I Hate Streaming

Wasn't this supposed to be easier?

I have been trying to watch “Save the Green Planet!” for about a year now.

The movie, a 2003 Korean sci-fi/comedy directed by Jang Joon-hwan, is pretty beloved. Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone must like it; they’re adapting it for an American audience next year. And I have seen many a Film Twitter account and Letterboxd personality praise the movie’s madcap insanity.

And yet, it’s nearly impossible to watch. I don’t know how all of these people are finding it.

Over the last few months, I’ve been perusing the eBay listings trying to find a DVD copy of this movie that’ll work in the United States. For those that don’t know, many DVDs only work in certain regions. Region 1 is Canada, the United States and U.S. territories. Region 2 is Japan, Europe, South Africa, the Middle East (including Egypt) and Greenland. And so on.

Just last week, I pulled the trigger on a disc of this movie and I immediately got a notice that it was only for Region 2. So I got my money back. I’m trying to give someone out there cash to watch a movie and I’m stonewalled at every goddamn turn.

Well, I finally did it. After much work (annoying my good friend Jake), I was able to see the movie on Kanopy. Kanopy is an “on-demand streaming video platform for public and academic libraries that offers films, TV shows, educational videos and documentaries.” Why is this only available on Kanopy? And why can you only watch this if you’re attending certain universities or a member of a particular library? Those are great questions that I have also been asking for quite some time.

The New York Public Library does not subscribe to Kanopy—they canceled their membership a while back—so I needed someone who uses a different library to step up and help me out. You might say, “Greg, that’s a lot of work to watch a semi-obscure streaming movie,” and you’re certainly not wrong. What’s the point of streaming if everything’s even more difficult than before?

You can’t go to a Blockbuster and try to rent something niche, all DVD/blu-ray stores are extinct and even Best Buy has even stopped selling movies due to the streaming takeover. Each service makes us pay between $10-20 and for what? For us not to be able to watch what we want to. At least you can watch Emily in Paris over and over and over again, I guess.

As more streaming services come out of the woodwork, it gets even more difficult to watch good things. Jaws wasn’t streaming for a while—I know this because I paid for it last year—and now it’s on Starz. The Godfather is stuck on Paramount+ Purgator. Alien is on Hulu and its direct sequel Aliens is, of course, on Max.

If you want a real film education, you have to pay somewhere between $75-150 a month and you still can’t watch Save the Green Planet! unless you have an Indianapolis Public Library card.

It’s bonkers when even new hits are shuttled over to mysterious services. Do you have an MGM+ membership? I would guess no. MGM+ is an “American premium cable and satellite television network owned by the MGMPlus Entertainment subsidiary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which is itself a subsidiary of Amazon MGM Studios.” Simple enough, right? Well, if you want to watch Challengers, you may have to get an Amazon Prime Video login and then pay an extra $6.99 for MGM+ in order to watch Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist glare romantically at one another.

This isn’t just for movies either. Everything is worse now with streaming. Maybe you want to watch the Euros, one of the biggest soccer tournaments of the year. Well, you need to be able to stream Fox and Fox Sports 1. Oh, and you also fucking need Fubo. What in the flying hell is Fubo? If you want to watch the direct-to-Fubo games (legally) you need to do the following:

There is a free seven-day trial, but the Group Stage for the Euros lasts two weeks. The price for Fubo just for its basic “Pro” tier is $79.99/month and then add 10 dollars more for its “Elite” tier, and another 20 more for “Premier”. Unlike other streaming options that either offer a longer trial or are $6-$15 dollars a month, this is a pricey ask and one that if you forget to unsubscribe after the tournament, could cause some people to spend hundreds of dollars for a service they might only use for a few games. -Awful Announcing

That also doesn’t include pregame, halftime or postgame shows. The Fubo broadcast, which most of the time doesn’t even work, fades into nothingness at the end of the match. That feels more than appropriate.

We may have everything at the touch of a button now, but every click is worth $12 and you probably can’t even watch the thing you want to watch after you finally sign up for a new streaming service.

With eight minutes left of Save the Green Planet!, Kanopy dropped my feed. It froze and then just cut out. I had to sign back in, find the movie on its interminable and messy catalog and fast-forward through the first 100 minutes. Awesome.

I got lag after lag while watching Alien the other week. I tried to watch Inside Out on Disney+ and got logged out multiple times when trying to open the app. We’re paying all this money, and for what?

For worse resolution and shitty quality and poorly-subtitled messes and laggy jumps and NO ACTUAL MOVIES.

There’s one solution and one solution only. We reopen Blockbuster and actual brick-and-mortar stores, swear off streaming and go back to a time when it was possible to watch something at the click of a button. In this case, you have to click ten buttons in sequential order to call Blockbuster to see if Addams Family Values is available yet.