Finder of lost movies, loser of lost movies

I've mentioned the website Internet Archive on here a couple times, so I thought it was time to finally devote a proper post to it -- especially since I was planning a weekend of watching movies I had unearthed on this internet library that I couldn't find anywhere else.

That only half worked out.

The Internet Archive, which can be found at archive.org, describes itself thusly:

"The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."

Now, I'm not quite sure how this mission coexists with the copyright held on particular films, and the right for the owner to show or distribute those films in a manner that generates them revenue. But the fact remains that this free resource exists, is open to the general public, and contains, by its own current count, 16,255 feature films.

Not only have I used this resource to get my hands on several films I had to watch for various movie challenges and could not otherwise source, but sometimes I go fishing to see the availability of more common films, ones with a healthy expected digital rental market, just to continue to blow my own mind that this resource exists.

I don't want this to become a replacement for watching films that are available in other forms. For one, it involves me hooking up my computer to my TV with an HDMI cable, which is a bit of a hassle. Sometimes I'd just prefer to click a button on the TV. Then there's the fact that there's some buffering involved in most viewings, so it makes sense to pause it and let it catch up for a while if you have the time. 

But the way it gave me hope of seeing films I hadn't seen in ages, or had never seen, was exhilarating.

On Friday I watched the film whose poster you see above, Ken Annakin's The Pirate Movie from 1982.

Anyone younger than I am probably has no idea what this is. But imagine a spoof of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance that was clearly inspired by the success of Airplane!, but in additional to parodies of the songs from that musical, there are also pop songs and gooey love songs written in 1982 that are meant to turn stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins into dreamboats who would appear on the cover of Teen Beat or the gone-but-not-forgotten magazine Dynamite, to which I had a subscription.

Don't remember Dynamite? Thanks again to the internet for obliging in a different manner:

Had this been McNichol's hairstyle in The Pirate Movie I might not have fallen hard for her. But she looks as she does in the poster you see above, and is spunky as heck, so it was love at first sight. 

It was sometime between 1983 and 1985 that I encountered the movie, as those were the years we subscribed to The Movie Channel and my mom recorded all sorts of movies on VHS that she never watched, that sat in plastic tubs in our basement with her cursive handwriting appearing on the labels. She recorded movies for me as well, and those were the movies I watched repeatedly as a kid.

Despite a mixture of incongruous ambitions that probably wouldn't fly today, The Pirate Movie worked on me like gangbusters as a ten- to 12-year-old. I laughed at the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style jokes and swooned at McNichol as she sung about her character Mabel's tragic love with the pirate Frederic (Atkins). I'm sure I watched it ten times but if you told me it was 20, I wouldn't call you a liar.

But after about 1990, it was completely unavailable. 

More accurately, I should say I did not seek it out during the 1990s, as these were my college and grad school years and I probably wasn't seeking the jolt of nostalgia The Pirate Movie would have provided. I'm sure you could have found it on the shelves of video stores, at least for a time.

Suffice it to say that it did not make the transition to DVD or digital. Now that nostalgia is more important to me, I've casted about for The Pirate Movie over the past decade or so, sure I would brush up against it accidentally at some point. Never happened.

Until Internet Archive.

I hadn't actually thought to use Internet Archive specifically to look for The Pirate Movie until Friday during the day at work, when I must have been on there for some other reason. Upon finding The Pirate Movie, I was so excited to put it on that I actually started watching it while I was still working.

There's something else I should tell you about The Pirate Movie: Everyone else thinks it's terrible. In fact, in searching back for my mentions of The Pirate Movie on The Audient -- a little surprised to find there had only been one, or at least only one time I tagged the movie -- I found this comment on this 2010 post:

"I'm sorry, but there's no excuse for liking the Pirate Movie. It's one of the worst movies and waste of money of all time."

So in the 30+ years it's been since I've seen The Pirate Movie, I've had time to think of it as the ultimate guilty pleasure. Something I should be ashamed of liking, that when I did finally see it again, I would find to be terrible.

Guess what? I still love it.

Now, I don't think it's possible to separate out the nostalgia component. You can't see a movie you first watched 40 years ago with a clean slate that's unencumbered by your memories. Part of the joy of watching an old movie is remembering the line readings, the inflections in actors' voices during jokes, the jokes themselves, etc. For those of us who watch Airplane! today -- something I have now not done in probably 15 years -- you don't watch them to laugh anew, but to remember the laughs of yesteryear in jokes that you wear like a favorite bathrobe.

But I got the same joy out of watching The Pirate Movie that I would have gotten out of Airplane! or The Naked Gun, and I still fell a little bit for the spunky charm of McNichol, a truly charismatic performer who didn't have the career she should have had. Speaking of careers cut short, the film's hilarious villain is played by an Australian actor named Ted Hamilton (the whole film having been shot in Australia). Given how funny this blowhard is, imagine my surprise that The Pirate Movie was the only feature film he ever appeared in. (Actually, it wouldn't be too late to appear in another, as he's still alive at age 86.) The movie was obviously such a failure that he slunk back to a few guest appearances on TV shows, amassing only four more credits before his career ended in 2002. 

In honor of an actor who should have gotten more work, I invite you to watch this clip, to give you a sense both of his presence and of the movie's general Airplane!-style tone.

Now that I've discovered Internet Archive has The Pirate Movie, I think I'll make revisiting it a more regular thing. However its jokes land for you, I found it an incredibly good-natured movie that leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling. It nourishes me like the best cinematic comfort food.

But I can't rely on its long-term availability on Internet Archive, because another movie I thought I was going to watch there is already gone.

I can't say for sure why Dominik Moll's Lemming had such an impact on me when I saw it in 2007. It's a four-person French psychological thriller that, if memory serves, involves mental breakdown, exchanging of partners, and weird noises in the night in an apartment. My memory of the movie is largely a memory of a mood. 

I was hoping to refresh that memory when I saw that Lemming was available on Internet Archive. In fact, I'm quite sure I wasn't imagining it, since I saw it fit to mention my planned upcoming viewing of the movie in this post. 

I arrived home too late on Saturday night from watching the Melbourne Aces play a doubleheader to be able to watch the 2+ hour movie then. So I teed it up for viewing last night instead.

And found no trace of it on Internet Archive.

I tried all sorts of different search terms. I tried the name of the director. I tried the name of the stars. I tried the French title for the movie (which didn't help, because it is also Lemming). 

Had I not actually seen this available on Internet Archive? I thought I had actually begun playing the film to test it out, which is what I do anytime I find a too-good-to-be-true availability of a film on a certain resource (usually YouTube).

Or did the copyright owner come and track it down after all?

It would be hard to say. I'm sure if a movie was once on Internet Archive but the site faces a legal challenge, they just purge the item in question, no questions asked. I'd say the mission statement of this site likely protects it from the notion that someone would be making money on the copyright, but that when someone comes after them, they just stand down straight away.

If that's the case, I wonder what the hell the Lemming copyright owner does intend to do with the movie, because I can't find it anywhere, and this makes me very grumpy. It's an especially strange outcome given that it stars Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Alas, there are also the movies I haven't been able to find and still can't find. I hoped Internet Archive would finally expose me again to a favorite from the 1990s, Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance, starring Albert Finney, Rufus Sewell and Tara Fitzgerald. You'll know how long I've been looking for this from another 2010 post, the second I've linked to in this post, in which it is one of a few movies I focused on that I already couldn't find then. The post even got its name as a riff on the title: "Movies of no importance."

Well, Internet Archive does have the trailer for the movie. But not the rest of the movie.

It may one day provide "universal access to all knowledge," but not today.

Pride Month: Wilde

There isn't much that I, a nearly 50-year-old man coaching my son's basketball team and doing improvements to my house in greater Melbourne, can do to make an impact supporting LGBTQI+ people during Pride Month.

But I can watch one pride-themed movie per week this June, and write about it here.

I went cruising for gay-themed movies on my streaming services last night (forgive the cheeky choice of words -- most gay men, known for their sense of humor, would probably approve). Disney+ actually had a good LGBTQI+-themed section they were advertising prominently -- good, as in smartly curated and presented, though not very extensive, as you might expect. (In fact, lest you think I went to Disney first because of the high probability of success in this area, I'll mention I was in there for another reason entirely.) I had already seen all the movies on there, which I actually anticipated might be a problem since I do tend to see a good percentage of the gay-themed movies that break through into the zeitgeist.

I didn't necessarily want the first movie I watched to be something super zeitgeisty -- I was happy to discover something I'd never heard of -- but I also wanted it to have the right look and feel, something of a particular level of craftsmanship. I thought Kanopy would be a good port of call, and they did have a section on "gender and sexuality" -- but it contained mostly cheap-o documentaries, and it wasn't really documentaries I wanted to spend my time on this month. 

Finally I ended up on Amazon, which did not have a special section for queer subject matter (shame shame), but I went through the various potentially relevant sections, such as "romance movies," to examine the tags of movies I didn't know. There were a couple prospects that were listed as LGBTQI+ themed, but I'm glad I continued on because the absolutely right option did ultimately present itself.

I believe it was in the "historical dramas" or some similar section where I found, without an LGBTQI+ tag, the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert. (Who, I would later remind myself, directed a film I really liked a few years before this, Tom & Viv, about T.S. Eliot.) 

I felt hazily aware of it, but maybe should have remembered it better because Stephen Fry received a Golden Globe nomination for his work in the lead role. Since Oscar Wilde was, of course, gay -- and since I don't actually know all that much about the particulars of his life -- it did indeed feel like the perfect choice.

To say nothing of the cast. The actors I would see as babies in this film included Jude Law, Michael Sheen, Ioan Gruffud, Jennifer Ehle and Orlando Bloom -- the latter of whom was comically listed as a star of the movie in the advertising materials on Amazon, even though he literally only has one scene with literally only one line of dialogue. Then also the likes of Tom Wilkinson and Vanessa Redgrave, not as babies, but as slightly younger adults -- 26 years younger, to be exact. In fact, given the famous faces in this film, the fact that it wasn't more on my radar is a sign of something -- perhaps of the very aversion to homosexual themes this film devotes its time to dramatizing. (Not an aversion on my part, but an aversion on the part of our collective film conversation, which keeps some films in the spotlight beyond the year of their release while relegating others to historical footnotes.)

The film focuses on roughly the final 20 years of Wilde's life, starting in a very strange setting indeed. When I saw the familiar vistas and backdrops of your typical western opening this film, I wondered if perhaps I had wandered into the wrong theater. But it turns out that Wilde had an 1882 visit to Colorado to meet with salt-of-the-earth silver miners on a lecture tour of the U.S. It's here we get a first taste of his proclivities, when he descends into the mine and is greeted by several shirtless men, and makes a comment about their beauty making it more like an ascension to heaven then a descent into hell. Probably confused and not even knowing what a gay person was, the men make nothing of it -- nor was it clear to me to what extent anyone knew Wilde was gay, nor if Wilde even knew it himself, at this point.

He does marry Ehle's Constance, and father two children, but we see him as a bit hesitant to engage in the full extent of the passion she requires in a bedtime kiss. Rather instead, he descends back down to their guest, Robbie Ross (Sheen), who seduces him -- for what appears to be the first time for Wilde, though not for Ross.

Wilde is confused, but he does know that this is what he wants, and he has another fling with Gruffudd's character. (Whose name is John Gray, and who seemed to at least partially inspire Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.) It's not until he meets Bosie Douglas (Law), a beautiful but petulant rich kid who bears the title of lord, that he forms a long-term relationship that can't escape public notice -- especially when the boy's father, John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury, says he will expose Wilde and have him arrested on charges of indecent behavior if he does not cease and desist with his son. (That's Wilkinson, but that sentence was getting too complicated to mention it.)

Before things go very south for Wilde, we see that there's a chance for the homosexual to win over the homophobe -- the sort of thing we hope can and will occur throughout our society today, to change the tide of hatred toward LGBTQI+ people. (Not that the burden should be on them to change the minds of others, but practically speaking, it is.) Wilde and Bosie are at a lunch when Bosie's father walks in and seats himself at another table, not seeing his son and his son's companion. Bosie has an instinct to flee, but Wilde encourages him not to -- in a preview of what his own choice will be when he is later on trial.

So Bosie goes over to his father and asks him to join them, knowing his father is aware of Wilde's reputation and knowing it will risk exposing him as a "bum boy," which is one of the many epithets his father has at his disposal. This is certainly an act of bravery on Bosie's part, but Bosie frequently acts in cowardice and just plain meanness -- so we can't read too much into it. But he does catch his initially resistant father in a clever trap, saying he doesn't know his father to be a man who places much stock in the opinions of others without forming his own. The elder Douglas cannot argue this and so does join the pair.

We watch as Wilde, using all his renowned gifts for language and persuasion, charms Douglas into a free and easy conversation lubricated by brandy and cigars. He knows just what to say to the man without kissing up to him, honoring his intelligence and speaking eloquently on areas of interest to Douglas, such as horse racing. Eventually they move to philosophy, where Wilde continues to be himself even though he disagrees with Douglas on most matters -- and this is something Douglas notes and respects. In short, just by being his erudite and charming self, Wilde makes himself an excellent companion for lunch, and Douglas talks to him almost as though he's talking to an old friend.

Only moments later we have lost any sense of optimism we may have once had. In Douglas' very next scene, he seems to have forgotten having had this pleasant lunch with Wilde, and doubles down on his objections to the man and his "perversions." It reminds me of how many people in our world today, on how many occasions, find themselves close to embracing the queer person in their life, only to fall back to their previous position of total condemnation. The fact that this moment does not take -- cannot take for someone like Douglas -- ultimately leads to Wilde's downfall.

I can tell you what happens to Wilde, because you can spoil a fiction film but you can't spoil documented history. Wilde serves two years of hard labor when confronted in court with "the love that dare not speak its name" -- more on that in a moment. His sentence is the harshest available to be issued by the disgusted judge. Wilde never cops to sodomy or the other acts of which he is accused, but tries to describe a Platonic ideal of a mentor-mentee love between and older and a younger man, to which he does admit. This is good enough for the court and they slap the cuffs on him. Although Bosie -- who is compromised throughout this movie, frequently treating Wilde terribly, especially in a scene where Wilde is sick in bed -- does try to remain loyal to him, and is there when Wilde is released from prison, a post-script tells us that they parted after three months and Wilde was dead of health problems acquired in prison by 1900 at age 46. 

Fry is really excellent in the role, witty and urbane as you would expect, a bon vivant with a bon mot available in any setting. However, I had mistakenly thought of Wilde as someone who was the winner in any social exchange, incapable of losing an argument and haughty in victory. Fry's performance reveals a significant melancholy, and frequently a modesty, to his character. Although he believed philosophically in experiencing everything life has to offer, which leads him to spend time with men in a setting that approximates the late 19th century version of an orgy, he doesn't really seem comfortable with it. In fact, he's a romantic at heart, devoted to Bosie -- even when Bosie frequently is unworthy of his affections.

The phrase "the love that dare not speak its name" made some connections for me to a movie I dearly loved 30 years ago when it came out, but have since been unable to find. (I should probably check again in our new streaming era.) For a long time and perhaps still, the 1994 film A Man of No Importance, starring Albert Finney -- a variation on the title of the Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest -- was not able to be found for rental, and only for purchase in arcane and incompatible DVD formats. But when I saw it at Portland Maine's arthouse theater my senior year in college, it not only struck me as a warm and sympathetic movie about a man going through very similar trials to what Wilde went through, it also kind of started my relationship with independent/arthouse film, in a very real sense.

In that film, the Irish bus driver played by Finney -- Wilde was also Irish, and he sometimes played up the accent for the purposes of humor -- is mounting a version of Wilde's play Salome. The choice of play is probably enough to make the other townspeople suspicious of his sexual orientation, and indeed, the character talks about "the love that dare not speak its name" as he falls for a younger man in his play, played by Rufus Sewell. His female lead (played by Tara Fitzgerald) is sympathetic to the bus driver but his friends his age ostracize him when they start putting the pieces together, similar to what happened to Wilde in polite society in London. He lives in fear of how Sewell's character will despise him if he discovers the crush.

It's really a shame that to this day, men and women live in fear of what will happen to them if one unenlightened person in their life -- who they love despite their lack of enlightenment -- discovers something about them that will change their relationship entirely. It's no reason to stay in the closet, but it's plenty reason to shake your first at the sky and wish things were different. Maybe one day they will be. 

The importance of being Albert

I woke up this morning -- just 15 minutes ago, in fact -- to the news that Albert Finney had died.

I wouldn't ordinarily have been prompted to eulogize most other British thespians of Finney's generation, which is to say, great Brits that we would still think of as "thespians." But I feel like Finney had a special place in my heart in a couple ways. I don't even really know what I'm going to say here, but I'll just start typing, and whatever comes out will suffice.

I first knew Finney from what would probably come to be my least favorite of his film roles. When I was very young, I became acquainted with the actor as the title character in Scrooge (1970). Although he plays a cantankerous old man, Finney was only 33 at the time he made it, which now seems like a miraculous transformation indeed. He was also only ten years into his career; that a casting director would think of such a relative newcomer and spring chicken for such a role seems to be a testament to his abilities.

This was also my first introduction to Dickens' A Christmas Carol and was my staple for a handful of years as they played it on TV every year at Christmastime. As soon as I had another option -- 1984's superlative adaptation of same starring a more age appropriate George C. Scott -- I recognized the shortcomings of Ronald Neame's film. It's a tonal odd duck as it's a musical (though not a very good one) and Finney does a fair bit of what I would call mugging. Less generous would be to say that he often seems like he's touched in the head, his face contorting in ways I now think of as the mannerisms of a stroke victim.

Hey, just because this is a eulogy doesn't mean I have to praise every element of the man's career. But don't worry, everything's rosy from here onward.

Over the years I saw and really loved Finney in a number of other roles. The mobster Leo O'Bannon in Miller's Crossing, who holds his own against the would-be assassins who breach the sanctity of his home. Ed Masry, the crusty yet paternalistic attorney who serves as a reluctant crusader alongside Erin Brockovich. Edward Bloom Sr. in Big Fish, my favorite Tim Burton film of the last 20 years, whose recollections of his life made my tear up in that finale at the lake.

But the role for which I cherish Finney is one most people have probably not seen, and cannot currently see.

In 1995, in my final year at college in Maine, I had what I have come to think of as kind of a seminal experience in the fine-tuning of my development as a cinephile. I had a car on campus for the first time as I lived a 20-minute drive away in an idyllic but remote house with its own little stretch of beach outside. The car also enabled me to really discover Portland, also about a 20-minute drive away, which hadn't much called out to me without the car, when I had basically everything I needed on campus.

Portland had what I think of as the first arthouse cinema I ever frequented. In digging on the internet I now find it was called The Movies on Exchange Street, though that doesn't seem quite right. (It was definitely on Exchange Street so I guess that has to be it.) It appears to have closed in 2010. In any case, it was directly across from what I think of as the first upscale coffee shop I was ever aware of, which I would visit after seeing movies there. I guess 1995 was a pretty formative year for me.

In my memory I visited this theater at least a half-dozen times, but a college senior is a busy guy and it was probably only twice or thrice. And the only film I remember I remember having seen there was A Man of No Importance, starring Finney. (The film was actually released in the UK in 1994, but it didn't make it to Maine until 1995.)

It's a story set in 1963, about a gay Dublin bus conductor played by Finney. He's closeted of course. His real passion is community theater, where he oversees the mounting of Oscar Wilde plays (hence the title, a play on The Importance of Being Earnest). He's got a meddling sister (Brenda Fricker), a young woman at risk in the cast of the play (my crush on Tara Fitzgerald was born here), and a young customer on the bus (the dashing Rufus Sewell, also first met here) on whom he's got a secret crush.

The story proceeds in small gestures and is about how this man hides and fails to hide his "love that dare not speak its name," featuring great cruelty as well as great kindness in among the rest of the cast. It's a beautiful little portrait of imperfect little people who mean to put good into the world, for the most part.

And Finney is absolutely key to its sizeable emotional impact. He's kind and gentle, but also with a fair bit of reckless spirit that throws itself into a world that isn't ready for it and won't always return that kindness. It was here that I think I truly learned the kind of performer we had in Finney, and what he could bring to the movies he appeared in.

Like Finney himself now, it's pretty much impossible to see A Man of No Importance, as far as I can tell. I'm not doing a current check of its availability, but I've checked numerous times over the years, and it's not available in any format that is remotely accessible. I think at one point it might have been available for like $100 in the wrong region. I have a region-free DVD player now, so maybe I should check again because that price has probably come down ... if it's possible to find it at all.

I said I didn't know where I'd go with my eulogy to Albert Finney, and indeed I went on an eight-paragraph tangent praising one small movie that no one has seen. My point in doing that, I think, was to give you a picture of the kind of experience I had when I first really came to appreciate this great actor. It was at my first arthouse theater followed by my first designer coffee. A Man of Importance, in a very real sense, was the progenitor for my appreciation of independent film, which could be the reason I remember so many of its details even though I haven't seen it since the mid-1990s. (I did get my hands on a copy of it at some point for a second viewing, but that was on VHS.)

The man who we lost yesterday was at the center of that, and he will always hold a fond place in my heart.

R.I.P., Albert.

Movies of no importance

We tend to think of the proliferation of movie titles on DVD as absolute. If a movie was made at any point in human history, it should be available on DVD, right? There should be someone, somewhere, who had enough of a relationship with the movie to steer it into a pressing of at least a couple thousand copies. Right?

Well, no.

It makes sense that some of the old, obscure titles from the earliest decades of filmmaking would have been lost over the years, or simply never would have been transferred. They made a huge number of movies back in those days. I doubt that it's an exaggeration to say that there are over a thousand movies made in the United States that are not available on DVD, nor were they even available on VHS. There could be a couple thousand.

But it doesn't make as much sense when this happens with a film from the last 20 years. Like a little film I saw and loved in 1995 called A Man of No Importance, directed by Suri Krishnamma and starring Albert Finney.

Let me set the scene for you a bit, to show you part of why it spoke to me so much. It was the spring of my senior year in college. I went to college in Maine, about 30 minutes from Maine's biggest city, Portland. Portland has an old, nautical history, and one of its most charming areas is call The Old Port, which is a district right near the harbor -- and which I only just discovered in the last semester of my college career, to my great chagrin. This district has art galleries, shops, amazing restaurants and cobblestone streets. Just the experience of being there is highly pleasing to all a person's senses, so going to a movie in the single-screen arthouse theater in the thick of it is like paradise for a person with the right aesthetic sensibilities. A friend and I came down from school and went to see A Man of No Importance in the spring of 1995. To cap the experience, we went across the way and got a coffee in the coffee shop, then called Java Joe's. This was also a bit of a revelation for me, since I was, until this point, unacquainted with the concept of the little coffee shop that supplied its own board games, to encourage you to linger and relax as long as you liked.

The movie itself was wonderful. It's about Dublin bus driver Alfie Byrne (Albert Finney), who is hiding a secret -- he feels "the love that dare not speak its name." In other words, he's gay. He's also a theater lover, and he's trying to mount a performance of Oscar Wilde's Salome, using only the passengers who ride his bus as his cast and crew. In the process of this, he develops a close relationship with a female passenger (Tara Fitzgerald) and a male stud with whom he falls in love (Rufus Sewell). However, when his true nature is accidentally revealed, it remains to be seen how those around him -- particularly his conservative contemporaries who oppose the production -- will react. And whether it will destroy his friendship with one or both of his young friends.

Finney's performance in this film is heartbreaking, but it also sings -- I've never liked him more than here. I was also mesmerized by Fitzgerald and Sewell, falling for both, but in the reverse way from Alfie -- he appreciates Fitzgerald as one would appreciate beautiful art, and Sewell as a love interest. I was the opposite. The film also has good performances from Michael Gambon, David Kelley and Brenda Fricker.

So why in the world can't you get this in any format except for the non-U.S. DVD format? All six actors I've mentioned are known from numerous other roles, and the film clearly played arthouse theaters in the U.S., because that's where I saw it. I even saw it a second time, within the next five years, on VHS.

But the advent of the DVD era was when A Man of No Importance ceased to have all importance outside of Europe. It didn't make the leap to the newer form of technology, which even the most artistically suspect of its cinematic brethren were able to make. It has basically become unattainable, at least for U.S. audiences. Which is quite a shame, because I thought of it over the weekend and wanted to add it to my Netflix queue, so I could introduce it to my wife. Alas, the title search returned no results, nor did a search on Amazon.com. On Amazon, only the non-U.S. format was available -- or else VHS.

This is not the only film where this has happened to me. In fact, I have a half-dozen other titles that I requested to review for the website I write for, only to find out later that they simply did not exist. At least, not unless I wanted to dust off my VHS player ... and find a place that still rents VHS. Or, fly to some other country to rent it.

Last year, I wrote a post called "The unattainables," about films I couldn't get because Blockbuster had excluded them from its catalogue on grounds of indecency. However, I've since seen the two main movies featured in that post, The Brown Bunny and Shortbus -- one rented from a different video store, and one borrowed from the library. The following are the really unattainables, reasonably prominent films that got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way:

1) Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993, Randa Haines). This film was on my radar as the most recent film made by Sandra Bullock when Speed came out and turned her into an instant star. The film also features Richard Harris, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Duvall, and Randa Haines directed Children of a Lesser God among others. Yet for some reason this was not available on DVD until last year -- in fact, up until about two minutes ago, I thought it wasn't available at all, except I now see it's available for purchase on Amazon. However, Netflix still does not have it, and only recognizes a title called Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling With Life when you search for it. I was approved to review this movie probably seven or eight years ago. I'm almost wondering if I should just buy the movie on Amazon in order to review it.

2) The Theory of Flight (1998, Paul Greengrass). Another prominent cast (Helena Bonham Carter, Kenneth Branagh) and prominent director (Greengrass directed two Bourne movies, among others) get left out in the cold, as this film is available only on VHS and non-U.S. DVD. I've been approved on this one probably only half as long, but it still feels like an eternity.

3) Year of the Comet (1992, Peter Yates). This film was on my radar because acclaimed screenwriter William Goldman wrote about it in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, as an example of a turkey from his own body of work. I thought it would be fun to see it myself and assess its status as a turkey, so I requested to review it. I'm still waiting for a DVD copy to be released. Oh, it stars the less household-namey combo of Tim Daly and Penelope Ann Miller.

Then there are a couple other movies I've been approved to review whose DVDs exist -- I can see them on Amazon -- but neither Netflix or Blockbuster carries them. For the African tribesmen basketball movie The Air Up There -- shouldn't every six degrees of Kevin Bacon movie be available to rent? -- Blockbuster let me add it to my queue, but then just listed it as Unavailable. On Netflix, those search words only bring up Up in the Air. For It's Pat: The Movie, Netflix gives you the option to save it for when it's available -- even though the DVD looks to have been released in 2003. Then there's What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole, the sequel to What the Bleep Do We Know?, which isn't searchable at all on Netflix. Then again, that could be because you don't know whether to spell it Bleep or #%?@!. What I find strange, though, is that the original is available -- and searchable -- but not the sequel.

It's frustrating to have movies dangling out there that I can't watch, but I don't really give a flip about any of them except A Man of No Importance. I guess one advantage to eventually moving to Australia, where my wife grew up, would be that I'd finally be able to see this little gem again.