LUV & HAT

LUV - We’re going to have to face facts. The DVD is dead. All those shelves and shelves of films and TV shows that you’ve carefully curated over the course of 15 years? The whole lot’s worth about £3.50 now. Seriously, you may as well have a living room full of VHS tapes. Or wax cylinders. Or cave paintings. Not even good cave paintings. Shit cave paintings.

Nobody needs DVDs any more. You can rent films on YouTube. You can rent films on PlayStations. If it weren’t for the fact that the average battery life for a modern smartphone is about four seconds, you could probably watch the entire Godfather trilogy on your phone. Right now, DVDs pretty much exist to stop HMV from transforming into a Poundland for people who read Mojo, and that’s it.

But that’s not to say that the death of DVDs is a good thing. A world without DVDs is a world where you can’t play Shake The DVD Box And Guess How Many Of The Little Fucking Teeth Things Have Broken Inside It. A world without DVDs is a world where you can’t go into someone’s living room, immediately notice that they’re a fan of The Wire and leave before they start tediously wanking on about how it’s, like, totally the modern-day equivalent of Shakespeare. But worst of all, a world without DVDs is a world without DVD commentaries. And that’s very sad

Cast your mind back to the birth of the DVD. They were going to change the way we watched films, remember? We were promised pioneering new features like alternative angles, for anyone interested in seeing what Grosse Pointe Blank would be like if it was shot entirely from the perspective of Minnie Driver’s chin. And alternative endings, for anyone who wanted Kevin Spacey to hand Brad Pitt a great big box of dildos at the end of Seven. And, best of all, DVD commentaries.

Because the DVD commentary would finally lift the veil on the glamorous world of Hollywood. It’s where master directors and Oscar-winning actors could all gather together, reveal their secret techniques and push cinema into a gleaming new Golden Age.

To be fair, it hasn’t worked out. It turns out that the average DVD commentary consists of a bored director and third-tier star disinterestedly mumbling about how relatively substandard the fruit baskets in their trailers were. That, added to the fact that nobody has ever sat through an entire DVD commentary without passing out or entertaining the thought of self-harm, meant that they never quite reached their potential.

There are exceptions, of course - Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall commentary being the shining all-time highlight - but it doesn’t matter. DVDs, and therefore DVD commentaries, are dead. And, unless you’re a poisonous little dickhead, you’ll miss them.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Remember The Matrix? For any younger people reading, The Matrix is an old film starring Keanu Reeves as a latex Jesus who lives inside a magic internet built by Transformers in the future.

Anyway, The Matrix was perfect. Nowadays the CG looks a bit ropey, but as a story it was perfect. There wasn’t an ounce of flab on it - it had an attention-grabbing beginning, a middle that kept you hooked and a satisfactory ending that still left you with questions. And made a certain type of man go out and buy leather trenchcoats and wrap-around shades, but I can forgive The Matrix for that because it was, in and of itself, singularly perfect.

But then came the sequels.

Then came the bloated, flaccid, showy sequels that the Wachowski brothers, fat with praise and money, vomited all over the grave of their immaculate gem of a first movie. Twice. Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions added nothing but managed to spoil everything, and to this day I cannot watch The Matrix without pretending that the other two films just don’t exist.

And, hey, who likes tenuous analogies?

Because, if The Matrix is a feature film, then the accompanying DVD commentaries are its unnecessary sequels. We all thought DVD commentaries were going to be amazing - just as we thought the Matrix sequels would be amazing. “Cor,” we all said, rubbing our hands in glee. “Now we’re going to get the director’s take on what the movie was really about, without all that Hollywood studio bullshit.”

Turns out the director’s take on things isn’t that interesting. Turns out it’s just a ninety-minute nasal drone about fucking nothing, punctuated by ums, chewing noises, and the occasional brainless whoop from a supporting actor. Listening to a DVD commentary is like watching a movie with someone who insists on turning the volume down during every interesting scene to monotonously relate something they read on Wikipedia.

Hollywood studio bullshit is there for a reason.

It’s there to save us from auteurs mumbling about how hard it was to get a certain shot because of “the way the sun was”, or how long it took every day to put Hobbit feet on actors, or how Deep Roy is the most overused short actor in film today.

Sometimes you just need to let the magic be. This is why I don’t like shows like The Xtra Factor or Doctor Who Confidential. It’s why I don’t like anyone who tells a joke and then explains why it’s funny. Give me the trick, but for god’s sake don’t show me the smoke and mirrors.

Unless you’re Derren Brown, obviously. I mean, how the fuck does he do that shit? 
- Robyn Wilder