Here’s an annoying thing that’s happened to me a few times recently: I’ll be talking to some guy, some L.A. hipster with glasses and bad genes, and the subject of movies will come up. At this point, this guy will bring up an older, seemingly off-the-radar, movie and tell me that I have to see it.
“You’ve got to see Chaplin. Have you seen Waking Ned Devine? Oh man, the performances…”
The reason that this guy has seen Chaplin recently is that Chaplin recently became available on Amazon Prime – a streaming video service which along with Netflix, HBO GO, and others, lets you instantly watch a variety of free films.
Here’s what bothers me: This guy’s tone suggests that he, of his own free-will, set out to rent or buy Chaplin because he’d heard it was great, and since this guy rarely lets a great film pass him by for more than twenty years since its release, he must strike out and watch it immediately, because, somehow, this one just slipped through his fingers. This guy will watch Chaplin out of loyalty to the institution of American cinema.
But, this guy did nothing of that sort. This guy got stoned, sat on his couch, and flipped around his various movie services looking for something to watch. Because pretty much any movie fan has seen all of the obvious choices available by now (as there are a lot of movies to choose from, but not that many) he debated between watching Lost in Translation for the sixteenth time, or rolling the dice on one of the dozen or so new releases. After watching the first four minutes of a Swedish abortion drama, he decided on Chaplin.
Now he has to tell you about it.
Well, check this out guy, you’re really not the film connoisseur you think you are. You’re simply taking what the powers that be toss in your direction after their licensing agreements have expired, and passing their scraps off as some sort of eclectic taste on your part. Guess what – it looks like everyone under 30 is going to have the same taste as you now, because… we’re all getting the same choices!
Now, as I’ve stated, this has only happened a few times, but each time, when these guys start talking, I’ve interrupted with,
“Oh yeah. I saw that was available on Amazon.”
They don’t like this.
“Oh, you have Amazon Prime?”
Yep. Everyone has it.
So, from now on if you want to recommend a movie to me, not in the ‘Are there any good movies available on Netflix?’ conversation – which is a fine conversation, not hating on it – but in the ‘Good movies you may not know about’ conversation, you CANNOT just spout off the stuff that’s available on your Roku box.
There are hundreds of awesome movies that haven’t been brought directly to your attention yet, so try and find one of these, hipster idiot.