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Topic: Cold Turkey (1971) via Amazon Instant Video
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-18-2012 09:17 PM
So I remembered liking this movie back when I was in high school and decided to try it out via the Amazon Instant Video thing.
For anybody who doesn't know, you just buy your movie for $9.99 (or rent for $2.99) through your Amazon account, and then you can download it to your Tivo or watch it on your computer or other device. If you buy, you can delete it from your device after watching but you still own it; you can re-download it later the next time you want to watch it.
The renting, downloading and watching process was smooth as silk. What was weird was the movie presentation. This being a 1971 film, it has a mono soundtrack ... but on the video, the voices all came out of the left speaker, and the music/sound efx and such mostly came from the right! It was so odd that I finally turned on the crappy TV speakers at a fairly high volume just to get the voices coming from somewhere near the screen center.
Also the movie was remastered from a film print -- there were cue marks in it at the appropriate times. It was kind of nice to see cues again. No scratches, splices, dirt or other film damage was evident. The color was faded a little -- it looked like a well-preserved 1971 print.
The movie itself? It hasn't dated well. It's a story about a "depressed" town which tries to win $25 million in a contest by having the whole population quit smoking for 30 days. Dick Van Dyke plays a minister who leads the quit-smoking effort, and Bob Newhart is the bad guy, a tobacco company suit who tries to sabotage the town's efforts.
It was directed by Norman Lear and features a score and song by Randy Newman (first theatrical efforts for both). And, it has Jean Stapleton in a minor role, playing a character very much like her Edith Bunker character from "All in the Family."
As a satire, it's pretty good but it seemed kinda slow to me. Maybe I'm used to today's faster paced comedies, I don't know. But for a $2.99 rental it was worth it.
Note: I didn't know whether to put this in Afterlife or Reviews, since the post is as much about the experience as the movie itself, so I opted for Afterlife.
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