Back to its regular Friday slot, WTT? is bursting with premiere dates and acquisitions this week, you’ll be glad to hear.
As we continue to enjoy life after The Event and remain indoors, movies and TV can continue to provide us with entertainment on streaming services or those old-fashioned things called DVDs and Blu-Rays (remember to remain indoors when ordering them).
So no reviews of movies at cinemas this week for Orange Thursday, but we do have one brand new movie and one really old movie to talk about. Both of them have a TV connection, too.
First in the line-up is Spenser Confidential (2020), a Netflix original directed by Peter Berg, written by Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland, and starring Mark Walhberg and Winston Duke. It’s based on Wonderland, one of the Ace Atkins novels that uses Robert B Parker’s characters from his Spenser novels. You may remember the previous adaptations of Parker’s work: 80s US TV show Spenser For Hire starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks and the A&E movies starring Joe Mantegna.
This isn’t very much like them.
Second in our double-bill is The Helicopter Spies (1968). Remember when spies were all the rage, particularly The Man From UNCLE, but no one had video recorders and everyone still had black and white TVs? Well, network TV execs had the cunning plan of releasing two-part episodes of The Man From UNCLE as fully fledged colour movies with extra, more adult content for people to enjoy.
And we’ll be looking at the The Helicopter Spies, the seventh of the movies, which was based on the fourth season two-parter The Prince of Darkness Afffair. If you grew up in the 80s, you’ll have probably seen it about 75 times from its frequent 6pm-7pm BBC2 repeats, so you may not need a rewatch.
See you after the ads and the trailers.
Streaming services might be our only hope for sanity right now, but they themselves are at the mercy of one thing: broadband speed. Watching on a slow connection? Then your picture quality will decline or you’ll get jumpy playback.
Hello “buffering”!
NowTV is particularly vulnerable to this, I find, with the service frequently downgrading itself in times of stress to “Remember that fifth generation copy of a VHS tape you used to have in the early 90s?”
Which is still fine. Even if the picture is a bit blurry, the audio is still clear and you can usually work out what’s going on.
Except if you’re watching something with hard-coded subtitles.
NowTV has recently jumped over Sky’s own Sky Go to become a much better, easier to use app. It now offers downloads on mobile devices and it finally has subtitling options.
So why NowTV feels it necessary to have hard-coded subtitles for Babylon Berlin and other foreign language shows, I don’t know. I mean my German is okay, but enough to cope with the intricacies of a murder-mystery plot during the final days of the Weimar Republic? Not all the time. So if I can’t actually read the subtitles, I (and many others) won’t have a clue as to what’s going on whenever the picture goes fuzzy.
The option for soft-subtitling (enforced or otherwise) is there, which would mean crystal clear subtitling even when the picture itself is poor. Other streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon, offer either dubbed or soft-subtitled versions of show. So what’s up with NowTV (and iPlayer, which has far better subtitling than Now anyway)?
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