Movies

I have two of these movies - rare hard to find gems, I know they exist because I have seen them.

1. The theatrical release of Revolver. Guy Ritchie made an epic version of this that was fantastic. Critics hated it. I saw it at the theatre and thought it was brilliant.

The issue is the online ones are all the studio edited version. They dumbed it down and made it even worse to try get some money out of it. You know you have the right copy when the credits roll to just black with piano over the top.

2. The theatrical release with active subtitles in English of Day Watch (2004) version. The cool subtitles change and move round the screen depending on what's going on. It was so well done but I only saw it in the theatre on release.

Always try the Internet Archive too.

Kevin Smith’s Dogma. It recently got a theatrical rerelease but you can’t find it online

So many Canadian movies have been financed by public funds and then the distributors who owned the rights were sold or sent bankrupt or whatever and it becomes pretty much impossible to know who has distribution rights anymore and when you do they tell you there's no public for it so it's not worth spending money to make it available...

Hell, a local director was saying that one of her movie which had great success when it released is currently unavailable and the only way she could find a copy was through illegal means (on a Russian website or all places...) because a company bought the rights to it and is just sitting on it.

More than most would guess I bet. Most movies have very limited release if any in theaters, and may have been part of a film festival or just someone who wants to try their hand at directing and producing and was watched once in one screening then never seen again. There's archives to try to preserve some of it but not everything gets submitted for archival or preserved.

This movie?

This was me and my friend with Who Made the Potatoe Salad for many years. I remember this lady who lived in my grandparents’ house had a bootleg copy of it and I watched it and it was funny while my friend had seen it too. But we lost both of our copies of it. I found the bootleg DVD case and was so excited until I opened it and found it was blank.

I could find the movie online and see it actually existed and had been released at some time, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Not even sailing the seas got me any results except fake listings.

Then one day last year, I found a single listing uploaded to a pirate site and it had some leeches. I began the slow download at night and woke up the next morning to it fully downloaded! I couldn’t believe it.

I watched it the next day and honestly it was funnier than I remembered. It wasn’t the best movie I ever saw, but it was well worth the wait.

Crazy how a movie can just go missing like that in this digital age. Not even second hand copies on eBay.

Denver the Last Dinosaur. I’ll see myself out.

According to IMDb, the film was released in January this year (despite being a "2024" film), but this could well have been a festival release and not a general one, which is usually how it goes. Are you sure the film just hasn't been released commercially yet?

"Stickmen"

A great film from New Zealand about an underground pool competition

Bloody impossible to find

The Village has been out of print since the DVD days. I also couldn’t find a couple Robin Williams movies that were recommended to me: Jakob the Liar and What Dreams May Come.

Maybe try looking it up on IMDb first? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30519830/releaseinfo/

It's still playing in film festivals. The first festival showing was in September last year.

I don't pay much attention to film festivals (there are none near me, so not worth it), so I can't really say how long it usually takes for a film to be made generally available, either in a wide theatrical release or streaming/home video (I'd guess about 6 months to a year for the most popular films?) but I'm pretty sure I've seen some that have taken a couple years or more. (Hopefully someone more astute can chime in here.)

This is why I collect those old DVDs and blurays, I treasure some of those old movies that are damn hard to find now.

The BBC of Northanger Abbey was hard to find for me. Spouse and I are Jane Austen fans, and it features a young Felicity Jones and the Onion Knight from GoT. Looks like it's on Prime Video now, wasn't at the time. I looked everywhere, and actually found a Blu-ray copy on eBay that I grabbed. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0844794/

Had a similar experience a few years ago.

There was a film that I saw as a child called Bernard and the Genie. It had Lenny Henry and Rowan Atkinson in it so figured it would be easy to find.

Long story short it was on VHS only and never got a dvd remake so could never find it. Finally found it on a back water pirate site that seemed sketchy AF.

I think we're going to lose so many more movies if we haven't already.