I blame the Russian dictator. I blame him, that is, for my dissatisfaction with streaming television. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with coverage of the war in Ukraine. Well, not strictly speaking.
The Ukraine business has old Vlad waving around his nuclear weapons, perhaps by way of scaring the NATO powers away from helping the Ukrainian upstarts who have humiliated him. One can’t help but think about the implications of such threats, something I started doing several weeks ago by writing about the great nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling.
But that’s a dismal business. And so I tried to stop worrying, as it were, and turn to entertainments that would distract me from the unpleasantness of the threat. I thought I might put together my own little film festival of nuclear shoot’em-ups.
There are the most obvious movies to include: Dr. Strangelove and its noncomedic counterpart, Fail Safe. Then there is On the Beach, which is decidedly unfunny, except for the fact that it featured Fred Astaire as a scientist. You have to give it to Freddy. Even in his portrayal of an apocalypse, he is unfailingly dapper. How better to face the end of the world than with style. Astaire has a suit and tie on when he drunkenly declares, “We’re all doomed!”
There is even a nonmovie that I slated for my film festival, the ne plus ultra of radio comedy, Stan Freberg’s “Incident at Los Voraces.” I have Freberg on vinyl. But for the rest of the entertainments, I find myself at the mercy of Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, which along with other streaming services recently cut off service to Russia.
I was looking forward to seeing British agent Michael Caine spar with a lethal young KGB man played by Pierce Brosnan in The Fourth Protocol, a film that captured the unraveling of the old Soviet Union. I’ll admit the plot point of the movie is silly. Let’s imagine a Russian spy sneaked nuclear bomb parts into England and assembled them in order to detonate the nuclear weapon there. Even the most punctilious advocate of nonproliferation would be outraged not by the violation of the Fourth Protocol, but by the explosion.
But I wanted it for the film festival I had scheduled for my couch over the weekend. And it isn’t to be had. The film rights are locked up by Amazon Prime but not available for watching.
Not that long ago, there was such a thing as a video store. There were the big ones, such as Blockbuster, and the quirky small ones, such as the one a few blocks down from where I live, a store that held on as long as it could but which was inevitably ruined by the streaming behemoths. One way or another, there was a store that would have had the films I wanted.
And now for the creepy bit. Just as I was in the middle of typing this little diatribe, I heard the mail slot clatter. On the floor by the front door was a single envelope. In it was a letter from the “Prime Video Team.” They felt I had not been using their service enough, that I wasn’t enjoying such entertainments as SpongeBob SquarePants and Dexter. And no, I’m not kidding, Amazon did recommend to me both a children’s show and a series about a serial killer on the same line of type.
To which I say, I’ll watch more Amazon Prime Video when Amazon Prime Video has everything a good video store would have had. Such as The Fourth Protocol. When you’ve got it, Amazon, you can post me another letter.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
