“Daddy, what were DVDs?”
“Well, they were these little plastic discs that you would put in this little tray . . . .”
“UGH. You actually had to get up to make them work?”
Well, yes, but that was before streaming video recreated everything we loved about DVDs. And now, there’s an insane new app for the movie-crazed that gives you the film, plus running commentary, director interviews, IMDB links and other extras, all without leaving your couch — or your office cubicle, where you can watch the Yeah! app on the Web or on your iPad.
The Yeah! movies app from AMC takes the films showing on the cabler and repackages them with a running crawl underneath the movie, similar to ones on cable news channels. But instead of showing stock market quotes and the temperature in Atlanta, Yeah! delivers an addictive stream of trivia, quips, commentary and analysis.
Unlike “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” though, the movies are gold-plated classics, and the comments are full of love rather than snark. And since they’re written rather than spoken, you can mentally tune them out whenever you want to.
It’s assumed, though, that you’re familiar with the movies. If you’re watching them for the first time, the shift of attention between the film and the crawl is liable to make you go slightly bonkers.
Dozens of films with the extra content are already available, including “The Shining,” “Superman: The Movie,” “Reservoir Dogs,” the extended version of “Apocalypse Now,” the hyper-violent director’s cut of “Natural Born Killers,” “Blade Runner” and “The Road Warrior.” Forty-eight-hour rentals are $4.99 (or $2.99 for hundreds of additional great movies without the bonus content). All the movies are commercial-free and uncut.
Yeah! would be a natural fit for a Friday night party atmosphere with film-geek friends.
The app’s running crawl yields delectable nuggets such as Stanley Kubrick’s take on “The Shining” (“It’s an optimistic picture. Anything that says there’s anything after death is an optimistic story”), the note that director Quentin Tarantino gave Robert De Niro while filming “Jackie Brown” (the actor was to “carry himself like a bag of dirty clothes”) and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1976 prediction about “Apocalypse Now”: “I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart, that the film will not be good.”