Criticwire Survey: Movie Purge

Q: Thanks to the principles established by the New Founding Fathers of the Moving Image, for the next 12 hours, all crime is legal — but only as it pertains to movies and TV. How would you Purge?

The one huge pet peeve – that will require legal intervention to fix – is that here in Canada, we need the same access to Video on Demand and Streaming sites as Americans get. Our version of Netflix is a pale imitation of what our American friends get. Services like Hulu and Amazon Instant aren’t available at all. When a movie says its available while in theaters on iTunes, it usually isn’t. Today, July 22^nd, is when we finally got access to Cold in July on Canadian iTunes – approximately 2 months after Americans got it. We still cannot get the new Roman Polanski film – Venus in Fur – which was available on demand in America on June 20^th. In America, video stores went under because of all the options consumers had at their disposal to stream things – legally – online. In Canada, we lost all our video stores even though they were making money. Blockbuster Canada closed all their stores, despite profits, in a desperate, and ultimately futile attempt to keep Blockbuster America, which was losing lots and lots of money afloat – and once they closed, Rogers Video, the other major player, closed as well – I assume to try and force people to get their OnDemand services, which charge the same price as the video store per movie – more for older movies – with less overhead. I assume that sooner or later we’ll catch up to America – there have been rumors that Rogers may be building a Netflix competitor for the Canadian market – but we need to goose this thing along. We live in an era where more movies than ever before are made available, and yet in Canada we don’t have access to these movies. I’m lucky enough to work near one of the last great video stores – Bay Street Video in Toronto – so I can get all the older movies I want – but most cannot. I have no idea how I would become the classic movie junkie I am – and started to be as a teenager – today. Canadians deserve better.