The death blow to MUBI

I've been counting down to my deadline for ranking my 2023 movies (next Tuesday), but there's another deadline looming that's also been on my mind.

I have only about ten days before it's D-Day on MUBI, the streaming service that was gifted to me as a subscription last Christmas -- and that I got very little use out of, as discussed here. (And that changed its core movie-a-day model mid-year, another mark against it.)

Given the close proximity of the January 28th deadline to re-up for a second year and the January 23rd deadline for finalizing my list, I didn't expect I'd get much new information to help me make a decision whether to renew, especially since MUBI tends to focus on films not from the current release year, and films from the current release year are pretty much all I've been watching for the past month.

Boy was I wrong about that.

As it so happens, the last two 2023 movies I've watched -- Passages on Tuesday night and Mister Organ last night -- both have the MUBI logo coming up at the beginning of the movie, just as a Netflix movie would have the Netflix logo or an Amazon movie would have the Amazon logo. 

Both 2023 MUBI movies, and neither of them actually available on MUBI.

Oh it's a region thing. I'm well aware of that. I'm sure these are both plastered all over the front page of MUBI in America. It's something I'm well aware of from the same post above, when I discussed the lack of availability of Passages, Ira Sachs' latest.

But Mister Organ is a New Zealand film. If I can't even get a New Zealand film on MUBI in Australia, something fundamental is broken here.

I was actually pleased that I'd waited as long as I did to watch this film, which is one of those that made it onto my Letterboxd watchlist in a way I no longer remember, so I don't know where the recommendation came from and if it was even credible. As I've mentioned here, there are certain films I've been waiting out to see if they'd be available on streaming so I didn't have to rent them. That happened with Charlie Day's Fool's Paradise, which I talked about in my last post, and almost as good was what happened with David Farrier's Mister Organ, which was that its $4.99 rental fee had at least temporarily dropped to 99 cents on iTunes when I rented it yesterday.

When I saw that MUBI logo, though, I thought I might have paid a dollar too much.

So right then and there I scrambled into my MUBI app and began typing in the title to search for it. It was clear from the first few letters that it wasn't going to come up. But I perversely typed out the whole title, long past the point MUBI was telling me there were no matches, just to be sure that it wasn't a fault of their search feature. And since this was on my TV using an AppleTV remote, it took that much longer. I pointlessly officially clicked the magnifying glass after I'd finished the title, and sure enough, no Mister Organ. Not even the page they'll show you for most movies whether they are streaming on MUBI or not. 

So I got back to my rental version, which I likely would have done even if I'd found it.

The deck was stacked against MUBI after my last post, and as the title for this post would indicate, that situation has become even more dire.

But MUBI has one ... more ... chance.

I got an email -- an unreliable source of information about MUBI in my region, as I have determined -- earlier this week about Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves, one of the best reviewed films of the year, coming to MUBI on Friday. In other words, before my deadline. In other words, the only place where I could conceivably watch it before my deadline.

Since each film theoretically has a different distribution agreement, it's possible I will actually be able to watch this movie on my own MUBI in Australia. And if I were to have a positive enough experience with that, I could surely reconsider giving MUBI the axe.

But I just went to the page on MUBI for Fallen Leaves, and there is nothing advertising its arrival in a few short days. (Tomorrow, actually, by our time.) 

That may just be MUBI's lack of hype for its upcoming releases. More likely, it's a prelude to more disappointment, and the end of my MUBI membership.

To re-MUBI or not to re-MUBI

I have been pretty disappointed with my 2023 subscription to MUBI.

Which is no shade on the person who gifted it to me last Christmas, should he be reading this.

I'd been considering subscribing to the service myself, as I was enamored with their unique model of making movies available for 30 days, with one new movie appearing on the service each day. Each day you could check in to be surprised by some long-lost gem, some elusive title you'd been meaning to watch for years, or just some weird thing you'd never heard of but looked like it was worth trying out. Having the choices pre-curated by MUBI takes out some of the randomness of choosing a single movie from a service that may make thousands of them available.

But during the year, MUBI abandoned its signature format.

I can't remember the reasons for this. I'm sure it presented challenges and I'm sure the cost associated with licensing films for 30 days of viewing was prohibitive, relative to the benefit of the format, when they'd be better off just having it for a year or however long. If they wanted to license 365 films -- and I'm not sure if they do have that many -- better to make them all available for the whole year.

In theory, that's no different of a service from having 30 at a time -- in fact, maybe it is better in some ways. But it means MUBI is not distinct from a dozen other streamers, at least at the fundamental level of its structure. It might offer more interesting titles ... or maybe it just offers a bunch of movies you've never heard of for good reason. 

Then early in the year I learned that they got exclusive distribution rights to the movie in this poster, Ira Sachs' Passages. I've seen most of Sachs' movies and his Love is Strange made my top ten of its year. So it gave me a little thrill that at some point during the year, I'd be able to watch this on MUBI.

Not so much. The distribution rights were for the U.S. I am in Australia. I cannot watch Passages on MUBI. In fact, now I'll probably have no way to watch it before my list closes at the end of January.

Then there were the emails I would get from MUBI telling me about the new availability of some title. Maybe they got my geography wrong -- it makes sense as I have some services set in the U.S. (like iTunes) and some set in Australia (all the others) -- but in these instances as well, almost without exception, I would go into MUBI to try to watch the movie in question, and get nothing. U.S. only, apparently.

If services are going to offer different titles in different countries, they should at least figure out what country you're in so you are not getting constantly teased about movies that you can't watch.

Then the offerings themselves.

Things started on a good note when I watched Cleo from 5 to 7. The Agnes Varda film was a regret for me when I watched Varda films a couple years ago for my Audient Auteurs series, because I couldn't locate it at that time. I hadn't specifically sought it out since, but having it handed to me here gave me a taste of the exclusivity MUBI promised. I was tickled pink by the MUBI possibilities.

But as I tried to delve into random movies I wouldn't hear about elsewhere, some of them were just too random, especially this one called The Red and the Black that I suffered through one night. 

Another MUBI highlight was watching The Balcony Movie, which I had meant to catch at a previous MIFF and really liked. But then there were also lows, as when I watched Trash Humpers, which is now my lowest ranked film on Flickchart. I can't blame MUBI for my poor choice in that respect, but it didn't help with my overall impression of the service, regardless of who was to blame.

Is it possible that these are the only four movies I've watched on MUBI this year?

It's possible. 

I went back through the movies I've watched this year and did discover at least two others: Where is the Friend's House, which I didn't love despite it being Abbas Kiarostami, and Actual People, a movie about as bland as its title. I thought I might have watched The Pez Outlaw on MUBI, but if so, it's no longer available. (Six is a better return on my friend's gift than four, and seven would be even better.)

I've tried to watch others. I've used MUBI as a possible last resort when there was a movie I couldn't find on any other service that I needed to watch during a particular period of time. None of the times I've checked has MUBI actually saved me.

Then the real tease is that MUBI has a page for almost any movie you can think of, even if it can't play the movie. So you get to the page and you get all hopeful, and then there is just no play button.

This past week, as I realized my renewal would be due in late January, I had another determined peruse through the various featured films, to be sure I wouldn't be struck by another sudden rush of optimism about MUBI's potential role in my viewing life. I was struck by more disappointment, namely:

1) There were so few featured titles that the same titles kept on popping up in different featured categories. I'm not sure how one movie can be a film noir, a superhero movie and a romantic comedy, but that's the sort of thing I was seeing. Not that any of the genre assignments were inaccurate, just that the categories themselves were written in such a way to allow the same movies to appear in multiple ones -- creating the impression of more titles than they actually had, an impression easily disproven by the most casual memory of the titles you had just seen featured in the other categories.

2) There was one particular category that focused on 1940s classics. This is the type of place I'd expect MUBI might help me out. There were exactly three movies listed here, all bonafide classics like Citizen Kane. I don't need MUBI to watch Citizen Kane.

3) There should be a three just for good list-making etiquette, but I'm disappointed enough by 1 and 2 that 3 is pretty much superfluous.

If MUBI can't offer me more elusive classics from the 1940s, if it can't offer me the movies it says in the emails it is going to offer me, and if it doesn't even have a unique structure as a streamer, what good is it to me?

And yet I am thinking of renewing.

The idea of MUBI is still powerful. The potential it has to be great is still exciting. It has a lovely layout that supports both this idea and this potential. Simply put, it looks like the sort of exclusive place I want to spent my streaming time, with the sorts of undiscovered gems I want to discover.

Do I have to give MUBI another year to try to realize this potential?

It's hard to say. 

I have almost two months until my subscription expires. It's enough time to give MUBI a red hot go, to use the Australian phrase.

The problem is, these two months are when I'm watching as many 2023 movies as I can before I close off my list. MUBI does not offer 2023 films, as a general rule.

And when it does, like Passages, I'm in the wrong country to even see them.

Hello ... MUBI Tuesdays

I know better than to start another new initiative in 2023. 

However, I couldn't resist the play on words in the title of this post.

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, Tuesdays are indeed a good day to go deep diving into MUBI, to see what weird and wonderful thing I might be able to uncover. You may recall, I previously considered Tuesday to be the ideal night to watch a new documentary every two weeks, an exercise I did for a full year ending last July. 

I eventually felt a bit imprisoned by the regularity of that commitment, breathing a sigh of relief on every alternate Tuesday and then feeling like I had to sit down and figure out which movie I was going to watch on the following one to meet my self-imposed commitment.

So I won't watch a MUBI movie every other Tuesday, or God forbid, every Tuesday. But I do think Tuesday is a good day to periodically sample my new subscription, with no commitment to write about it here. 

Since many of the movies on MUBI will not fit my description of relaxing weekend viewing, that pretty much takes out Thursday through Sunday, since I often do consider Thursday night to be weekend adjacent enough to watch something less taxing on my brain. (For example, last night I watched The Forever Purge.)

That leaves Monday through Wednesday for more challenging, cerebral material, and Monday I often still feel like I'm recovering a bit from the weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday both work for MUBI but then with Wednesday you don't get the Rolling Stones reference.

I started this past Tuesday night with a French movie from 2011 called The Red and the Black, or more easy to find on sites like IMDB, La Rouge et La Noir. It was the film of the day about a week ago. In fact I've also seen it as Red & Black. And it's so obscure that the image you see above was the only thing I could get in terms of a proper poster.

This, I tell you, was the full MUBI experience.

I'm currently reading a book where I never really got my bearings in the story and am now just looking at all the words until it's over. It's a 280-page book and I've been reading it since November. I should just stop. Instead, I have a hundred pages to go.

The Red and the Black was like that experience except writ small. Writ very small, as in only 74 minutes.

But what the hell was going on in this movie? I could not really tell you.

Here's what I can tell you:

French director Isabelle Prim presents a variety of images that appear to include documentary footage of a real French camera designer at several periods of his life, scenes of a hybrid cat and dinosaur being rendered by a 3D printer, and POV angles of two thieves trying to steal a camera. The language is not actually French. The two thieves -- never seen, but ultimately revealed as a mother and daughter -- speak a made-up language that is, fortunately, subtitled. There are also shapes on the screen in a kind of old school digital animation. 

I really don't know what happened in this movie but I did watch all 74 minutes.

And I can't say there wasn't an odd sort of hypnotizing quality to the experience. I did not hate watching it, not by any stretch. But I never from one moment to the next had a single idea what was going on. 

It really did show me what kind of doors have been opened to me now that I'm subscribed to MUBI.

I'll try to get something more coherent my next time around ... which will be on some upcoming Tuesday no doubt. 

Off and running on MUBI

It seems like I've started a lot of new initiatives this year. Well, here's one more.

Welcome to my collection of streaming services, MUBI.

I recall being tantalized by MUBI when I first heard about it, which I roughly equate with when Paul Thomas Anderson released that documentary Junun back in 2015, a MUBI exclusive. If that movie had been feature length -- it's only 54 minutes -- I might have figured out that MUBI was available in Australia sooner than now in order to see it, either just to be a PTA completist or possibly even to have ranked it in the year it came out. I always assumed that like some other more boutiquey streaming services, such as the Criterion Channel and Filmstruck before it, the Australian market was out of bounds -- and back in 2015, it probably still was.

Well, a friend of mine did that work of sussing out MUBI's Australian availability for me and gifted me a subscription for Christmas, which I finally activated on February 1st. 

Now, as recently as Wednesday, I was still operating under the impression that MUBI had only 30 films available at any given time. The high concept that MUBI originally introduced to us was that it had a film of the day every day of the year, which existed on the site for 30 days and then was gone. It meant blissful relief from option overload, while always giving you a good slate of films to choose from, many of them rarities. 

I don't know if that was ever really the total business model, nor could it be a sustainable one in today's streaming environment with only those parameters. I suspect even back in 2015, that wouldn't have been the model because they wouldn't premiere a movie like Junun, which obviously has a cost associated with it, only for it to disappear a month later. 

I didn't work that out until I was actually in and browsing the choices, though, and had an initial reaction that was equal parts thrilling and frightening. That reaction was:

1) I've only ever even heard of two of these 30 movies!

Followed quickly by:

2) I've only ever even heard of two of these 30 movies.

The two movies I'd heard of, I'd also seen, which were the film Swallow from a few years ago (about Hayley Bennett swallowing household objects to dull her housewife boredom) and Jane Campion's Sweetie (which would have been a perfect choice for Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, except I saw it about five years ago).

All the rest were from the definite margins of cinema, sometimes from countries I didn't even know had film industries.

Now, the main point of a service like MUBI is to challenge yourself and see movies you've never heard of. Just trying to find elusive films that are also critically acclaimed is not a great engagement with the site's core concept. Yes, you can find films you never knew you wanted to see on lots of streaming services -- Kanopy is a particularly good example -- but the films on MUBI feel somehow more cultivated and curated. You know some really academic cinephile has gone to the trouble of seeking these out and securing their streaming rights, to greater expand our understanding of the vastness of the cinematic landscape. 

But on the very first night, I just couldn't select one of those other 28 films to click play. They were all equally tantalizing, which is to say, none of them felt quite tantalizing enough to be my symbolic first MUBI viewing.

So it was with a little relief, though also some sense of defeat, that I found all the other movies that are part of MUBI's ongoing catalogue. At least I selected one that was listed as LEAVING SOON.

And through this first choice, I did immediately recognize the uniqueness and value of this new venture.

When I watched the films of Agnes Varda for my Audient Auteurs series in July of 2018, Cleo from 5 to 7 was meant to be one of the two films I watched -- in fact, it was the primary reason I had chosen Varda for one of the slots in this 12-month series. Aware of her many other respected contributions to cinema from a series they did on Filmspotting, I still went with Varda and loved both The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. But the reason I chose those films was that I just couldn't find Cleo.

Well, thanks for helping out with that, MUBI.

Just checking right now, the film still isn't available for rental from either Amazon or iTunes. That's a pretty sad outcome for a film that was #14 among critics in the recent Sight and Sound poll. So not only did watching this as my first MUBI movie scratch a five-year-old itch, it also removed the second highest ranked Sight and Sound film that was on my list of shame. Only Claire Denis' Beau Travail (#7) was higher ranked in that poll among films I haven't seen.

Alas, I wish I could say that Cleo was 100% a success story for me. I should have known it was a dumb choice for a day in which I'd gone into the office for the first time since mid-December -- office attendance is pretty scant during an Australian summer -- and was exhausted from a very busy and tiring last few months. As is increasingly the case when watching from my all-too-comfortable couch, I had to pause the movie multiple times for short/long naps, even though it's only a very manageable 90 minutes.

By the end I did work myself into a strong appreciation of it, finding it to be a thematic precursor to something like Before Sunset. Both films include a jaunt (mostly) on foot through Paris as the light starts to fade and as everything assumes the heightened significance of limited time -- in Jesse and Celine's case, because they may never see each other again and have to make a decision, and in Cleo's case, because she thinks she might have a fatal illness. In these two hours, Cleo's life literally flashes in front of her eyes, as she has impossibly short yet somehow elongated ten-minute windows doing different things that are gratifying to her soul in some way. (I know it's not fair to "compare" these two films, Cleo certainly being considered the more seminal of the two, but I can only go by the sequence in which I watched them.)

However, I do feel like this first Cleo viewing is only laying the groundwork for a second viewing, when I'm more awake and can be more finely tuned into its meditative wavelength. I supposed that may not be on MUBI since it's supposed to be leaving soon, but maybe it will pop up again on MUBI in the future.

Even if the movie was not a slam dunk win for me, due to issues with me and my viewing circumstances rather than the film, the experience MUBI provided me was a slam dunk win. The ability to see an all-timer at the click of a button, when none of my other streaming services have any significant focus on films that came out 60 years ago, was just grand. (Incidentally, I was pleased to see that Cleo is not nearly as "ancient history" as a person might think, as the actress who plays Cleo, Corinne Marchand, is still alive and well at 91 -- herself certainly not a victim of the imminent demise that hangs over her character.)

I'd certainly like to use MUBI more often than every 30 days, and the next time, I will definitely opt for one of those 30 movies of the day -- probably intentionally choosing one I haven't heard of, even if ones I have heard of are available. 

I don't really need a new streaming service, considering that we have also just added Binge -- which I haven't even started using, that's how new it is. (This carries HBO programming in Australia.) But I always need a new streaming service that is as different from the others as MUBI is, and I am psyched as hell to be off and running on this experience.