not immediately. I can sit here where I work and, at the push of a button, bring up every film and television show I can think of, and that’s not an exaggeration. I know streaming services like HBO Max and Prime Video and Criterion and Disney+ all try to sell you on the idea of “everything,” but their libraries are fairly restrictive, even at their best, and that’s just the way things have been designed. It’s clear that studios aren’t particularly interested in the best options for consumers. They are interested in the best options for the studios, and that means weird licensing agreements that make no sense, rotating things in and out of availability, and ecosystems that leave weird gaps where certain films just don’t have a home. Ultimately, while I wish everything was made available in the best possible remastered version, I can see now that it’s not going to happen. Fine. In order to be able to do the work I do, I’ve made other arrangements, and physical media remains a giant part of that equation.

image courtesy of Lucasfilm

I’m going to dig into my observations about this format in the weeks and months ahead, and I’m going to it first with The 4K Farm Report, a short daily audio show that I’ll be publishing exclusively for my Patreon supporters. I’ll do more in-depth work here in print for you guys, though, because I think it’s worth writing about and supporting physical media as much as possible. I’ve got a lot of stuff to look at, but even in my first rush of new-toy-excitement, I have had a few moments that stopped me cold. What I am looking for is something that reproduces the experience of watching actual film projected and in some ways, OLED redefines that experience. I’ve never seen blacks that are quite as black as what you see in this image, and the way that shapes everything else is remarkable. The 4K Blu-rays I have for Mad Max: Fury Road, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and The Last Jedi are some of the most eye-popping I’ve seen so far. Kino-Lorber’s recent release of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is fantastic, pure black-and-white heaven, and there are so many titles here in the house already that I can’t wait to dig into that I’ve considered giving up sleep entirely for the summer. We’re watching Game of Thrones with my sons, and the 4K Blu-rays are stunning, with image after image that had us all dropping the occasional “Wow!” as we watched this weekend.

There are plenty of films and books and TV shows worth talking about right now, and I want to catch up by first talking about a couple of big premieres that I’m guessing a whole lot of people watched this weekend…