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.
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