Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the development and marketing of 4K and 8K television sets. I say “set” in the traditional sense, meaning an appliance that incorporates both a display and a tuner, though many modern consumer TVs don’t include tuners owing to various factors, the most obvious one being the range of source signals available. You can now watch TV shows that originate via terrestrial radio waves, satellite feeds, cable input, and internet connections, and while there are TVs that are easily capable of handling all of these functions, they each require other devices to make them work, such as satellite dishes, wi-fi routers, cable boxes, as well as subscriptions with the various operators who provide these services. It can become quite complicated, and the area immediately surrounding your display can start to look like a snake pit of cables and connections. Also, most people now buy recorders, which have tuners built in.
I mention this because the main thrust of the column is that home electronics manufacturers are always looking for new things to sell, because replacing old devices was once a proven money-maker. You bought a TV and upgraded when new models promised better picture quality, and that is what 4K and 8K provide. However, as technology improves picture (and sound) reproduction, the opportunity to profit from upgrades also becomes more complicated. For sure, no one longs for the days of CRTs and video tapes. Even the picture quality on an iPhone is better than any you could get on the highest-grade, largest-screen TV set sold 20 years ago. The reason 4K and the theoretically four-times-better 8K went on the market almost simultaneously has more to do with technological development than economics. For sure, manufacturers and retailers seem to be in a fix trying to sell both, because logic says that they should be touting 8K as the best thing available, though from my own observation the quality advantages of both modes can only be fully appreciated on very large screens—at least 55 inches. Personally, I don’t have the room in my home for that big a display, so 2K is still just fine for me. Salespeople have their work cut out for them.
And as I said at the end of the piece, content and consumers’ relation to content will really determine what kinds of devices people buy. Young people don’t watch conventional television much any more, and TV companies have had to adjust to a certain extent. Until 20 years ago, content on TV was restricted by certain economic and technological realities, but no more. TV is the rival of cinema in terms of narrative content, and in many cases surpasses movies. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people stop going to movie theaters because they can watch the same films at home on large displays. It simply means there are so many choices that each mode of viewing has to share an audience with another mode of viewing, whether it be a movie screen, a TV display, or a smart phone. The development of technology both drives and confounds this diversity of choice, and those who want to profit off of it are still struggling with ways of making it work for them. It’s no longer a simple question of planned obsolescence. It’s niche marketing gone ballistic.
Damsel-in-distress movies still exist, but these days women in peril tend to be the heroes who defeat malevolent forces rather than their victims; though in many cases the deadly force is not malevolent, but merely hungry. In this vein, the gold standard was the 2016 shark movie, The Shallows, which traded in jolts and gore for a simmering suspense fueled by the intelligence of survival. Like that movie, Crawl has a hero who is good with water—she’s a champion university swimmer—but while horror master Alexandre Aja foregoes the usual tactics, he doesn’t quite find a proper rhythm, and the movie feels slack even at 87 minutes.
The most interesting thing about this pop star fantasy is that the Beatles estate agreed to license so many songs. McCartney I can understand, since he was always the band’s most fervent champion regardless of how his beloved “tunes” were used, but Yoko? In her dotage she seems to be slipping a little. Danny Boyle’s film, based on a script by the always annoying Richard Curtis, imagines a world without the Beatles, which, in fact, is pretty difficult to do considering how large the Fab Four figure in the history of the late 20th century—or in the 21st, for that matter. It’s a clever conceit as far as it goes, but Curtis and Boyle try to take it further with mixed results.
Todd Phillips’ odd superhero gloss has a lot of distractions built into it, the most obvious one being its non-relationship to the Batman franchise (or franchises, depending on how doctrinnaire you are) as a feature that is only tangentially relevant to the Dark Knight. The other distraction is the way Phillips uses our collective movie memory of New York City in the 70s and 80s. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t there at the time or even if you weren’t born yet: if you’re a moviegoer you know the grungy production values that are de riguer for movies set in the pre-Clinton administration Big Apple. Here, of course, it’s called Gotham City, and Phillips’ main goal seems to be to ride us through analogues of all that era’s big crime stories, from Son of Sam to the infamous garbage strikes to the Bernhard Goetz shootings. His ability to connect it all to our current crisis of income inequality is a neat trick.
It says a lot about this reboot that its focus on an origin story that seems quite different from the one put forward in the previous movies is barely coherent; or that it mostly does away with whatever it was Guillermo del Toro brought of himself to a beloved comic book to make it peculiarly cinematic. It’s essentially a faithful rendering of the grossest appeals of the source material beneath a coating of self-mocking humor applied with the broadest of paint brushes. Ron Perlman was no Brando, but his cagey, wisecracking style was perfectly suited to a superhero who is the actual spawn of Satan and understood the irony in the fact that he was working for the so-called powers of good. David Harbour gamely takes over under Neil Marshall’s direction and the only thing that makes an impression besides his razor-sharp cynicism is that, really, anyone could be underneath all that makeup and body latex.
There are few segments in movies of recent memory that so starkly delineate the gulf between the director’s sensibility and that of their protagonist as the one that opens Eighth Grade. I don’t know how old Bo Burnham is, but it’s obvious that the technology ruling the life of his adolescent hero, Kayla (Elsie Fisher), is something he’s not comfortable with. Kayla, an awkward, shy, but also distressingly aware girl who is now in the eighth grade at a public middle school in a well-to-do California suburb, makes YouTube videos in her spare time that attempt to give advice to others her age on how to “put yourself out there” and “be yourself.” Her media skills will be impressive to anyone who came of age before the iPhone was a fixture of teen culture, though they come across as second nature for Kayla. In other aspects of social interaction, however, she’s seriously lacking, which is the point of Burnham’s movie.
The points of narrative and thematic convergence between James Gray’s last film, the old-school world explorer epic, The Lost City of Z, and his latest film, the old-school sci-fi potboiler, Ad Astra, are too numerous to ignore, but the main point of divergence—the respective stories’ grounding in objective truth—clearly demarcate them in terms of relatability. Lost City was, in part, based on a true story that has developed a patina of legend over the years, and Gray obviously felt some responsibility in keeping the known facts about the legend central to his storytelling. Being set in the future, Ad Astra demands no such adherence to known truths, rather only the kind of verisimilitude we’ve come to expect from sophisticated science fiction movies, and while Gray does an admirable job in this regard, he can’t quite build a story that justifies it all.
Here’s 
The person played by Rosamund Pike in this harrowing biopic is supposed to be American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in 2012 covering the civil war in Syria. However, early on there’s a sense that Matthew Heineman’s film intends to be the last word on battle-hardened journalists and the woman Pike plays could really be any battle-hardened journalist. With her alcoholism, inability to keep loved ones close, and obsession with being as close to danger as possible, she doesn’t even have to be a woman; which is to say, A Private War never really makes a case for Colvin’s storied cynicism and self-destructiveness because it’s all presented as a generic given.
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