Whenever anything remotely related to The Weinstein Company comes up at work, I end up in a sick-angry state of rage and frustration. It becomes clearer and clearer to me with every such interaction that they can only have gotten where they are by throwing all their chips in with Satan.
First of all, two guys who you’d think would have a certain feeling of confraternity with independents in the movie industry (I mean, it was “independent film” that put them on the map, right? Miramax is the company that Pulp Fiction built, right?) nonetheless have shut local independent video stores out of their distribution: they have an “exclusive” with Blockbuster. This means that whenever a WC movie comes out on DVD, we have to go to WalMart or wherever and buy 30-40 copies at full retail.
It also means that someone at my store has to actively check their website for release dates. This is what got me chewing off my own hand today: their website is the most obnoxious tangle of Flash-only bullshit that I have recently come across. As far as I can tell, after digging through obnoxious Flash-animation after obnoxious Flash-animation, there is no simple list of titles by release date. As far as I can tell, there is only a bizarrely clumsy and essentially unnavigable animation-with-embedded links of images and titles, with no apparent dates. In order to click on any of these links for further details, you have to play a game of complex hand-eye-coordination worse than any of those stupid “zap the fly!” banner ads. Then when you do manage to thread the spinning needle and click on the title you want, still all the information you get is “coming soon!”–no date.
So then I spend 15 minutes navigating this OBNOXIOUS Flash site to find an email address, with ZERO success. THe best I can find is a street mailing address! I even go so far as to Google for an email, and find some kind of business directory, which STILL lists no email address.
Fuck the Weinstein Company, and Fuck the Weinsteins.