Random Thoughts

The Weirdness of Vimeo

So, I was looking for Das offene Universum, a movie from 1990 (featuring Tilda Swinton) that hasn’t been available for decades. But suddenly it’s on Vimeo! But you have to pay to watch it, so I create an account and buy it.

And look! Download link! I like that!

Of course, clicking that cloud symbol doesn’t do anything, because this is Firefox and web pages usually don’t work in Firefox any more. (And I love that they’ve apparently had so many reports from people that they can’t figure out how to download that they’ve spelled it out as “click the cloud to download”. Instead of just having a button that says “download”.)

User Experience Design FTW!

Anyway, so I go to Chrome and log in… and…

OK… there’s a link for “upload a video”… “record”… “create”… “create a virtual event or webinar”… “new video”… That’s a lot of buttons for creating videos. Not, really geared towards people wanting to watch films they’ve paid for.

Also a several buttons to “upgrade”, which is what you have to do if you want to upload several videos, apparently? And you have to pay if you want to upgrade, I guess?

Well, OK, perhaps the movie I bought is in “library”?

Nope.

Perhaps under “Watch”?

Nope.

Errr… Perhaps if I click that smiley face?

Nope.

*gasp* If I hover over the smiley face, then I get a “purchases” right in the middle of the list!

Yes! There’s the movie I bought! And I can click on it and download it (from Chrome). Nice!

So, the entire Vimeo experience is geared towards getting money from video creators, not selling movies to people who want to watch them. And that’s just loopy. If people aren’t able to watch the stuff they’ve bought, they’re not gonna be really enthusiastic about buying more stuff.

The entire thing just reminds me of early 2000-ish bookseller scam sites — sites that talked about nothing else but how easy it would be to sell your books, but not talking about buying books at all. I.e., Vimeo is selling its site to sellers, and forgetting that there has to be buyers, too, if the sellers are ever going to be able to sell anything. I.e. again, Vimeo is making money off of the sellers and not off the buyers, I assume?

I think the three “upgrade” links on the front page are a dead giveaway.

Anyway. Now I’m gonna watch Das offene Universum.

TSP2021: What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?

I’ve watched a substantial portion of the Marvel superhero thing, but I’m pretty much over it now (as apparently is the rest of the world). I did not watch this, because I’m just really annoyed by modern animation.

But apparently Tilda Swinton does some voice-over stuff for The Ancient One (reprising her Doctor Strange role), so I guess I have to watch it.

And, yes, this animation is pretty annoying. Bobble-headed figures and very uncanny-looking movements — like if I’m really watching a video game cut scene that’s just been rendered to resemble animation.

Oh, I thought they meant that he… lost his heart. Like Iron Man. But it was just his girlfriend that died.

So euphemism.

I think Swinton just delivered her line.

Didn’t Dr. Strange stop being a surgeon because of the damage to his hands? But he still stopped doing surgeries, just because he’s moping around?

I guess I’m surprised at how boring this Groundhog Day variation is. It’s just so … rote.

There’s repartee and stuff, but it’s all stuff everybody’s heard before. I think ChatGPT would be more original than this.

Why is this 35 minutes long? It’s just incredibly boring.

See?

SEE!?

This is brutally boring. A plot you’ve seen a hundred times before, with no new twists — the only surprising thing is that this is 34 minutes instead of 14.

What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?. Bryan Andrews. 2021.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

TSP2011: Amore carne

Yes, I’m watching this Italian movie with French subtitles! I’m not participating in The Prize For Most Pretentious (I’ve already got all the statues), but this movie just isn’t available with English subtitles. Even the pirate subtitle sites are coming up empty.

But I’ve been duolingoing for almost two years now, so surely I can understand enough French to get by… I understood that sentence above, at least! It’s promising!

I’m still understanding stuff!

This is filmed as if it’s done on the sly — people are only partially in the frame. For all I know, it’s really that way, but I’m guessing not.

Oh, he says that he’s doing that, so now I believe that even less!

So this bit is about Delbono getting an HIV test. Filming en cachette, supposedly. It’s the shakiest shakycam I’ve er seen, and I’m getting a bit seasick… Hopefully he sits down soon.

Phew.

His mother is brutal!

Heh heh.

My problem with this movie is… that I couldn’t watch it, really. The shakycam is so extreme — he zooms way in, and then waves the camera around a lot, and it’s just puke city for me. That stuff is so nauseating.

Other than that, I quite liked the first quarter of this movie — I found it interesting and original. The rest of the movie was basically listening to various songs while Delbono waved the camera around, and then listening to a lot of poetry while Delbono waved the camera around. It’s just not all that thrilling?

Amore Carne. Pippo Delbono. 2011.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

TSP1986: Caprice

I found this 1986 short finally — one of Tilda Swinton’s earliest movies. Somebody uploaded it to youtube seven months ago. Perhaps that was because of the Souvenir movies (which are fictionalised accounts of making this movie — sort of)?

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

TSP2021: The Souvenir Part II

Right!

OK, an explanation before we get started:

Almost a decade ago, I started a blog project to look at the brave new world of movie availability: It was the heyday of Netflix and people were going “oooh, ah, you can watch every movie now”. And I was rather sceptical, because… well, just because. But I wanted to check, so I thought would make sense to choose a famous actor and see whether all their films were available.

So I chose Tilda Swinton, because she seemed like she had good taste (from the few films of hers that I had seen).

Spoiler warnings: There’s lots of films that live on in obscurity, and you can’t watch. Still.

But I’ve been doing updates to the blog series, checking if somehow the future had arrived, about once a year. I forgot to last year, so I’ve got two years to catch up with, as well as checking all the previously missed films to see whether any of them are now available.

Makes sense? No, I know, but here we go with this film anyway.

I have to admit that I don’t recall what happened in Part I, except for… er… Tilda Swinton’s daughter apparently playing the part of director Joanna Hogg? Or something? Something very meta, at least.

But I do remember that I really enjoyed Part I.

The cinematography is very unusual — it looks like it was shot on film? (I mean, not on digital.) At least some of the scenes.

Or it could be digital, but then colour graded in … ways that aren’t usual. There’s also something about the graininess that looks real instead of simulated… but I guess anything is possible with digital these days.

Nice pants.

Hey! It’s Richard Ayoade! Playing a chain-smoking cool-as-fuck director! That’s typecasting for you.

This film is lovely. Less Éric Rohmerish than the first film (because it’s less unclear what the film is about), but it’s still quite Rohmerish.

So if this is about Joanna Hogg’s first movie (which I still haven’t seen), then they’re soon going to be casting somebody playing Tilda Swinton (who was in that movie)? IT”S SO META

On the other hand, it might not be that autobiographical at all.

I guess part of the fascination here is that this is an old-fashioned intellectual movie — the kind that used to rule art cinema, but has mostly disappeared now. If it’s art cinema these days, it’s something like, say, Titane or Caché, which are very different sort of things.