Still ongoing, still finding new films to view

Although I’m as much a piracy advocate as Gol D. Roger, it’s not like the legacy services don’t occasionally give us something worth viewing. The way I got into watching movies primarily on YouTube (before looking elsewhere if what I wanted wasn’t available) began with that time I started to binge all the Terminator movies in rapid succession, next to a viewing of Saving Private Ryan.

For Saving Private Ryan, I recall in middle and high school how whenever the history classes progressed to World War II and eventually to the Allied Landings, they almost always showed the Normandy landings and it became something of a tradition to show the brutality of battle from the Omaha landings, the deadliest landing of just that day. But if you’re American, you’re history lessons probably stopped short of the fall of the wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Out of curiosity, I went to look up the entire movie and someone was ballsy enough to have it fully uploaded onto YouTube at the time, before there were ads and before YouTube started to turn to s[pop!]t.

And as regular viewers would know, this was the same setup for at least the first Terminator movie. The original channel I watched it on a decade ago is most certainly deleted (and I highly doubt I can look up my YouTube history from ten years ago), but even to this day dastardly (read: heroic) YouTube channels with only about 20 people in their audience are uploading the full movie, risks notwithstanding. Like this channel:

Channel: INDY CAT PLAY

The graphic content will of course lock the movie to YouTube, but this is an acceptable sacrifice.

After that, it was down to looking for multiple different movies on multiple different pirate and torrenting sites. Gangster Squad, the 300 movies, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and several more. It was an occasional thing to do prior to community college and during the summer of 2017, it started to ramp up alongside that time I checked up on the Naruto series to discover that Boruto was a thing.

Maybe it’s because I took a break from Naruto that I grew to appreciate the successor series as well. But criticism still exists.

In between choosing my courses, I was on the hunt for new movies to watch, and prior to this, I had expressed an interest in military service by the end of high school. Unfortunately, I was 17 when I graduated and wasn’t able to convince my mom that even part-time service had its merits. “Try college first,” everyone said. You know how the classroom setting doesn’t mesh with everyone? That’s me. Learning by myself was always better than learning in a classroom setting, and there was always a pressure to get the highest scores. My average was usually a B- to B, tops. Except for Art, English and Foreign Languages which got me consistent A’s. The push for A’s across the board led me to lightly defy those expectations due to how Icarian and hubristic it felt. Also, every smart kid was a know-it-all with an attitude.

So I went from slightly above average high schooler to slightly below average college student. Seriously, my GPA took a hit due to my piss poor math scores. But away from that, a section of my free time was devoted to movies with a military slant, as a means to hype myself up. I was still determined to join the Army, and if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have had that break in service from 2021 to ’24 if I had kept it a bit more realistic.

As for the movies I was looking for, there was never a single one-size-fits-all website for me to watch them all on, and as you’d expect, popup ads. Popup ads everywhere. But I was able to fight through the mess and make some pretty neat discoveries. The one website that I was able to watch my movies on was called MegaShare. I’m going off memory alone, but as I recall, the site had its server in Vietnam and momentarily went under in late 2020. A Google search during this draft reveals that as of writing this it’s still up and still functional, with TV series included in its lineup.

Watching anything on this site is a bit tricky without a VPN so good luck streaming Paddington 2 or Jigsaw for instance. These days, the majority of the content that I don’t always pirate comes from my subscriptions to Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Tubi, and for free viewing, there’s YouTube Movies and the Internet Archive, God’s gift to the internet.

Which brings me to the arc of YouTube movies made free with ads in between. It started in early June 2020. In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, movies promoting primarily black casts and stories were made free with ads, and one of them was the saga of Philly detective Virgil Tibbs:

Filmed in 1967, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, this movie was about a murder of an influential man in tiny Sparta, Mississippi. The racist police department not only suspects this out-of-town Yankee Negro of doing the deed, they point a gun at him while taking him in. However, when Det. Tibbs reveals that he’s also a cop, his superiors assign him to this murder case and his expertise wins over both the police, the victim’s next of kin, and even select townsfolk. A great movie that to those who’re old enough may have a few things to say about how segregation worked at the time, though probably a smaller net would need to be cast for on-duty cops from back then. My grandmother certainly has some surviving memories of Virginia. Not as far south, but still influenced by the Jim Crow laws.

Afterward, there was a blank period where I didn’t watch that many movies, until the last half of 2022. In the Army, if you can’t continue on in basic training, you’d still be allowed to graduate just at a later date. They’ll recycle you into another company either at the beginning or slightly behind depending on certain factors. I was getting tired of medical issues f[clank!]ing me over and I called it quits… which I was regretting. Playing the waiting game for the entirety of 2022 gave me a lot of time to kill as I couldn’t get a job. Eagerly awaiting the initial rejection, I just watched a handful of movies, two of which that stood out were The Mask and Tombstone. Fast-forward to the last quarter of 2023, where my second attempt at joining the Army bore fruit. Much of my time was divided between watching Lucky Star and Azumanga Daioh on YouTube through unlisted playlists and playing CoD: MW 2019 and House Flipper. This was also after my grandmother moved out to an elder’s home in Baltimore, so for the first time in my life I had my own room… at 24 years old…

The recruiter I was talking with through Reddit (true story) told me that my waiver had been approved and I was set for training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri the following January. With that out of the way, I watched as many of the movies as YouTube would make available. The list of movies I’ve seen is extensive, so instead I’ll grab three of the movies that I recall watching on YouTube. Not necessarily before the second attempt at Army life, but just on YouTube Movies

1. Black Hawk Down

I was more than a little hyped up getting back into the Army, and one of the movies I watched was Black Hawk Down. The dramatic retelling of Delta Force’s worst day in Somalia in 1993. To gloss over some of the history, numerous factors helped contribute to the breakdown of the Somali government and instability in the leadership thanks in no small part to colonialism and the clan system. By the early 1990s, the Somali government hit the road indefinitely and numerous warlords rose up dousing the flames with gasoline. One of them, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had been antagonizing UN Peacekeepers from Pakistan, and President Bill Clinton authorized military action to take him out. The tip of the spear had no idea what they were fighting, a trend that would curse the U.S. military, starting arguably in Vietnam, but continuing on after Somalia.

Channel: Armchair Historian

This video explains it in further detail.

A Black Hawk helicopter was blasted out of the sky and the new mission was to find the soldiers and get them out intact. Easier said than done, when the population of Mogadishu, radicalized and armed with small arms and machetes comes barreling down on your position. Delta lost two of their operators, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, and it became a race to get the f[gunshot]k out of Mogadishu without losing anymore people. Mission failed. We won’t get them next time. Somalia is a failed state, yadda yadda…

I’ve talked about this last year, but that was to observe different military practices that are still in use today. For content, 90% of the movie is obviously focused on events from that fateful day, with 10% dedicated to the history and politics of the event. Completely historically accurate? Well, this website fills in the gaps that were scrubbed from the movie for brevity’s sake, but it’s not like there was a fictional account of a flying Pegasus so to that I’d say it’s 95% accurate.

2. Tropic Thunder

This one I hadn’t seen since I was a kid, and its content shows that, on the one hand, it’s best when things age to show the difference between the culture of media then and now, but on the other hand, biting satire like this is sorely missed in this day and age, especially with social media companies making idiot moves in recent history. Cancel culture anyone?

The premise of this comedic masterpiece is that four actors are joined together to adapt a novel of a Vietnam war movie and the production goes awry at every turn. Not because they can’t get film rights, but because of on-set clashes between not just the actors, but also the producers. The studio decides to throw them into Indochina and film them with hidden cameras, failing to realize that they were dropped into the Golden Triangle, a region swaddling Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar where much of the world’s opium is cultivated, typically under the thumb of the nastiest gangs in Asia, to include Triad groups.

Of course, the actors find themselves somewhat held hostage by these guys and the movie turns into an impromptu rescue mission that harkens back to the Project 100,000 policy during the Vietnam War. As for the directors, they have a very clouded “show must go on” mentality and fail to realize who has their stars hostage.

The comedy comes from all the politically incorrect writing and satire. This movie pulls zero punches in taking the piss out of everything. Hollywood’s controversial casting choices, the portrayal of disabled characters by able-bodied actors, the drug use among the Hollywood elites, the draconian control of select studio execs, directors, and other production staff; in an alternate universe, Tropic Thunder would’ve been a documentary. I’ve made jokes elsewhere online that comedy is prophetic and I’ve been seeing it less as a joke and more as the truth these days. No matter your beliefs on a variety of topics, I can’t encourage you to watch this enough. If you’ve seen it before, like I have, give it another watch.

3. No Country for Old Men

Based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, in 1980, West Texas hunter, Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong and takes the money for himself and his wife. Knowing an agent of chaos is after him, he goes through numerous lengths to avoid this amoral hitman, all while an aging sheriff tries to reach him before cartel bullets do.

This movie is called by some the pinnacle of the western genre brought to the modern age. Changing world, untamed land, conflict between nature, society, and mankind; I can think of different media that fit this mold.

No Country requires an elevated level of thinking. It gets a lot of flak from some for the way it ends, which I attribute to a misunderstanding of the western genre. Moss may have been the protagonist, but he’s not necessarily a good guy. His adversary, Anton Chigurh, is both an antagonist and a bad guy and the sheriff Bell is honestly at a loss. When the camera pans to him, he feels like he’s useless and out of his element. Things made sense ages ago, but that age is no more and there’s not much he feels he can do. Moss and Chigurh move at a comparably breakneck pace in their search for the money. Most analyses of the movie are about Chigurh, but not a lot mention Sheriff Bell at all. The movie introduces his character several minutes in, but he has the first and last lines in the movie. I don’t have the analytical expertise to talk about Bell’s place in the movie or the novel (which I haven’t read), but I say he deserves some exposure himself.

YouTube movies can expose you to some films you didn’t know you would like and with a healthy library to show for it, you could easily get lost looking for something to see. No, really, it’s a labyrinth, bring a map… and maybe something to distract the minotaur. For a fourth surprise recommendation to complement the three here, have this:

No staff members were sacked in the production of this classic.