I like movies. Except rom-coms. Ok, there are some of those I like too but people laugh at me when I admit to owning a DVD copy of Shakespeare in Love. It was written by Tom Stoppard and it's funny! Anyway, there are a huge number of movies I think everyone should see that are not "popular" - they don't appeal to a wide audience in those parts of the world with the largest movie-going audiences. I remember when my mom won free tickets to a preview of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and half the audience left at the beginning because they didn't want to read sub-titles. I'm not a movie snob - at least I don't consider myself one. I don't pride myself on knowing a lot about movies or having theories about them or knowing the work of a particular director inside out. I like every movie I have ever seen that had an exploding helicopter; that excludes me from the elite club of cineastes. Still, everyone should see Tampopo before they die.
I think Tampopo is a great example of the kind of movie I want to talk about because everyone (who doesn't mind reading sub-titles or can speak Japanese) will like it. The story is about noodles. A trucker (who is kind of like Shane in the eponymous Western) eats at a struggling noodle counter and there begins the quest to create the perfect bowl of noodles. It's a tremendous mash-up of styles and stories, great writing and slapstick comedy (including a scene in which a man's life is saved with a vacuum) that is interesting if you want to think about it and fun if you don't.
There used to be specialty video stores in almost every city (like the comic book store, a haven for a particular kind of nerd) that had one copy of every movie only a few people wanted to see - that was their niche. If you wanted a Hollywood mega-hit, you could get it at Jumbo Video or Blockbuster for $3 and if you wanted Days of Being Wild or Yakuza Election you could go to that one place with the annoyingly hip staff.
These days everything is a function of bandwidth. iTunes rents two kinds of movies, the incredibly popular and the complete shit. If you are looking for movies from Korea or Japan, forget it. Even Canadian movies are hard to get. And if it's more than 10 years old but isn't by a director your filmy friends can't shut up about you aren't going to find it either.
The sites that offer movies for free aren't really offering movies for free; they are offering either slow downloads that try your patience and get you to buy a membership or a little piece of real estate between two banner ads. You can get new movies from all over the world at those sites because they are accessed from all over the world but you don't get sub-titles.
What I imagine will happen is the internet will eventually fill the niche held in meat space by the specialty video store with a specialty download store. The problem is finding it. And even then, they will be asked to perform tasks (that cost money) previously done by the film's producers (or whoever handles the release). DVDs with sub-titles aren't sub-titled so I can enjoy renting them for $4, they are sub-titled as an incentive to by them for $30. It isn't an accident that dubbing went out when rentals came in. Television audiences want to watch, not read. DVD audiences want the original (with options). So that site will require a membership and if you pick the wrong site you end up paying two membership fees (and there goes your credit card info to who knows who, etc).
DVDs are so great I think we take them for granted. Even if the commentaries were almost always shit, they had the movie, optional sub-titles in several languages, chapters you could skip to and navigate with, little extras like "Behind the Scenes" or "The Art of..." It all added up to a pretty great package. And you got the whole deal when you rented. Now you get the movie and that's it. If you can find it. Which means I never have to pay to see another hundred million dollar action movie (unless I want to see it in 3D or in IMAX) but the rest of the movie world is duller. I have been trying to find a way to buy Wong Kar-Wai movies (in real life and on the internet) and it's hard! I finally found them all at the little store under the theaters in the TIFF building - which is more like a gift shop at a museum than a store.
While it might seem stupid to be complaining about the difficulty of acquiring consumer goods at this point in our history, when there is more of everything for sale everywhere, but there are certain areas where curation has taken a larger role than others. This is true past a certain level of discernment of all things (for sale). Someone has to make a choice about what to put on the shelves and they choose the most popular, not the best. Unless their niche is "the best". It is in those types of products where different geographical or ideological territories are producing radically different products that curation becomes important. And why I want a Muji store to open in Toronto so badly I can taste it. But to get back to the subject of movies, the market is huge and so is the supply. Almost every country has a domestic movie industry capable of producing all the movies you could want to watch. I don't care about Icelandic cinema but there are people who do and, if they don't live in Iceland, they are being curated out of the market. When it's a product like really high quality paper-clips (which I really want now but can't find) I don't mind so much but a product like movies starts to both bother and worry me. It worries me because next it might be books and that's the proverbial straw that will mess with this (following the constraints of the proverb) camel's back. When people start messing with my access to books, I get mean.
If you are a young internet entrepreneur, I recommend at least looking at the feasibility of the "All Movies of All Time" membership website. You might get rich. You almost definitely get invited to some cool parties. You could say you were "Bringing Tarkovski to everyone!" People would eat that shit up and, meanwhile, I could watch Beat Takeshi's entire ouvre for $5.99 a month - with the occasional diversion into movies featuring exploding helicopters.
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