Why I'm Stopping My MUBI Subscription

I have been subscribed to the online streaming service MUBI for a LONG TIME - since autumn 2018 according to my viewing history page. It has a contemporary art-house catalogue, occasionally runs a good retrospective (I caught up with a lot of Rossellini movies thanks to that), and sponsors new movies, in part I guess by giving them distribution. I saw some good movies through it.

But for the last couple of years when I run through the catalogue, I have not thought "oh wow, yes, must watch that". Instead I've thought "Seems okay, I could if I didn't need to wash my hair right now" or "Jesus... 165 minutes?" or "Sorry, not interested in the tribulations of a transexual in Baghdad". I'm of the age when "art movie" meant France, Germany, Sweden, American indie, Italian, Kurusawa and Ray. Simpler times.

There's something cutely undergraduate film society about MUBI's choice of films and its descriptions. Whoever writes them has definitely drunk the post-modern feminist everything-is-power-relations Kool Aid, and may go on to a job writing comments for the Tate Modern or National Gallery. Whereas all they really need to do is say "contains Adele Exarchopolos" and I'm in, now that La Reine Isabelle is no longer making movies. Let's say that the pre-occupations of today's film-makers are not mine. I'm watching the Battlestar Galactica box-set again at breakfast.

I watch new movies in the cinema, and part of that is the whole going-to-the-Curzon thing (i'm not really an Everyman Man).

Also, MUBI is a subscription service. I have access to the Curzon catalogue, because Sis very kindly for Christmas bought me a Curzon membership (which pays for itself with the free movies) through which I can watch a movie for what amounts to a nominal rental. The films it has now are more interesting to me than the MUBI films, though there is some overlap.

So I have just pressed the button on "Cancel Subscription" in my iPhone settings. Not really because I needed to save the money, but to stop there being one more thing I should be doing but am not.

Film Emulation Bracketing (on Fuji X-E4)

Bracketing on the X-E4. I kinda knew what it was - it takes three pictures of the same scene with one parameter varying - but wasn't sure what I would do with it. Until I saw it did film emulation bracketing. Suddenly I could take lots of shots with three different film emulations and compare them.

The Standard / Velvia / Astia emulations can produce a lot of shadow, which it often takes shoving the Shadow Adjustment clear over to 1.0 to reduce. Those algorithms produce way more shadow that the human eye sees, or maybe the eye does some computational photography as well, just not as egregious as Apple's. A first pass through convinced me that Monochrome was way more to my taste than ACROS, and that the Eterna was, well, wintery

 

Summer (Astia)

Winter (Eterna)

Now take a look at these, taken on the Regent's Canal

Astia - feels like now

Eterna Bypass - feels like 1975 

Monochrome - feels like a quiet day in 1930

Which conveys the majesty of St Pauls better?

Personally, I prefer the Monochrome version of these

If you have film emulation bracketing on your camera and have never tried it, give it a whirl. In the end, I think I arrived almost where I started from: Astia is fine, I've added some HDR tweaks from You Tube, and I must pay more attention to the range of brightness in the frame. Like I did when shooting film back in the day.

Somewhere in Soho

I leave this one with no comment. It doesn't need one. Eterna, Fuji X-E4 with 27mm pancake lens.