Notes From a Hulu/Criterion Weekend

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I've sworn off paying for Hulu Plus since last year, since they decided to redesign the site and broke nearly all the searching and sorting functionality for their Criterion Collection titles. The interface is still in a sorry state, but this weekend Hulu decided to promote the addition of a batch of new titles to their Criterion section by offering all of them for free for four days, from February 14th through the 17th. I figured that this was a good opportunity to play catch up with the new entries to the" They Shoot Pictures Don't They" Top 1000 list. So, over the course of four days I watched eight movies, one each from Francois Truffaut, Jacques Feyder, Mikio Naruse, Aki Kaurismäki, Roberto Rossellini, and Nagisa Ôshima, plus two from Pedro Costa.

The free Criterions were offered with commercials, unlike the ones on Hulu Plus which don't contain ad breaks. I was a little wary of trying to watch the films this way, particularly the Costa titles, which both ran nearly three hours. However, I didn't find the interruptions that disruptive. It was easy enough to tune out the commercials, especially since the ads tended to repeat constantly. The biggest problem was that sometimes the movie would fail to resume after the commercials ran. After some experimenting, reloading the page seemed to fix the issue most of the time, though it meant having to sit through the Criterion introductory idents and ads again every time. This was a problem on some films more than others, but there were none that I didn't have to reload at least once.

I also spent some time poking around on Hulu, testing alternate ways to browse their collection. Currently, the site's Criterion page is organized so that you have to scroll through graphics-heavy lists that only show you five entries at a time. This might have been fun for a casual watcher using a tablet or a smart phone, but not for me. On my aging laptop, I got through about 200 entries from the "Most Popular" list before giving up, deciding there had to be a better way to compare Hulu's advertised 800 Criterions against the list of new "They Shoot Pictures don't They" titles I was looking for. Searching by director yielded some decent results, but searching by titles was often troublesome because so many of the Criterion films are not English-language, and can have multiple title translations. I sorely missed the ability to filter by country and director, and to limit my search to the Criterion films.

To really make use of the Hulu collection, you really need to know what they already have available, which is more difficult than it sounds. There's been a lot of bad reporting that the entire Criterion Collection is available on Hulu, but this has never been the case. Criterion struck deals with many studios to release titles like "The Royal Tennenbaums" and "Chasing Amy" as Criterions, but these deals didn't include streaming rights. Only about half of the official collections is currently on Hulu. However, Criterion also offers other films through Hulu that were released in other collections, or that the company has the rights to, but never released on disc. As these are the films that are the most difficult to find, to the dedicated cinema nerd they're what Hulu's partnership with Criterion has proven the most useful for.

However, finding a complete list of what is actually available on Hulu was almost impossible. A few of the articles reporting on the free trial pointed toward third party sites tracking which movies were on the site, all the ones I checked had outdated information. A fan-generated list of 700 titles, updated a year ago, was the most comprehensive one I could find. Paging through a Criterion fan message board, where posters had listed titles from each update for the last year, gave me the rest. And it was a good thing I checked, because otherwise I wouldn't have known to look for "India: Matri Bhumi," Roberto Rossellini's little-seen documentary about life in India, or half a dozen more Yasujiro Ozu titles.

I'm very happy that Hulu is offering these movies, and I have no issue with the size or the variety of their current collection of Criterion titles. I absolutely think it's worth the money to have access to many of these hard-to-find movies. By my own calculations, I've only seen about a third of what they're currently offering. However, the Hulu interface is user-unfriendly to the point where it negatively impacts on the use of the site. I shouldn't have to resort to third party sites to tell me how many Ingmar Bergman titles Hulu has. Typing "Pedro Costa" into the search bar shouldn't immediately direct me to the Pedro Zamora biopic "Pedro."

Right now I have enough classic films from other sources available to me, that I don't feel like putting up with the hassle. So I'm still going to refrain from subscribing to Hulu Plus again until they get their act together.
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