Culture Shock 04.16.15: 'Daredevil' brings Marvel back down to Earth

One particular scene marks when Marvel's "Daredevil" goes from being merely good TV to being something special.

At the end of the second episode, Daredevil — although he isn't yet called that — fights his way through a gang of Russian mobsters in order to rescue a kidnapped boy. The entire fight plays out in one long take, no cuts and no trickery. With its bare-knuckle brutality and seemingly effortless cinematography, it immediately draws comparisons to the extraordinary hallway fight in Chan-wook Park's 2003 film "Oldboy." One rarely sees such compelling fight scenes in movies nowadays, and never on television. If anything, "Daredevil's" fight surpasses "Oldboy's."

If there's one thing "Daredevil" does well, it's fight scenes, but the show does a lot of other things well, too.

All 13 episodes of "Daredevil's" first season debuted on Netflix last Friday to near unanimous raves. Count this review among them. The first of Marvel's five planned Netflix series, "Daredevil" brings the far-flung Marvel Cinematic Universe, which took off into deepest space with "Guardians of the Galaxy," back down to street level, specifically New York City's Hell's Kitchen.

This is a New York still rebuilding following the events of "The Avengers," and one man wants to see the city rebuilt according to his own grand design, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way.

Wilson Fisk (a perfectly cast Vincent D'Onofrio) may lack the Red Skull's Cosmic Cube or Loki's godlike powers, but he more than makes up that deficit with sheer physical menace. He's Marvel's most fully realized villain to date, in large part thanks to D'Onofrio's mercurial performance.

A man-mountain barely concealing both volcanic rage and childlike insecurities, Fisk has never truly grown up. But he has grown powerful, and from Hell's Kitchen's shadows he runs the most fearsome criminal organization in the city. He owns the cops, the courts and even members of the media. And he's looking to expand.

That places Fisk on a collision course with Hell's Kitchen's self-appointed defender, a masked vigilante dressed in black who is chipping away at Fisk's empire.

When he was 9 years old, young Matthew Murdock (Skylar Gaertner) was blinded while saving a man from being run over by a truck carrying chemicals. The chemicals took Matt's sight, but they heightened his other senses to superhuman levels. He can hear cries for help across town, tell when you're lying by your heartbeat, and smell a hit man’s aftershave two floors down.

He's also an expert in martial arts, thanks to being recruited and trained by a blind martial arts master and all-around jerk named Stick, made likable by Scott Glenn's endearing portrayal.

Yes, that sounds a lot like the old TV show "Kung Fu," a fact the show acknowledges with a sly grin, proving you can do gritty street-level superheroics without losing your sense of humor.

Now an adult, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fights for the innocent by day as a lawyer and by night as the "man in the mask." Like I said, he's not Daredevil yet, but he is on the path.

As not-quite-Daredevil, Matt has one ally, Rosario Dawson as the nurse who patches him back together. As Matt Murdock he has a few more: his law partner Foggy (Elden Henson), their client-turned-secretary Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) and investigative reporter Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall).

Cox's Matt Murdock makes us forget Ben Affleck was ever miscast in the same role. Cox brings humor and drive to the character, and endows him with charisma to spare.

Show runner Steven S. DeKnight, taking over for Drew Goddard, who dropped out early into production, ably treads the fine line between genres. By the time Matt finally puts on his red costume with the horns, it feels natural. The Marvel Cinematic Universe happily accommodates the spectacle of the movies, the family-friendly adventure of ABC's "Agents of SHIELD" and the adult crime drama of "Daredevil." But those of us who grew up reading the comics already knew that.

Culture Shock 08.08.13: TV and movies experience reversal of fortunes

Two new books, taken together, perfectly illustrate the divergent fortunes of television and the movies.

The first is "Difficult Men" by GQ correspondent Brett Martin. In this case, the (overly long) subtitle — "Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad' " — says it all. Television is no longer mostly just sitcoms and episodic police procedurals, although both are still around and doing fine. Now there are complex shows with ongoing stories that attract some of the best actors in the business, the sort of actors who used to do only movies and looked down on TV work.

Driven by writer-creators rather than by directors, television has become the go-to platform for long-form, narrative storytelling.

At the other, seedier end of the street is Lynda Obst's "Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business." Obst is a producer who has a hard time producing movies nowadays, even though her credits include hits like "Adventures in Babysitting" and "Sleepless in Seattle."

The reason is Hollywood doesn't make the kind of modestly budgeted films she makes anymore, unless they're horror films or star-driven comedies. Everything is either low-budget indie films, on the one hand, or grotesquely budgeted effects-driven extravaganzas based on brands with built-in audience appeal. That's why everything Hollywood produces seems to be a remake, a sequel or based on a book, comic book or old TV show.

They're not all bad, but for every "Iron Man" there are a dozen "Man of Steels," crowding out other types of movies. Once, these big-budget would-be blockbusters were tentpoles around which studios built their release schedules. Now, Obst complains, just about every studio movie is a tentpole.

Even a big-name director like Steven Spielberg has to scrape together funding when he wants to make a non-tentpole like his Oscar-bait biopic "Lincoln."

That prompted Spielberg and George Lucas, jointly credited/blamed with creating the "summer blockbuster," to warn that Hollywood's big tent is on the verge of collapsing.

The common denominator behind both TV's and films' fortunes is DVD sales.

The rise of DVDs (and video on demand) in the past 15 or so years made movies more available, a development that was one thing driving pay-TV channels like HBO into original programming as a way to differentiate themselves. The subsequent decline in DVD sales, however, broke all of the Hollywood studios' financial models, leading to the tentpole-dominated model that prevails now.

The decline of DVDs is in part the work of Netflix, which is also credited with helping change TV for the better by encouraging "binge viewing" and producing its own shows like the Emmy-nominated "House of Cards," a fourth season of "Arrested Development" and the latest critical darling, "Orange is the New Black." It's not too much of an exaggeration to say Netflix changed everything.

So, is everything roses for TV and curtains for the movies? Not necessarily.

Television still falls prey to formula. For all the talk of a "creative revolution," how many of these daring new shows can be summed up as "family man (or woman) with a secret criminal life"?

And Hollywood has been here before, when big-budget disasters like 1963's "Cleopatra" nearly sank studios and cleared the way for a new generation of filmmakers who made smaller, more personal films. After a decade of bloated epics, we got the generation of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and, yes, George Lucas.

Lest we forget, the original "Star Wars" was also a modestly budgeted film, by today's standards.

Culture Shock 06.06.13: Season 4 is our 'Arrested Development'

A funny thing happened after "Arrested Development" was canceled in 2006.

The housing bubble burst.

"Hey, that's not funny!" you say? Not on its own, no, but who could have suspected a sitcom about a bankrupt family forced to live in a model house in an unfinished subdivision could prove so prophetic?

Yet as the old economy stagnated, the new economy kept on keeping on. Canceled by Fox, "Arrested Development" was resurrected by Netflix, which has released the entire fourth season all at once, because the way Americans watch television has also kept on keeping on.

Thanks to Netflix and its streaming service, supported by a growing library of TV programs, binge viewing is rapidly becoming the norm.

Who hasn't lost an entire day to a "Battlestar Galactica" marathon?

But enough about my problems. This is about the Bluth family's problems, which are as numerous and ridiculous as ever.

Michael (Jason Bateman), the son who passes for the responsible member of the Bluth family, has cut ties with the rest of his family. Again. No, this time he means it. He has sold his stock in the family company and finally finished, on his own, that subdivision. Just in time for the housing crash.

So, broke and homeless, Michael has moved in with his son, George-Michael (Michael Cera). Unfortunately, George-Michael is at college and lives in a dorm.

Meanwhile, family matriarch Lucille (Jessica Walter) is preparing for her trial for hijacking the Queen Mary in an attempt to flee from the Securities and Exchange Commission. (See the end of season 3.) The rest of the family is strangely ambivalent.

And while all of that is going on, the family patriarch, George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), is hatching a scheme involving his twin brother Oscar (also Jeffrey Tambor), a sweat lodge, gullible corporate CEOs, cheap desert real estate, and a plan to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The rest of the Bluth family is also on hand, including youngest brother Buster (Tony Hale), who still has a hook for a hand. Eldest brother G.O.B. is still trying to find the ultimate magic trick. Adopted sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) is still trying to find herself. And brother-in-law Tobias (David Cross) is still trying to find a clue. All unsuccessfully.

Old supporting characters are back, too, like Henry Winkler's crooked lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn and Liza Minnelli's unbalanced Lucille 2. But the heart of the story belongs to Michael and George Sr.

Michael finds himself in Hollywood, trying to turn his family's story into a movie for Ron Howard, which adds a new wrinkle to Howard being the show's narrator. And while Michael is caught up in the entertainment economy, George Sr. is caught up in his old ways: shady real estate deals and corrupt government contracts. It's just like old times. It's how the Bluths got into this mess to start with.

Unlike the original run of "Arrested Development," each episode of the fourth season focuses on a particular member of the Bluth clan. That's probably owing to scheduling conflicts. Everyone in the cast has moved on to other projects since 2006. But series creator Mitchell Hurwitz makes that work for him. Each character's story arc ends up crossing the others' arcs in surprising and funny ways.

In a way, the entire season is one very long episode that, for reasons of custom, is split into 15 segments. It's the first TV show meant specifically for binge viewing. If you don't watch at least the first six episodes in one sitting, you're not doing it right.

So, a television show that began as the story of a dysfunctional family is now equally as much the story of a dysfunctional economy, but delivered in a format best suited to the new economy.

This is our arrested development.

Culture Shock 08.02.12: The British are here, and they brought their telly with them

Even as the rest of the world descends upon Great Britain for the 2012 Olympics, The U.K.'s most visible export is reaching new heights of popularity in the United States.

Nowhere is that more obvious than this week's cover of America's most prominent entertainment magazine, Entertainment Weekly, which for the first time ever is given over to a British television show. And not just any British television show, but the long-running sci-fi series "Doctor Who," which is rapidly approaching its 50th anniversary.

Long a staple of British Saturday-evening viewing, "Doctor Who" has, in the past few years, grown beyond its American cult following to become mainstream viewing. It's BBC America's No. 1 show.

"Doctor Who" previously aired in America on Syfy, which seemed embarrassed by the show and didn't know what to do with it. Syfy also ran episodes a year after they aired in the U.K., and by then all the most tech-savvy "Doctor Who" fans had downloaded the series online.

BBC America, however, made "Doctor Who" the centerpiece of its schedule and began airing episodes the same day they aired in Britain.

That's faster turnaround in some cases than NBC can manage for its tape-delayed coverage of the London Olympics.

Then there's the personal touch. The cast of "Doctor Who" has become a regular fixture in the U.S., speaking to packed convention halls at San Diego's annual Comic-Con International.

Add to that the fact BBC America exists in the first place — an American television channel devoted to British television — and it's Paul Revere's worst nightmare.

The British aren't just coming, they're already here, neither by land nor by sea but by the air.

PBS has for decades relied on British television for many of its most acclaimed shows, but now it has certified hits in the form of two British imports, the BBC's "Sherlock" and ITV's "Downton Abbey," which netted 19 Emmy nominations between them, including Best Drama for the latter.

We've come a long way from late-night reruns of "Benny Hill" and "Are You Being Served?" No doubt much of this is a matter of necessity.

Cable and satellite services have more channels than they can fill with programming, and apparently there is actually a limit to how many hours of "Law & Order" marathons you can expect viewers to tolerate.

The U.K., meanwhile, is a reliable source of programming — much of it very good — in a language vaguely similar to the one most Americans speak.

And nowhere is the demand for programming more acute than online, where video-streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are looking for their own must-see TV.

Hulu, for instance, just picked up the exclusive U.S. rights to seasons 1, 2 and 3 of the blistering political satire "The Thick of It," which stars the brilliant Peter Capaldi as the prime minister's vicious enforcer Malcolm Tucker, who, as the late Jean Shepherd would say, works in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay.

Hulu will also stream the upcoming fourth season this fall, providing a welcome change from what passes for political TV in the U.S. — the sanctimonious, hackwork fantasies of Aaron Sorkin.

Netflix, for its part, has built an impressive library of British television for its on-demand offerings, from the geeky comedy "The IT Crowd," to the superb spy drama "MI-5" to classics like "Doctor Who" (new and original) and "Blackadder," and finally to sleeper gems like "The Last Detective" starring Peter Davison.

Still, as long as Matt Lauer doesn't know who Mr. Bean is, there is work for this British invasion yet to do.

Culture Shock 09.22.11: Can Netflix survive long enough for its master plan?

Netflix has had a bad couple of months.

Since the company announced its new price structure, which took effect this month and amounted to an increase for most subscribers, Netflix has been dealing with one PR disaster after another.

The rate hike was followed by Netflix's failure to renew its streaming deal with Starz, meaning lots of on-demand movies — including Disney films — will disappear from Netflix's offerings at the end of February.

As a consequence, the past two months have been ugly. Netflix has shed roughly 600,000 customers, while its stock has lost about half its value.

The backlash's severity caught Netflix's top brass off guard — and me, too, for that matter. I figured most Netflix users would complain and then suck it up, deciding Netflix was still worth the money. As it happens, most did. But, still, more than half a million customers actually following through on threats to dump Netflix. I don't think anybody expected that. It runs counter to the entire 20-year history of Internet griping, which had never amounted to anything.

Until now.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings tried to stop the hemorrhaging this week in an emailed apology that doubled as an announcement for Netflix's next move, spinning off its DVD-by-mail business into a separate company to be called Qwikster, while Netflix continues to offer streaming video.

Cue yet another round of angry customers and widespread ridicule.

Adding the cherry to this self-inflicted pie to the face, the newly valuable @Qwikster Twitter ID is already spoken for, and the guy who speaks for it does so only in a vague approximation of a language, presumably meant to be English.

From a PR standpoint, you couldn't ask for much worse, which is why it's ironic that from a pure nuts-and-bolts business perspective, everything Netflix has done makes sense — in the long run.

In the long run, DVDs are a dying format, destined to appeal only to collectors, aficionados and aging hipsters the way laserdiscs and vinyl albums do now. Nobody is going to make bank renting discs by mail. Even the Postal Service can't make money on mail.

Anyway, Netflix would rather spend money on content than on postage.

But, knowing that, all of the Hollywood studios have started upping their demands, which is what forced Netflix's rate hike and restructuring. Movies and TV shows don't come cheap.

The long-run plan is sound, but in the short run, Netflix has all of the dead-eye aim of an Imperial Stormtrooper.

Still, how bad are things for Netflix, really?

Despite losing half of its market value, Netflix's stock is still in the neighborhood of $130 a share, which is about $100 a share more than where media giants Disney and Time Warner currently trade.

Netflix also still has 24 million subscribers in the United States alone, which is more than either Showtime or Starz, and not far behind HBO's roughly 28 million. And Netflix has yet to roll out its own original programing.

The biggest threat to Netflix is still that someone might beat it at its own game. Blockbuster's new owner, Dish Network, might turn that floundering brand around, or a new owner might try to make Hulu competitive — something Hulu's current owners seem to discourage, with the exception of offering Criterion Collection films to Hulu Plus subscribers.

But first things first. Netflix really needs to buy that @Qwikster Twitter account.

Culture Shock 07.14.11: Rate hike will test Netflix surplus

It really is amazing sometimes how something can go from not existing at all to being such an essential part of daily life that any change to it is met with anger, frustration and uncontrolled sobbing.

Netflix didn't exist before 1997, and it only really became virtually ubiquitous just a few years ago. But when the video-on-demand and DVD rental company announced a new, less user-friendly rate structure this week, you'd have thought the Spaceballs had landed and said they were going to start charging us to breathe.

Basically, if you only want streaming movies and TV shows, or if you only want DVDs delivered to your home, Netflix is willing to cut you a deal. But if, like most Netflix subscribers, you want both, you're going to have to pay more. How much more? In the neighborhood of up to 60 percent more, in some cases.

If, for example, you currently have a subscription that gives you two DVDs at a time and unlimited video streaming, you can expect to pay about $5 more per month, roughly a 33 percent increase, starting Sept. 1.

The reaction to Netflix's price-increase announcement was instructive.

The Netflix blog and Facebook page quickly filled with complaints and threats to cancel subscriptions, with formerly loyal and suddenly outraged Netflix customers threatening to jump to competitors like Hulu Plus (cheaper, but you have to put up with ads) or Amazon Prime (also cheaper, but with a smaller selection of streaming titles overall, although Amazon is arguably better when it comes to recent TV shows).

If you take the angry customer reaction at face value, then you're probably thinking Netflix has just made a huge, possibly fatal mistake. Netflix is about to lose so many customers it will earn less money than before the rate hike.

That conclusion, however, is probably wrong. And Netflix knows it, otherwise it wouldn't be risking this customer revolt in the first place. (And if you want to know why Netflix is doing this, look to Hollywood. The studios are demanding more money for the right to stream their movies and TV shows, and Netflix is passing the cost along.)

Before this week's bombshell, it seemed like most Netflix customers were thrilled with the company's offerings and service. To hear most of its customers talk, Netflix was the greatest thing since the invention of moving pictures. Simply put, the vast majority of Netflix customers, based on their own reported satisfaction, seemed to enjoy a rather large consumer surplus.

"Consumer surplus" is what those of us with economics degrees call the difference between what you pay for something and what that something is actually worth to you. If I pay $5 for a double mocha latte with whipped cream but would be willing to go as high as $10 for it, my consumer surplus is $5. You may think I'm crazy, but I'm getting a 100 percent consumer surplus. That's a steal.

Netflix is betting most of its customers have been getting enough of a consumer surplus that they'll absorb the rate hike, even if they have to vent about it first. That's probably a safe bet, because all of those angry Netflix customers wouldn't have been so upset if they didn't really love their Netflix.

And that means a lot of Netflix's customers are dirty, dirty liars.

Either they were lying just a few days ago when they were saying how great Netflix was, or they're lying now when they say they're going to cancel their accounts because Netflix suddenly turned into a greedy, profit-maximizing corporation with bills of its own to pay, which it totally wasn't just last week.

You can't believe what people say. But when they actually put their money on the countertop, that's when they're telling the truth.

When it comes to Netflix, we'll find out the truth sometime in September.

Culture Shock 09.30.10: Doomsday is approaching for the DVD

A little more than a decade after its introduction, the DVD is already on its way out. It's a quick end to what was the most quickly adopted media format in history.

The evidence of the DVD's demise is overwhelming.

Best Buy plans to greatly reduce the amount of floor space it devotes to DVDs this holiday season, using that space instead for netbooks and tablet PCs — products that are actually in demand. And if you've been in a Best Buy recently, you've probably noticed the big-box retailer has already scaled back its DVD selection. Just try finding anything other than recent films or classics like "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca." The midlist selection has all but disappeared.

Earlier this year, Movie Gallery, the nation's No. 2 video rental chain, went out of business. Last week, the No. 1 chain, Blockbuster, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in a last-ditch — and probably futile — effort to avoid the same fate.

Neither Movie Gallery nor Blockbuster could withstand the onslaught of Netflix, which delivers DVDs by mail, offers an unsurpassed selection and never charges late fees. But even Netflix is trying its best to phase out DVDs.

Netflix is aggressively pushing its on-demand service, which streams movies directly to viewers via the Internet. This month, Netflix began streaming films released by Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM under a new deal worth nearly $1 billion.

Netflix would much rather pay the movie studios for the right to stream movies than pay the Postal Service to deliver DVDs to customers within one day. Netflix's executives can see the future, and it doesn't include physical media like DVDs, which are rapidly going the same way as compact discs. (Best Buy is cutting back on CDs this year even more than on DVDs. You can blame — or praise — Apple's Steve Jobs for that.)

None of this means that DVDs are about to disappear completely. The Hollywood movie studios are still banking on high-profile new releases, and Blu-ray, the high-definition successor to DVD, still appeals to people with home- theater systems. But the studios are already cutting back. Most older movies still languishing in studio vaults will probably never be released on DVD.

To meet the lingering demand for those catalog titles, a couple of studios are adopting a middle ground. Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures have launched print-on-demand services via their company websites and Amazon.com. The studios burn films to DVD-R discs when you order them.

DVD-Rs don't offer the same quality as commercially released DVDs, but they'll have to do for fans of obscure films that have not, and likely will not, make their way to DVD. For instance, Sony had scheduled a DVD release of the 1965 Sherlock Holmes film "A Study in Terror" for last year, to coincide with the release of the latest Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. But the DVD of "A Study in Terror" never arrived.

This month, Sony finally made "A Study in Terror" available as a DVD-R at its website. Clearly, someone at Sony has reconsidered the studio's approach to older films with cult followings.

Warner Bros. has been especially aggressive in shifting to DVD-R. It's print-on-demand films include "Under the Rainbow" with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, the foodie murder mystery "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" starring George Segal and Jacqueline Bisset, and Peter Sellers in "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu." A few years ago, when Best Buy was still stocking midlist titles, all would have been candidates for traditional DVD.

A few other catalog titles may find their way to DVD through small, special-interest labels that have always catered to the cult-film audience. Synapse Films will be releasing three long-awaited horror films that had been gathering dust in the Universal Studios and Fox vaults: "Vampire Circus," "Twins of Evil" and "Hands of the Ripper."

Vinyl record albums have disappeared except for the few pressed to satisfy a small but devoted following of aficionados. DVDs seem destined to follow the same path.