Elusive Glass

If there's any movie in a given movie year you're most likely to see, it's the first.

If you're me, anyway. Most of you aren't, so just try and imagine.

Not because it's good. Movies released in January often aren't. But you'll still see them, because a) you're desperate for something from the new year after overdosing on the previous year, and b) you have the most opportunity to see them on video, since they're released before any others.

I think I still had left a week or so of watching 2018 movies when M. Night Shyamalan's Glass hit theaters back in January, so I didn't see it in the cinema. My fellow critic on my website had already reviewed it, so there was no incentive in that regard either. I did fully intend to see it, but I passed on seeing it in the theater, a decision made easier by its bad reviews. Video would provide me ample opportunities to correct that.

Or would it?

I've been casually checking numerous resources to watch new video releases throughout 2019, and never once have I seen Glass available.

One such place is the movies I can rent directly through a device I have on my TV called Fetch. The newest movies appear along the top so they're easy to see. I never saw Glass there.

Then there's iTunes. Every Monday I check for new movies that have been made the 99 cent rental for that week. I never saw Glass there.

I even flew on four international flights this year, each time checking to see if Glass was one of my options, figuring that would be an ideal time to watch a movie I knew wouldn't be very good. But I never saw it.

Now that there's only a month left before the Oscar nominations are announced and I have to close off my 2019 list, I'm in danger of not seeing it at all.

Oh, it's on iTunes, but only as a purchase. I ain't spendin' no $19.99 on Glass.

Now, if I still fetched movies from kiosks, maybe I'd have a shot. But that business has pretty much shuttered. There's one or two still out there in places I can get to without too much difficulty, but I've kind of mentally moved on from the tedium of two round-trips on consecutive days to watch a movie and return it without a late fee.

In another way the movie-watching industry continues to change, I haven't even checked Netflix for it because I feel like Netflix no longer does the thing where it makes a movie available at the start of its rental window -- or at any point during its initial year of availability, for that matter. I feel like if I'm trying to find a movie from the current year on Netflix, it has to have debuted on Netflix, which Glass did not.

There was probably a time it was available for rental on iTunes, but I wasn't so fussed about seeing it that I wanted to pay the new release rental cost. And that near-certain 99 cent discount week just never happened.

I also checked the library, but you won't be surprised to learn that that title is not search engine optimized enough to get only a small number of results. When I limited the search to only BluRays and DVDs, though -- nothing.

It's kind of ridiculous because I don't even really want to see this movie that much. Except I think it would be the first Shyamalan movie I haven't seen the year it was released ... more a reflection of my unkillable optimism than the actual quality of those films.

It's not worth worrying about a single film I can't see, so I won't. There are plenty of really good films I'll have to write off because they won't yet be released in Australia by the time I finalize my list.

But I would have thought if there were any one 2019 film I'd be sure would make my list, it would be the first.