The Movies

The Movies

I love the movies. I enjoy the experience, the sound, the food, but most of all I like seeing a movie for the first time and taking as much in as I can.

I enjoy the trailers with all the new things I haven’t seen. I like the anticipation and expectation of them, and I like being able to keep up with the conversation on Facebook and other avenues.

New Zealand is usually pretty good at keeping up with movies, if not TV. But recently there has been an exception to this. I speak of the several month delay to the arrival of John Wick: Chapter 2.  For those not in the know, John Wick is a movie series in which there is a goodly amount of physical action, clever quips and a nice world in which criminals pay for things in gold coins that have an unspecified value.

John Wick: Chapter 2 was released in the US on Valentine’s Day – Feb 14 for those who forget such things. Usually NZ is at most a week or 2 late and on the very odd occasion (think Lord of the Rings) we get it even sooner than the US. But with this movie, it’s not early, it’s not even a couple of weeks later. No, no. This movie is three months late. But not to worry – this is not the first time this has happened. Some of you may know that, on occasion, I “acquire” movies from various sources. In this particular case, I was browsing DVDs that had been released in the US to get a good idea of what might be available.

I came across a movie that I had not previously seen. Priest. I had not seen the previews, hadn’t seen it in the movies nor seen any other advertising for it. So I watched a few trailers and thought that I would be interested in watching the movie proper, but before I did that I thought it prudent to ask the cinemas if it was coming soon and if I had just somehow missed the trailer round. So I called around and asked if they had screenings or were intending to screen in the near future, and finally if they had even heard of it. The answer was no on all counts. So I “acquired” the movie and watched it. It was a good copy, straight from DVD, so 5.1 surround sound, great picture for the time, and it was enjoyed.

Thus added to my movie collection, it was forgotten about for a while. I don’t like to watch movies too much too close together lest they become boring to me. Six months later, such as is my practice, I was watching a movie at the cinemas, when lo and behold, there was a trailer of a movie that I recognised. You guessed it – Priest was finally coming to the movies in New Zealand. Bear in mind that this wasn’t the movie that I saw in the cinemas but rather the trailer, something to be followed up about two months later by the movie proper.

Tonight, I watched Logan, a good movie in a series of good movies, well-acted, well told, and a pleasure to watch. At the end - I always stay to the end - there was a tag. Something to the effect that the movie was produced by hundreds of people and took hundreds of thousands of man hours to make. I respect this – some of my friends help in the creation of just such movies and as such I do my best to go and see these movies in the cinemas so that I may have the maximum amount of enjoyment and see it – the way it was meant to be seen.

New Zealand Cinemas have denied me this when it comes to John Wick 2.  Now, in an age before the internet, before instant communications and before e-mail, chat rooms and message boards, this would not have been a problem. I simply would have perhaps heard about it from one or two travellers and maybe the odd hitchhiker. I would have keenly anticipated it, and enjoyed the showing when it eventually did show.

But this is not the world we inhabit. We mastered the early days of dial up, we suffered through the screeching whine of our 14.4k modems, we paid the exorbitant fees for internet by the megabyte, then by the gigabyte, and have finally arrived at some halfway decent plans that facilitate easy communication with the rest of the world.

We now live in a world where it is possible to watch sports games from other countries live, as they happen, on your own computer. So when my friends and I were watching the super bowl, a game from America that I still don’t understand, one of the things that I enjoyed the most was the movie trailers that were part of the advertising. These go for something crazy like a million dollars an ad. One such ad was for John Wick 2.

Now this one I had done right: I had seen the trailers on YouTube, and I had talked to my friends and we’d decided that when it was time we would go and see it together. The ad in question included a release date, that of Feb 14. Knowing New Zealand cinemas as I do, I was prepared to wait a couple of weeks, so I looked in the movie cinemas’ “coming soon” listing and was horrified to discover that the movie wasn’t anywhere on the list.

And guess what. Turns out that if I wanted to, I could watch John Wick online already. Granted, at present, the only copies are bad cam rips of theatre screenings. But my fear is that once again, New Zealand cinemas will not screen the movie until after a good, high definition version of it is available online. If this is the case, I will have another decision to make, as, while doing other things to the house, I recently installed a sound system that will rival most.

Perhaps the cinemas will learn their lesson soon.

Perhaps not.