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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Certified nurse-midwife Cara Muhlhahn attends the home birth of Mayra and David Radzinski in "The Business of Being Born"
"The Business of Being Born" features Ricki Lake, naked, in labor, in a bathtub. It may also change the way you think about childbirth. Plus: Korea's unsung visionary.
By Andrew O'Hehir
Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Childbirth, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Beyond the Multiplex
Jan. 10, 2008 | When I posted my lovingly crafted year-end article about the state of the indie-film business a couple of weeks ago, several of you wrote in -- in the loveliest possible way -- to point out that I was a mainstream media hack who had missed a major element of the story. Well, that may be true, but you know what? It's hard out here for a pimp.
Readers observed that the people in the movie biz whom I interviewed indulged in a lot of bellyaching about how "specialty films" are moving gradually but inevitably out of the theaters toward some not-yet-specified home-delivery mechanism. There was a lot of talk about IFC's move toward video-on-demand as its primary mode for distributing art-house films, but none of my interviewees even mentioned the more old-fashioned elephant in the room. "Have you heard about this revolutionary new service called Netflix?" one reader inquired. Hmm, I don't know; do I detect a note of sarcasm there?
This acerbic commentary points out a real phenomenon: Everybody in and around the film business knows that Netflix and its competitors have altered the behavior of film buffs, perhaps fundamentally. But most of us are so deluged with movie screenings and DVDs that we don't often use those services, so we don't experience the change at a personal level. (In addition to the mainstream rivals of Netflix, like Intelliflix and Blockbuster, let me nudge you toward Chicago's Facets Multi Media and San Francisco's GreenCine, probably the two best online sources for renting independent films, foreign films and art-house classics. Other faves? Let me know.)
Netflix already offers some indie films on an exclusive basis, before the DVDs have become generally available, and the company is also considering acquiring video-only distribution rights for films that have played the festival circuit without finding more conventional deals. But the question that's been hanging over Netflix and all other such services for several years is exactly how long a business model that combines the 21st century and the 19th century -- the Internet and the United States Postal Service -- can remain viable.
Last week came an announcement that, at least potentially, marks a major step away from that model. Netflix will partner with LG Electronics to develop a set-top box that will allow subscribers to stream movies straight from the Internet to their TV sets. There are lots of unanswered questions about this venture, from the price of the box -- LG may integrate it with a dual-format player that plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats -- to how much of Netflix's catalog will be available in digital form. (The company's current Internet streaming mechanism carries only 6,000 titles, less than 10 percent of the total available by postal mail.)
As the Reuters story on the LG deal observed, the movies-by-Internet market is "increasingly crowded and confusing." Apple TV has failed to catch on, despite that company's rabid fan base. The Vudu set-top box costs $400, and only offers about 5,000 movies. TiVo's partnership with Amazon has yet to gain much consumer traction. Still, the long-term picture is pretty clear even if the details are murky: Sooner or later, you'll be watching movies that have been piped into your house, somehow or other.
In the meantime, Netflix's supposedly antiquated business model works just fine, thank you very much. We've hit a post-New Year, pre-Sundance lull in the release calendar, while Oscar-hungry Indiewood productions like "Juno," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" continue to pile up awards (and plenty of cash money too). All four of the new movies I'm covering this week may well fare much better as DVD rentals than they will in the theaters; these days, a limited, big-city art-house release is more like an "ancillary" to home video than the other way around.
In the case of Abby Epstein's documentary "The Business of Being Born" (which Rebecca Traister covered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival), Netflix is arguably the film's principal exhibitor. After screening in a few major cities this month, Epstein's button-pusher on the natural-childbirth and midwifery movements will be made available by Netflix "to women everywhere" in February, as the film's press kit puts it.
It only makes sense to reach an audience that largely consists of pregnant women (or would-be pregnant ones) in their living rooms. But with occasional exceptions on the order of "Pan's Labyrinth," "The Lives of Others" and "La Vie en Rose," the audience for foreign-language films has also gravitated from the cinema to the couch. So acclaimed festival pictures like Korean director Hong Sang-soo's intriguing comedy "Woman on the Beach" and Turkish director Reha Erdem's haunting "Times and Winds," both of which could have been modest art-house hits a generation ago, will sneak into a couple of theaters to be seen by a few hundred people, before (we hope) gradually finding a viewership on disc.
My ultimate underdog this week, though, is Ilya Chaiken's micro-budget feature "Liberty Kid," a terrifically engaging story about two friends on the mean streets of Brooklyn that does more, with fewer resources, to capture the spirit of post-9/11 New York than a dozen typical Hollywood morality fables. If Chaiken can get any kind of DVD deal for this movie, and the chance to make another one, I'm sure she'll be delighted.
Oh, and in other news, this is the last weekly installment of Beyond the Multiplex. Wait, hang on! It's even worse than you think: Starting next Thursday with my first report from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Beyond the Multiplex will become a daily feature on Salon (and yes, that's spelled B-L-O-G), covering all the latest indie releases along with interviews, DVD releases, box-office reports, news on upcoming films and more stuff we'll make up as we go along.
Next page: Spreading the gospel of home birth
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Ricki Lake's "awesome" vagina
