Streaming services across the board are going to suffer a major blow come December 1st. FilmStruck, the gold standard of content streaming that combined the Turner Classic Movies archive with the Criterion Collection to deliver the largest and mot diverse library in the home video market, is shutting its doors at the end of this month. And although new homes have been arranged for (most of) its expansive library — with about half of it appearing on the stand-alone Criterion Channel due to launch in the spring and the other half of it likely to appear in some limited form as part and parcel with the larger Warner Bros streaming service due to start in the dead of next winter — the shortsighted disruptions caused by the AOL-Time-Warner mega-conglomerate will invariably cause many masterpieces of the film world to slip silently through the cracks of our attention and be lost to history.
But, in a much more mundane way, the first of the month starts the familiar process of rotating through the collective libraries of various streaming outlets and shaking up what we can and can’t watch in the weeks to come. And moreso than other months recently come and gone, this one’s going to hit really close to home for a lot of subscribers. From horror classics (which so rarely get featured on Netflix these days) to foreign masterpieces, and from modern favorites to genre gems, the scales seem perpetually tipped to less and less interesting content arriving in our living rooms months after month.
Battle Royale (2000) — Although it’s safe to say that most savy moviegoers have at some point seen (or at least heard of) this movie in the years since The Hunger Games franchise took the English-speaking world by storm, there are still plenty who seem to think that Katniss & friends exaggerated adolescent plights were born of whole cloth in Suzanne Collins’ head. Now, I’m hardly one of the backlash mafia that seemingly hates these stories on principle for the similarity that they share with the Japanese texts that clearly inspired them. I actually enjoyed the first two books quite a bit, and the movies a great deal more than that. They interestingly emphasize different aspects of the fight-to-the-death central to their respective narratives and I enjoy them for different reasons (same as Dances with Wolves versus Fern Gully, or Pocahontas, or The Last Samurai, or Avatar…).
At the same time, however, it is remarkable how much better prolific Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale is relative to its more typically Hollywood counterpart. Its characters, while not necessarily deeper, are certainly much more interesting. Its rendition of the games is infinitely more nihilistic, possessing an almost Kafkan edge to the proceedings. The world is more richly rendered and the plight of the disenfranchised youth is better relegalized. And if you are one of the few who is only familiar with Collins’ variation on this gladiatorial narrative, you owe it to yourself to see what sources she was pulling from when she concocted the Capital’s sadistic, annualized death games.
Hellraiser (1987) — I’ve bemoaned the state of Netflix’s horror catalog so much in recently months that I almost feel like a scratched record: constantly skipping back to the initial complaint of too few and too unremarkable of films being offered relative to even their rival streaming service’s catalogs. They have some, certainly, even more than people generally give them credit for, but not nearly enough, not nearly good enough and seemingly shrinking in number all of the time.
After this month, the service will be down two crucial entries: Clive Barker’s remarkable Hellraiser and its wonderfully grotesque sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Featuring a perfectly cast crew of actors, Oscar-worthy makeup effects and perhaps the greatest stop-motion sequence ever committed to film, it is a remarkable achievement in horrific filmmaking: made even moreso by the efforts of first-time director Clive Barker (who wrote The Hellbound Heart, upon which the movie was based) and the paltry $1 million budget he had to work with.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) — With as tired as its sequels have gotten and as troublesome as Johnny Depp’s presence is in anything these days, it’s easy to forget why we loved the first Pirates of the Caribbean so much. We had not yet reached Peak Johnny Depp, so his presence was refreshing, rather than repugnant. We had not yet realized what an incredibly limited tool nominal lead Orlando Bloom was as an actor, so we could imagine he was as good here as his minimal presence in The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) made him out to be. We were at the height of Keira Knightley’s career, and could imagine this as merely a stepping stone to bigger and better things to come. And we had not yet suffered through The Haunted Mansion (2003) and Tomorrowland (2015), so the idea that this was based off of a theme park ride was an impressive novelty rather than an impossible quirk of the movie business.
Really, though, what the first Pirates of the Caribbean has over its listless string of sequels is that, unlike them, this was actually a good movie. The premise (immortal skeleton pirates versus the most ragtag group of misfit mariners imaginable) was killer. The action was top-shelf. The effects (though sagging at the corners fifteen years after the fact) were cutting edge. The script was smart, the direction smarter, and that score was as good as they come. And before you have to suffer through another one of these godawful things seemingly any day now, it couldn’t hurt to take pause and look back at how great movies like this can actually be when everybody involved actually cares about the work that they’re putting into it.
Moana (2016) — You should never bet against Disney. It’s a losing prospect on every level and they will always, always, leave you hanging out to dry while they count their endless billions come year’s end. I doubted The Princess and the Frog (2009) so much when it first came out that I passed up the chance to see it in theaters. I doubted Frozen’s (2013) staying power until I saw what a remarkable return-to-form it was for the company. And I even doubted Moana (2016), easily one of the best movies from the year it came out, because I thought that the Princess-obsessed crowd had grown out of the genre (spoiler alert: they didn’t).
That’s not to say that Moana is your typical Princess movie — far from it — although it is angling for a smarter, more modern take on the entire concept. From its toe-tappingly catchy songs to its shocking climactic showdown and every starlit adventure along the way, Moana proved that there was still vitality in the Princess genre and plenty of avenues left to explore.
Spotlight (2015) — We are living in troubled times. The press is constantly under attack by whole arms of the government as being “fake news,” as being “the enemy of the American people,” as being the real problem with the world today. And despite the legal victories of their allies and PR failures of their adversaries, too many people take it at face value that the press is more of a hindrance to democracy than it is of vital benefit to it: that it somehow fails to hold the wellbeing of the country as part of its foundational mission.
2017 is a great place for such people to start, as the indelible The Post captures much at the heart of the free press. So, too, is 1976, as All the President’s Men covers the exact same period from a different (and a then more contemporaneous) perspective. Lost in the middle of these two is Spotlight — an old-fashioned news drama about the news team that uncovered the molestation scandal that continues to haunt the Catholic Church to this day. Featuring an all-star cast acting out a slick, stylish story, Spotlight easily ranks among not just the best films of recent decades, but the best films about journalism period.