BEFORE: Last summer, I suffered a great loss when my DVR died - and after chewing out my cable company for several hours, and tallying up which movies that I'd been storing on the drive needed to be replaced, I was forced to start the transition off of physical media. Before that point, I was able to dub a movie from every premium channel to DVD, so that I could always have a copy of every film I watched. You know, just in case I ever have time to go back and re-watch something I liked (a pipe dream, it turns out...) and the cable channels aren't running it at that point. Plus I liked having a physical record of my cinematic journeys, despite the fact that it was an ever-increasing storage problem. I was told that my new replacement DVR would still allow me to record movies from the premium channels, but it turned out that wasn't completely true, and I had to do tests to figure out which channels run that signal that makes a film unable to copy to disc. (The answer is fairly complex, some channels yes, some no, some work from "On Demand" only...)
But the silver lining in that whole process is that it forced me to watch more films via streaming services - and the channels that run that signal and don't allow duplication (like HBO and Cinemax) were transformed into, essentially, streaming services to me, no different from Netflix or Hulu - watch it once, take it off the list, if it's a great film, maybe look for a physical copy somewhere down the road. Before 2017, I was about 99% cable, and after summer 2018, I'm now about 50% cable, and 50% other sources. (I'll have a breakdown of September's stats in a couple of days, but it's been a BIG month for cable...). If I hadn't bumped up my streaming game, maybe I wouldn't be just 31 films away from my first Perfectly-Linked Movie Year right now.
But lately my way of life and my love of physical media got challenged again, I noticed that my DVD recordings weren't sounding very good - at the start of my recorded discs I'd have a fluctuating hum, sometimes very light, and sometimes incredibly distracting. Most often this would disappear 5 or 10 minutes into the film, but sometimes it would stick around for the whole film - and so even if I'd recorded a movie to DVD, I got into the habit of checking before watching to see if that film was still airing on demand, as the HD cable copy was probably much better than the one I had on disc (and, extra bonus, I could watch with subtitles, my hearing's not improving...).
My first attempt to fix the problem involved buying new videotape - which is not easy these days. I figured that my tapes (which I use to bring movies down to my basement lab) were probably worn out, and in the event that the problem wasn't my VHS tapes but my recording VCR, I've heard that the best way to clean the heads on a VCR is to pop in a virgin tape and record something. I waited for a bargain on videotape on eBay and made my move. Only after just 1 or 2 recordings on each tape, I got the humming again. Next step was to look into replacing my VCRs, I still own 3 working VHS/DVD combo player plus the recorder, and I've already shuffled them around the house into what I think is the last possible configuration that suits my needs.
First step, replace the one I'm using for recording movies - this is no longer an easy or cheap thing to do, because the few new VCRs still on the market are going for several hundred dollars each, which is way overpriced. The prices are high because nobody wants them any more, but logically I think that means that stores should REDUCE the prices, rather than increase them, for the people who still use them. But what do I know about supply and demand? If you pay $500 or $700 for a new VCR, I think you're a fool, but you've already paid the price for your foolishness. Instead I made a note of the model number and bought a used model of the EXACT same VCR/DVD combo on Amazon for $60. No remote included, but who cares, because I've already got a working remote.
I got the replacement a few days ago, and I put it into my system last night. So far so good, I made two recordings on (relatively) new VHS tape, and there was no hum. So it seems I'm back in business, no immediate need to replace my other players, I can do that little by little, until this life that I've come to be familiar with disappears entirely, or they come up with some system where I can watch any movie, any time I want, for one small fee. We're just not there yet, so I'm going to continue to dub what I can to DVD so I can watch it at leisure, and my movies don't disappear into the ether after I watch them. Call me crazy, but I'm keeping VHS and DVD alive for now, because it suits me to do so.
Tonight's film aired on one of those channels I can't dub from, so I can't save it - maybe that's a good thing, I don't know yet. Dwayne Johnson carries over from "The Rundown" - from one of The Rock's earliest films to the most recent one that I'll watch during this chain. (What, did you think I was going to run out and see "Hobbs & Shaw"? Unlikely, since I've avoided that whole franchise to date...)
THE PLOT: A security expert must infiltrate a burning skyscraper, 225 stories above ground, when his family is trapped inside by criminals.
AFTER: OK, maybe this wasn't the best idea, because I am afraid of heights. I don't see this as an irrational fear, I see it as a very rational one - you fall from a skyscraper, there's just no hope for you. I worked for many years on the 15th floor of a building in Manhattan, and that was a challenge for me - and I realized the whole time that there were many buildings taller all around, but 15 floors was high enough for me. The office briefly moved to a building around the corner, and was on the 28th floor of that building, and I couldn't have been happier when we all moved back to the old building, and I was 13 stories closer to the ground. During the summer, my boss would like to go out on the roof and have lunch, it was a stunning view of Manhattan, but I would be edgy and nervous the whole time. The one picture I have of myself from visiting the Grand Canyon, you can clearly see how uncomfortable I was, and I was probably over 20 feet away from the edge.
It's been years since I've visited the top of the Empire State Building (or the old World Trade Center) - I'd rather view a skyscraper from a block or two away. They just finished a new residential building called Central Park Tower, and I hear it's nearly as tall as the Freedom Tower. I was at an event a couple years ago at one of those fancy gyms nearby, and I remember getting dizzy just from LOOKING at the new building they were erecting. And people want to LIVE that far off the ground? I just don't get it. I'll stay here in Queens where I sleep only one story above ground level, and I'm fine with that. (Before this, I had a ground-level condo in Brooklyn for 11 years.).
The fictional Hong Kong building in this film, the Pearl, is three times TALLER than the Empire State Building, bigger than the Burj Khalifa. What could possibly go wrong? And then for some reason it's got these giant rotating turbines in it (does it produce its own electricity?) and a giant sphere on top - presumably in the shape of a pearl - that seems like an enormous waste of space, until you find out later in the film what it does. Then it becomes a COLOSSAL waste of space. We stayed in the Ocean Resort Casino in Atlantic City a few months ago, and that building also has a round ball on top, but one that admittedly serves no practical purpose - and even that seems like a better raison d'être than the ball atop this skyscraper has.
You're going to want to pay attention to everything they tell you about the building near the start of this film - of course it's all going to be important later on in the film. Imagine if at the start of "Die Hard" someone casually mentioned what a great duct system the Nakatomi Plaza building had, or how easy it would be to blow it up. In this case, Dwayne Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a security expert who reviews the safety systems of the building before its upper half it opened up for residential use, but right off the bat, there's a big NITPICK POINT as his family is somehow allowed to live in the building for a few days, while he determines whether it's safe to allow people to live there. Sure, why not break the building codes and do something just before it's legal? Seems a bit like eating at a restaurant before the health inspector signs off on it, but what do I know?
What Will doesn't know is that there's some kind of conspiracy to take down the building's owner, and the building is attacked by terrorists (corporate ones, not political ones, but that scarcely matters) who set the 96th floor on fire with a special chemical, and manage to disable the state-of-the-art fire safety systems (because hackers). However, the building was supposed to be empty except for the owner/architect/shady businessman, and that just isn't the case - Sawyer's family is above the fire-line, and he can't get to them because he's been framed for the actions of the criminals. The only way to get to them is to complete a series of impossible climbing stunts, get above the 96th floor, somehow get into the building from such a high vantage point, and then get out before the whole building goes up in flames.
Oh, and figure out what the criminals want, where it is, and how to get it, circumventing all the ridiculous architecture of the building and then maybe get the systems back on-line somehow. I'd say call the help-line, but you know their advice is going to be so ridiculous - like "Are you sure your building is plugged in?" or "Have you tried resetting your building's password?" and "OK, we'll send a technician out to service your burning building, how about a week from Thursday?"
But this leads to a number of "Oh, crap!" moments where the lead character has to scale the outside of buildings, or balance on tiny ledges 150 stories above the ground, or ALMOST fall but catch the edge of something at the last second, and pull himself up to safety. If it were me, and my family was in that burning skyscraper, and I MIGHT be able to save them by rappelling down the outside of skyscraper, or climbing up the side of a giant crane, or even doing one complete pull-up to get myself to safety, I'd probably end up saying, "Well, this sucks, but you know what, I can probably get a new family..."
Extra difficulty points for the lead character having an artificial leg, I think it's great that this isn't portrayed entirely as a disability, because it hardly ever slows him down, and in some cases he can do some things with his metal limb that wouldn't even be possible for someone with two regular legs. It would have been so easy to just treat this as a weakness, but here it's anything but - it's just like anything else, there's a series of challenges involved with rescuing his family, let's stop and think about the resources we have and figure out the best way to do what needs to be done. Screenwriters of several films I've watched lately ("Toy Story 4", "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World") could learn a thing or two from this.
What starts out as a take on "Die Hard" meets "The Towering Inferno" ends with something of a tribute to "The Lady From Shanghai", which seems a bit odd, if you ask me. Classic film fans may pick up on the similarities, though. And as a bonus, we all learn a very constructive argument against the use of facial recognition software.
Also starring Neve Campbell (last heard in "The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride"), Chin Han (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Roland Moller (last seen in "The Commuter"), Noah Taylor (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Byron Mann (last seen in "The Big Short"), Pablo Schreiber (last seen in "First Man"), McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell, Hannah Quinlivan, Adrian Holmes, Elfina Luk (last seen in "Tully"), Tzi Ma (last seen in "Arrival"), Kevin Rankin (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Venus Terzo (last seen in "It" (1990)), Matt O'Leary (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen").
RATING: 5 out of 10 collapsing walkways
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