random bits

[cellio]

While we were in Sears waiting for Dani's new tires, he noticed a "bilingual tire gauge". Yes, it talks to you (in English or Spanish). It also has a decent-sized digital display. So I went looking for one that has the display but doesn't talk, because I have a lot of trouble reading a conventional gauge and thus do not check my pressure as often as I ought. Alas, there is a hefty surcharge for silence. So I got the noisy one and will hope for minimal annoyance.

Erik (the underweight cat) has developed a voracious appetite (for him) in the last several days. I'm happy to oblige, but I wonder what the difference is. I did buy a new type of food to try out on him on spec, but he's also chowing down on the food he had previously shown little interest in. Maybe he just needed some new flavors to jump-start his appetite. It's probably pretty boring (culinarily, at least) to be a domestic dog or cat, getting the same stuff day in and day out. Think back to childhood and those "tuna casserole again?" moments, and that probably wasn't daily. :-)

Dani and I finally saw The Incredibles this afternoon. Fun movie. They probably should have included a family pet, who would exhibit absolutely no powers but keep you wondering. But maybe I'm being influenced by The Crossovers. :-)

We saw a matinee and all the previews were aimed at kids. Is that because that's what's attached to this movie, or because you get different previews at matinees than at evening shows? There was also a short feature -- haven't seen one of those since I was a kid -- and it, too, was pretty clearly for the kids. Well-done technically; insipid artistically. (I didn't catch a title.)

Comments

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

(Had to break this into two pieces, because it was over 4300 words. Can you say long-winded? I knew you could.)
Trailers are generally added at the discretion of the theater (though it is possible this has changed in the decade or so that I have been out of the industry). It used to be that the distributor would send out the trailers of films the theater itself had booked to screen. The industry has changed since those days of the independent theaters. In the era of the multi-plex, every theater gets pretty much every preview, as it is assumed that somewhere in the chain, every movie will get shown. When I was getting out of the industry, we were beginning to see movies arriving with preloaded trailers, but it was not the industry norm at all. My guess, as the distributors have grown more powerful, that has increasingly been the trend. However, there is nothing to prevent a theater from removing trailers and they will almost always add trailers that are relevant only to their theater chain (Let's Go Out to the Lobby, and the like).
Back in the day, there were no restriction of what we could put on a film (other than ratings appropriateness; very tacky to run a trailer for Nine and Half Weeks before Lady and the Tramp). My guess is that this has changed some. The distributors have much more power than they used to. I could see them threatening to pull all of their products from a chain if someone didn't play ball. Remember, the theaters make almost no money on the sale of the tickets. They need to movies to get you to buy popcorn. If you don't get the hot new movie, no popcorn sales. The distributors know that if someone can't watch a movie at one theater, there is another right done the street that they will go to instead. They kind of have the theater chains over a barrel.
I'm glad all of my years spent in dark warm spaces was good for something!