The HBO Effect

Do you have HBO? We have satellite, so we get six HBO channels. One is in Spanish, although it's pretty entertaining to watch movies in Spanish with bad dubbing sometimes.

Anyway, HBO plays the same movie multiple times in any given month, of course. It's always been that way. I remember going to my aunt's house in town in about 1982 or 1983 and checking out her HBO monthly guide and seeing that Risky Business was on about every four hours (this was around the time that the original ESPN was still showing aerobics in the morning). So now that we have six channels of HBO, the same movies are on over and over again every month.

This is an unadulterated good thing. If there is some movie you don't like, then change the channel. (We have like 100, including the BYU Channel. We don't watch that one much.) Ah, but, if there is a movie you like or even mildly interests you, then you can catch 15 or 20 or 30 minute swatches of it just about every day, if you want. For me, a liberal arts/attorney type guy who deconstructs stuff for fun and for a living, being able to watch little pieces of movies over time rocks.

This month is great. HBO is showing L.A. Confidential, which is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years or so. (Here's my very quickly prepared list of the best 12 movies of the 1990's -- couldn't get down to 10 -- in no particular order:(1) The Crying Game; (2) Pulp Fiction; (3) Dazed & Confused; (4) L.A. Confidential; (5) There's Something About Mary; (6) Schindler's List; (7) The Matrix; (8) Saving Private Ryan; (9) Toy Story; (10) Babe; (11) Fargo; and (12) Being John Malkovich. The Fugitive and The Shawshank Redemption are pretty close, too.) I've caught about an hour of it twice so far. I'll probably check out little bits of it several more times. (I highly recommend James Ellroy's book L.A. Confidential, on which the movie is based. Ellroy's L.A. Quartet of books are great, though they take a little getting used to.)

When you watch little bits of a movie a whole bunch of times, you catch all kinds of things that you didn't catch when you first saw the movie or even you saw it on video or DVD. So, for instance, Collateral was on HBO a few months ago and I caught 15 or 20 minutes of it a whole bunch of time. (After being into Miami Vice back in the 80's, I'll pretty much go see any movie that Michael Mann makes. The ones about crime and cops all have that after-dark, wet-streets kind of look that Miami Vice had and are pretty good film noir. See Collateral, see Heat, they're good.) Collateral is about a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) who is hired for the night by a hit man (Tom Cruise -- playing a freak, got to give him credit for not always demanding to be a good guy) to drive him around while he shoots people (the taxi driver doesn't do it willingly once he finds out Cruise is a hit man, of course). I saw the movie in the theater and liked it, so, when it showed up on HBO, I was pretty happy.

At one point in the movie, Tom Cruise forces Jamie Foxx to go into a bar and tell them he's the hit man to get some information. Foxx asks Cruise some questions about him just in case Foxx gets asked. Foxx asks him, "How long you been doing this?" Cruise says, "Private sector, six years." (Foxx's next question is something like "So, do you like get benefits, you know, health care, stuff like that?") Now, when I saw the movie in the theater, I caught the "six years" part, but not the "private sector" part. The "private sector" part puts a whole new spin on the line and, to some extent, Cruise's character. The "private sector" part tells us that he was an assassin with the CIA or the military or something before hanging out his own shingle. Interesting. Wouldn't have noticed that without the joy of HBO.

I haven't caught a lot new in L.A. Confidential yet, except that it's kind of unbelieveable that, of everyone in that movie who was brilliant -- Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, James Cromwell (the subject of a post here soon), David Strathain, Kevin Spacey -- the only one who won an Oscar was Kim Basinger. Apparently, the Academy that she didn't scream in the movie. There's three weeks left this month, though.