Nothing is as satisfying when you are watching a doc film about the entertainment industry as when you see the former CEO of a company, in this case, the pasty-faced mug of J. Mitchell Lowe (a.k.a. Mitch Lowe), in complete denial over his actions that caused the collapse of said company. Mitch Lowe has no bones about telling us in MoviePass, MovieCrash that lower-level peons that work in the industry, and more directly, the people that ran the company he was the head of, have no place in attending a million-dollar party he threw while celebrating the success of MoviePass. One million dollars was spent on a ghost celebration for an achievement that never existed. You can hate Mitch Lowe (and Lowe himself makes it oh so easy to do just that while watching his milquetoast interview segs), but something tells me he truly believes in his bullshit.
MoviePass, MovieCrash details the dizzying heights and abysmal lows of a company that initially shook up the entire system of exhibiting theatrical film by allowing movie fans to see unlimited movies for $9.95 a month. As a result, MoviePass forced Hollywood to think beyond its 1980s mentality and understand what moviegoers wanted and how they wanted it. It only took a few corporate suits and a massive cash inflow from a non-creative entity known as Helios & Matheson Analytics (these guys bought MovieFone in 2018, thinking it was still a relevant entity) to decimate the original MoviePass concept. In this case, it happened just under twenty-four months after Lowe “took charge.”
MoviePass was started by Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt in 2011, two African American entrepreneurs with solid entertainment business roots. If you are waiting to read that these guys got fucked out of their own business, let me tell you, you won’t be disappointed. What is quite alarming is just how they got fucked. Unfortunately, it’s not a new story, but it will still shock the viewer, considering this isn’t a documentary film about what happened fifty years ago in Hollywood. This is recent history.
The doc is put together dynamically, allowing the viewer to shift back and forth within the short history of MoviePass. I’ve read that some viewers were confused by this style of editing, but it works for MoviePass, MovieCrash.
Interviews with key players, former employees, investors, and power users of the app are presented here in measured snippets without allowing any direct point of opinion to take control. You get the full story here, at least the version the filmmaker wants.
Director Muta’Ali does a commendable job making sense of this unbelievably true story. Ali’s Life’s Essentials with Ruby Dee (2014) is one of his early works that deserves a second look, assuming you’ve not seen it. I hope to see more well-defined documentary films from Muta’Ali as time passes.
MoviePass, MovieCrash sits squarely in the same arena. It is a well-made documentary film that tells the overall story of the birth and death of a concept that could have changed how we see movies. Perhaps it has, but not in the way Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt set out to do back in 2011.
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