Love Film Sucks

My 2.5 year old daugher said to me this morning, ‘when I’m a big girl I want chewing gum and pills’.

My fear for her development and the effect she may have on any pre-approved babysitter and the fact my wife is 8 months gone with Untitled 2 means our Saturday nights are spent watching a film and eating sustainably sourced pizza’s from South Africa, or something like that.

Wife, who knows her way around a Google but thinks RSS is a whispered insult has taken it upon herself to subscribe to Love Film. People at the daytime social gatherings we attend also subscribe to Love Film.

3 weeks in and dismayed with Wife’s selection, I have decided to take control and duly logged in as her. Frankly if you’ve sat through The Family Stone you will know why I did this.

I’m vociferous about the opportunities for film makers and studios to offer their product online, on demand at the same time it’s in the cinema, arguing that the ‘at home’ and ‘at the cinema’ are two totally different social experiences and not mutually exclusive.

Take me for example, I’d point at myself and say ‘neo geek file sharer with a patchy beard’, but I’m not, I’m fearful of corrupted files eating away at my much loved hard drive and worming their way into my poorly organised files. I don’t give a rat’s ass that it’s illegal, I just want quality and the knowledge that I can get the film from an approved source at the time I want. I even want to pay for it. Sky Movies is half way there, if they ramped up their inventory to offer more than a handful of popular titles, they’d have a captive market.

But antipodean behemoth’s are slow to change, as are the studios and increasingly it looks like Google and Apple, or Goopple, will control this market.

So an old fashioned dvd through the post, cheaper than my local dvd shop and with seemingly larger inventory makes sense.

But the site, good grief, it’s awful, the interface total crap, tiny thumbnails of blurred dvd covers, the risible Miss Potter starring McGregor and Zellweger as hand drawn bunny lovers the top title in the Documentary section (!).

It’s just lazy, a lazy site. Whist ebay and Amazon do plain and functional, Love Film does irritating and ugly, the Recommendations baffling; Jackass The Movie : Number Two?

Designers are paid a lot to make movie posters engaging, the whole judge a book by it’s cover thing, it works, I know, I love judging, it saves on actual thinking. So why not give the site a more visual interface, give the movie posters prominence? link out to reviews across the web, shove those recommendations in my face, not bury them behind multiple tabs. Also the banner ads, I pay for this service, sure, not a lot, but I pay, I don’t want them, they irritate, I don’t want to drink cheap mass produced wine and watch universally panned Narnia 2, Princely Caspian Sea.

What about a Facebook app, that allows my friends to share their Love Film account with me? so I can see what they rated, not what a lot of people I don’t know like. Wife likes rom-coms, I like gross out and subtitles but never combined.

Love Film sucks and it’ll suck even more when dvd’s are just used as coasters, but it doesn’t have to and that really irritates me.

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