Eenie Meenie Miney Movies: October 2011

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Rocky and Bullwinkle

Ssshhhhh ... you hear that? That's the sound of a very quiet month for family features in theaters. The closest we'll come in the month of October is Real Steel (Mike's review), a PG-13 robot-brawl movie with Hugh Jackman, and that's really only for older kids. There are a few special events mentioned below, but October is a wasteland for new releases for families.

Fortunately there's a whole world of home video options – so many, in fact, that it makes recommending home videos problematic. In this column, I focus on DVD/Blu-ray releases (which can be confusing as older movies make their first appearance on Blu-ray) and the Netflix "Watch Instantly" streaming service. (I call it Netflix Instant but the streaming service seems to have had a number of names over the years.) This can make my recommendations somewhat repetitive as a film like Disney's Tangled makes its way down the chain from theatrical to DVD and finally to Netflix Instant. Imagine how much more repetitive it would get if I included the other services, each of which has its own release windows.

Since there aren't any theatrical films to recommend this month, I'll use this space to spell out the different tiers of service available for home video -- maybe it will help you make some decisions about what services you want to use. If you don't need the discussion of video rentals, you can skip down to the home video recommendations below.

New Releases: DVD/Blu-ray and Premium DVD Rental/On-Demand Services

After a movie ends its theatrical run, it usually appears on physical disc media a few months later. This delay can be just a few weeks or several months depending on rights negotiations, holiday sales cycles, etc. At this point the DVD or Blu-ray discs (hereafter I'll just call them DVDs) appear more or less simultaneously in stores for purchase and in brick-and-mortar rental outlets price in the range of $5 per rental.

Apart from physical media, new releases may also appear at this time in some of the "premium" on-demand services, including iTunes, your local cable company's on-demand offerings, xBox Live, Amazon Instant and Sony's Playstation Store. These films are similarly priced at a pay-per-view rental of about five bucks.

"Recent" Releases: DVD by Mail, Kiosk and On-Demand

In 2010, Netflix bowed to pressure from movie studios and agreed to a 28-day delay before making new DVDs available by mail. You can read some background on that here, but it established a precedent that has since been followed by other deep-discount rental offerings like Redbox, Blockbuster by Mail, and some on-demand services. Each service has its own agreements with different studios, but the basic idea is that if you want to rent something for cheaper than $5 (Redbox is a dollar a night), you'll have to wait about a month after it becomes available on DVD. These are the releases I don't usually mention in this column for simplicity's sake.

Library or Catalog Titles: Unlimited Streaming Services

All-you-can-watch plans from vendors Amazon Prime, Netflix Instant and Hulu Plus are a great bargain at about $10/month but most of their content is at least a year old. Even more frustrating is the highly limited nature of these catalog titles -- for the most part, they're pretty mediocre movies and TV shows from the last few decades. Really good, classic movies (like much of the Disney canon) are often withheld from the streaming services no matter how old they are.

This leaves many good movies -- movies you occasionally want to watch but don't need to own -- available only on DVD. Since DVD rental stores are going by the wayside (Austin is lucky to have great stores like Vulcan and I Luv Video) and the on-demand services don't always offer catalog titles for rent, Netflix disc rental is becoming the only practical way to see some movies. I expect this will eventually right itself and these titles will become available for pay-per-view online, but in the meantime there is an online viewing chasm between expensive hot new releases and bargain-basement cinematic crap, into which fall most of the better movies in history.

Recommendations

Picking among the various services can be a matter of the hardware you already own -- Netflix Instant is available on just about everything that plugs into a television, so check to see if your Tivo or Wii or whatever can connect to Netflix or a similar service. A $99 investment in an Apple TV will give you access to the Netflix and iTunes "ecosystems" in one blow, so that's not a bad direction if you don't already have a box for the purpose. If you own a Playstation 3 or an xBox 360, you already have access to Netflix and the pay-per-view rental services from Sony or Microsoft.

For a while I was streaming Netflix and renting new releases on my Sony PS3, but I was recently gifted with an Apple TV and I'm finding that to be a much nicer experience. iTunes new release pay-per-view in particular seems to have a better selection and a shorter rent-to-watch delay. Because I pay for the Amazon Prime upgraded shipping service, I have access to their streaming service, but I don't think any of the boxes in my house will push that content to my TV. Sorry guys, watching movies on my laptop just doesn't appeal like it did a few years ago. (The release of Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet may well start swinging viewers in its direction, however.)

There's a good chart here at Clicker that compares the different online streaming and pay-per-view services if you want to get into the details, but for a family with two small children I'm finding the combination of Netflix Instant and iTunes tough to beat.

Netflix gives us access to a nice large catalog of kids movies and shows we might not otherwise check out – things like Pingu or Pucca. My 5-year-old daughter occasionally indulges in a bit of vintage animation like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Godzilla: The Original Animated Series. (Yeah, she's a Godzooky fan. What can I say?) There are even a few episodes of Shaun the Sheep, Sid the Science Kid, and Super Why for those days when the episodes on the Tivo just doesn't cut it.

iTunes, on the other hand, lets us rent new family titles we missed in theaters -- things like Rio, which we don't necessarily want to own but would like to see for novelty's sake. iTunes also offers the advantage of portability to a handy iPhone or iPad, though we don't actually use that much.

For everything else, there's always DVD.

Now back to your regularly scheduled column about kids' movies.

Notable Theatrical Films in Austin for October 2011

Whole Foods & Alamo Drafthouse present Sunset Supper Cinema (South Lamar Whole Foods Store, various dates in October)-- Now that the weather is cooling down and it's nice to be out of doors in the evenings, check out some movies on Whole Foods' rooftop plaza. October titles include Hook and E.T. See the Whole Foods website for dates.

Puss in Boots 3D and other family films at Austin Film Festival (10/22 - 10/23) -- AFF always runs a handful of family-friendly flicks during the festival weekend, and this time the flagship title is a sneak preview of the new Dreamworks animated Puss in Boots at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. Check out all of the titles in the Family Film Series.

Puss in Boots (PG, wide release on October 28) -- Wait, look at that. All the way at the end of October is Puss In Boots. But hey, that's so late in October it might as well be November, right? Anyway, Antonio Banderas reprises his recurring role from the Shrek films as an adventurous fairy-tale cat. When my daughter saw the poster with Puss in silhouette she mistook it for one of the main characters (the Baron) in Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns. It's going to take a lot for Puss in Boots to even come close, but fingers and paws are duly crossed.


Notable Home Video Releases

Tom & Jerry Golden Collection Volume One -- Cartoon ultra-violence just the way I like it. Seriously, I feel sorry for kids who grow up without having seen Tom & Jerry on a regular basis. Which reminds me, my daughters haven't seen any recently.

Winnie the Pooh -- The recent Disney re-imagining of everyone's favorite silly old bear. I quite liked it -- it's fun in a harmless sort of way. I'm not sure what risks one would take with Winnie the Pooh so it's a little hard to criticize this film for playing it safe.

We Wish Ewe a Merry Christmas -- From Aardman Animation (creators of Wallace and Gromit), this is a collection of Christmas-themed episodes of Shaun the Sheep. I've gushed about Shaun before.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition -- I would feel a bit silly rehashing the plot of a classic Roald Dahl novel and equally beloved children's movie, but it's nice to see it getting a big-ass collector's edition release. Includes a book, a new interview with the director, and a Wonka-themed pencil box. Sadly, no chocolate is included.

Netflix Instant Pick

New episodes of Super Why - This show, aimed at kindergartners learning to read, is on constant rotation at my house. It's available on Austin's PBS affiliate but it's nice to see episodes making their way onto on-demand outlets too. The show features a group of kid superheroes with alphabet powers who solve real-world kid problems by exploring storybooks with plot similarities. It's fairly repetitive and aimed straight-on at kids. There are occasional flashes of subversive wink-at-the-parents humor but nothing on the level of Sesame Street or even the animated Curious George.

Amazon Streaming on the TV

Our Roku box (yes, we still have one, and I think you originally recommend it to us, Chris!) will stream video from Amazon as well as from Netflix. It also does Hulu Plus but we aren't subscribed to that, and SnagFilms and a bunch of other smaller streaming services. I don't quite like the Netflix interface on Roku but that's a small quibble, we've done extremely well with this device over the past few years.