"You just can't find them"... unless, you know, you look

Today's Writer's Almanac features a poem called "La Strada" by George Bilgere which begins like this: this:

A dollar got you a folding chair
in the drafty lecture hall
with a handful of other wretched grad students.

Then the big reels and low-tech chatter
of a sixteen-millimeter projector.

He lists the movies you saw:

"La Strada. Rashomon. HMS Potemkin (sic). La Belle e le Béte, before Disney got his hands on it. And The Bicycle Thief, and for God's sake, La Strada" and, later, " Les Enfants du Paradis, or Ikiru, or The 400 Blows" and, again, "for God's sake, La Strada".

And then he announces

You can't find them
at the video store anymore. Only the latest
G-rated animated pixilated computer-generated prequels.

That's just the way it goes.

After which he says that even if you could find them, they'd be "restored, colorized, scratch-free"... Well, restored, yes. Scratch-free. Yes. Colorized? Not by the Criterion Collection folks, fella. Colorizing kind of came and went, and the classics were always available as they were filmed.

And then he says, you couldn't really see them because

You're just not young enough,
or poor enough, or miserable
enough anymore to see—really see

Now, maybe he's got some kind of point, but all I could think, when I hit his statement that "you can't find [these movies] at the video store" after the first five, was, "Hey, I own three of those, and I know I've seen the others". And then, his second listing of titles, one of them. Of his eight, I own half. And a quick check - the Criterion Collection. Yeah. Every one of them - including, for God's sake, La Strada - except for Battleship Potemkin, which was put out by Kino International. Not colorized, and with the original score.

(Not to mention, when was the last time anybody made a G-rated movie?)

Now maybe his point that I'm not 24 any longer, or single, or watching the movies on an uncomfortable chair with a bunch of other young students for whom the price of the movie was a significant part of their income but at home on a plasma-screen tv, is true. (And before you say "Maybe???", I don't in fact have a wife and baby. Or a plasma-screen tv.) But even though most of that's true, I really don't think those movies were made just for starving grad students. There's an elitism there that's annoying.

But the truth of it is that long before I got to the end, and his real point, I'd dismissed his argument. Because these movies are not lost; every damn one of them is easily available on DVD. So to say "You can't find them ... That's just the way it goes" is so out-of-touch, and so snobby, that I just can't take him seriously.