At one point or another in 2020, my wife and I were subscribers to 11 different streaming services. As we embark on 2021, we have narrowed it down to six “essentials,” or as essential as on-demand television and movies could be considered. This is the landscape of home viewing now. It has been for some time, and the quarantine has served only to speed up this process.
But, I do not need to do a state of the union on the streaming industry. Smarter, better-informed, better-connected people than I have done that and more. Instead, I thought a more personal reflection might be in order. After all, most of us do not engage with our home viewing as part of a broad social and cultural trend, but rather as an individualized entertainment experience. In short, most of us are just scrolling, looking for the next watch.
I watched 557 films in 2020, the vast majority on streaming services, which is a first for me. In every year prior, I would guess the majority of watches came from home video or theater-going. I suspect this was more of a tipping point than a one-year anomaly. As I write this, it is the 5th of January, and I have watched nine movies this year: all of them on streaming. It is an odd new reality after I spent so much of my life dedicated to physical media.
My shelves are full of books and I would much rather pull one down than reach for my Kindle. I much prefer reading articles in magazines to online. Perhaps it is the old print journalist in me. Things feel more real, more comprehensible when you can hold them in your hand. Never mind the 1,000 or so DVDs I treat as precious, shareable artifacts, filled with the knowledge of other worlds.
It makes me a little sad, of course, as all obsolescence is wont to do. Yet, if you had told the college-age me -- that 18-year-old student renting the maximum seven movies a week from the video store -- that he would have access to a sizable portion of the Criterion library with a couple clicks for a nominal fee, he would have been thrilled. Such is the push and pull of progress.
The Criterion Channel truly is among the most amazing gifts to the cinephile world. It essentially began life as FilmStruck, the Turner Classic Movies streaming service in 2016. When it shut down at the end of 2018, it was a blow to film fans everywhere. Its re-emergence in 2019 as a standalone service was a tremendous boon to the streaming world, and it is not a stretch to say Criterion played a major role in getting me through 2020.
The best of world cinema was right at my fingertips, and I tried to take advantage as well as I could: from Victor Sjöström’s silent classic The Phantom Carriage to Russian war masterpieces The Cranes Are Flying and The Ascent; Japanese masters such as Ozu, Kurosawa, and Kobayashi to Finnish iconoclast Aki Kaurismäki; films from every continent short of the Antarctic. My watchlist on the site is 150 movies strong, and it only scratches the surface.
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| Daisies, available on Criterion Channel and HBO Max |
In May, HBO made its oddly confusing switchover to HBO Max. It was not the world’s greatest roll out, but the service itself is tremendous. It features a heavy rotation of stone-cold classics (including many Criterion films, mostly part of the Warner library), as well as an array of popular modern hits for anyone looking to fill in the gaps of their pop culture knowledge. If it sounds like I am trying to sell you HBO Max, I am not, but times are tough, and if you have $15 a month to put toward your streaming budget, this is where I would put it.
Of course, we made fair use of Amazon Prime, which is great if you want to rent movies you cannot find anywhere else and which makes it easy to add premium channels (such as Starz or IFC). Hulu and Netflix are still good, though Hulu is sometimes unnavigable and Netflix feels too bloated for its own good. We mostly keep Disney+ around for access to Hamilton, but we should probably just buy a DVD.
Ultimately, I am an old-school guy. My wife likes to joke that I was born middle-aged. That has never bothered me, although the closer I approach to middle age, the stranger that feels. I like my DVDs and I like going to the movies. That is why I founded this site. Movies just feel different in a theater, on a big screen. Nothing could replace that. The streaming revolution is great, and I am 100 percent here for it, but if I could take every dollar I spend on streaming every month and pay to see just one of these classics at the cinema, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Top 10 older movies I watched on streaming this year (listed alphabetically):
The Ascent, directed by Larisa Shepitko (Criterion Channel)
An Autumn Afternoon, directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Criterion Channel)
Le Bonheur, directed by Agnès Varda (Criterion Channel)
The Cranes Are Flying, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (Criterion Channel)
Daisies, directed by Vera Chytilová (HBO Max)
Hara Kiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi (Criterion Channel)
Le Havre, directed by Aki Kaurismäki (Criterion Channel)
Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee (Netflix)
The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (Criterion Channel)
Z, directed by Costa-Gavras (Criterion Channel)
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