The Art House Strikes Back

Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed a little “staycation” (that is, a vacation where you don’t actually go anywhere) from my job at the Rainbow Factory. I decided to take advantage of this by catching up on my movie watching. To my surprise and delight, Hulu Plus offers a ton of Criterion films commercial-free and unedited.

                For those of you unfamiliar, the Criterion Collection is a video label that specializes in art-house foreign films, as well as American films with a unique vision or voice, films like Rashomon, Wild Strawberries, 8 ½ and Harold and Maude. These DVDs/Blu-Rays tend to be higher in price, difficult to find in brick and mortar stores and (lately) even hard to get to on Netflix.  Thus, finding a lot of them right at my fingertips, available to watch whenever I want (for a low monthly fee of $7.99) was a godsend.

                Oh, and they have TV shows to, if you’re into that sort of thing.

                So, what did I watch?

Movies I Dragged My Mother To

Kids are strange, particularly when it comes to movies. Anyone who has spent any amount of time around a child will tell you that they can watch the same movies over and over and over again, and never get tired of them.

We, the current generation of film geeks, were also guilty of this as children. As a young child, every time we went to the video store (itself a novelty in 1985), we had to rent The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. As much as my family hoped I would, I never got tired of heffalumps, blustery days, or Tigger getting stuck in a tree. Remember, this was before buying a video was an option (my generation still remembers commercials advertising movies that were now “affordably priced to own,” which meant about $19.99).

Ah, Pooh Bear.