There’s a plethora of on demand video out there these days. So much so that sometimes it can be hard to wade through it all and find something worth watching. Watch This Now is your guide to instant video on Netflix, Hulu and elsewhere, highlighting the very best stuff that you can watch right now.
A lot of you might be done with coverage of Let the Right One In, and I can’t entirely blame you. This gorgeously serene, unsettlingly savage little movie is one that probably works best when you discover it on your own. But there’s so much garbage out there that we’ve got to trumpet good work when we see it.
Furthermore, after last week’s flap over poorly chosen subtitles for the US DVD, a lot of you might be shying away from the film once again.
Reason to rejoice, then: not only is Let the Right One In now available to stream on Netflix in HD, but the subtitles are the more (ahem) subtle translation rather than the simplified subs that riled up the internet last week.
Damn, I love the modern world. Last night I was reading some of Robin Wood’s essays on Hitchcock, and he opens a piece on Rear Window (written sometime between ’67 and ’70) by explaining that, as the film had been unavailable for a years, his thoughts were based only on notes and recollection. Rights to Rear Window, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Trouble With Harry and Vertigo reverted to Hitchcock in ’67. He took the films out of circulation and stored them (poorly) in a warehouse. (For some notes on just how fucked up the Paramount Hitchcock films were by this storage, check out the AV Club’s interview with Robert Harris from 2000.) The result was that, until their rerelease in 1984, almost no one saw those movies. In the interim their fame and legacy grew, but they were still representative of a host of great movies that no one could see easily, if at all.
A few decades later, I still reel when I realize how much has changed with respect to simply being able to see movies. Contrast Wood having to write about Hitchcock from memory with being able to watch a movie like this streamed to your computer or TV, and in a version preferable to the one people paid good money for two weeks ago. It’s amazing.