Some Not Bad, Nearly Good Free Movies on YouTube
For one reason or another, major movie studios are dumping full-length movies onto YouTube. Not the awful pay YouTube, either. Just regler old YouTube. Here’s a link to Warner Brothers entertainment landfill. I’ve noticed other studios are starting to do the same thing. If you poke around, you’ll find more. New Hollywood movies are like Ivory soap’s evil twin. They’re 99.9% impure. So if they dump the older stuff on YouTube, you might as well scarf it up while you can. I imagine next stop after abandonment on YouTube is erasing anything that doesn’t conform to today’s bizarre sociological landscape.
I assume there are ads playing on these. I have no idea, though. I’ve never seen an ad on YouTube, or on the results the few times I’ve ever used Google. If you use Firefox for a browser, just get uBlock Origin, and maybe NoScript if you’re really sick of programmatic advertising everywhere, and you’ll never be bothered by such things.
I’ve also heard, ahem, that if you’re tired of looking at things in the browser, you can use yt-dlg to download videos onto your desktop. It will turn videos into regular mp4 format that you can play in your Jellyfin app or Plex on Roku on your TV or something similar. If you add the date to the movie’s title, like this: The Wind and the Lion (1975).mp4 , apps like Plex and Jellyfin will go out on the intertunnel and grab screenshots and movie info and cast info automagically. Of course this is all advice for Windows computers. If you have an Apple something or other, I’m not sure exactly what happens, but I’ll bet it involves getting a second mortgage and mailing the proceeds to Steve Jobs’ festering corpse to watch anything.
The Warner Movies are hit and miss, of course. Here’s a quick rundown on the ones I’ve seen:
The Wind and the Lion isn’t a good movie or anything, but it’s good for unintentional laughs. It’s a John Milius script, so it has its moments, some truly bizarre, as is his wont. Sean Connery as a lion of the desert with a burr is a hoot. The movie is worth the price of admission to see Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt. He’s bully.
Michael Collins is a good movie, and a pretty good history lesson, too. Little known fact: the actual man standing next to the real Michael Collins in the Post Office getting shelled by the British army has the same (Gaelic version) of my father’s name.
The Incredible Mr. Limpet is lots of fun if you’ve got toddlers to entertain. The back and forth between live action and cartoons was state of the art back in the day, and still holds up. And if you need a guy that looks like a fish, Don Knotts is your man.
Waiting for Guffman is amusing. It’s a Christopher Guest smarmy sendup, with the usual cast of cutups he keeps in his orbit. It’s not This Is Spinal Tap, but it’s free.
Mutiny on the Bounty, from 1962, is a terrifically underrated film. It came out the same year as Lawrence of Arabia, so it never really got its head above sea level, audience or Oscar-wise. Brando is Fletcher Christian, and takes half a reel to try to get a British accent going, and then mercifully mostly gives up and mumbles his lines admirably. Trevor Howard is the best Bligh ever. There’s lots of familiar faces in the Bounty’s crew, including Richard Harris. The scene where the hula dancers come roaring up the path towards the luau is jaw dropping. Don’t miss it.
The Year of Living Dangerously isn’t bad. Mad Mel does his best “I’m running fast” scenes, and Sigourney looks almost fetching as his paramour. If you don’t know a Suharto from a Sukarno, you might have trouble following the plot a bit. Indonesia was the meaningless slogan capitol of the world at the time between the two of them, and children who grew up there probably got the hang of it early.
The Mission is a flawed masterpiece. It’s a Robert Bolt script. The Catholic story of the Americas get short shrift from Hollywood mostly, but this movie goes deep into the jungle, literally, and Catholic politics, figuratively. Nearly everyone but Jeremy Irons is totally miscast, but it doesn’t matter much. And remember, Jesuits are an order, not a democracy.
There’s a Jackie Chan movie in there. I mean, how bad can a Jackie Chan movie be? Might as well watch that one, too. And after you watch Archer a few times, you’ll want to watch Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood in City Heat.
Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? This one might give you intellectual indigestion here and there, but the price is right.
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