To add to your point, I recently tried to pick up some of my favorite movies from when I was younger, only to find that they were “out of print”. Some of these may not be lost to people searching around online because the directors are well known, but you’d likely have to search first.
Inland Empire - David Lynch /
The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci /
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw /
La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci /
(I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)
The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.
I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.
Every one of those titles showed up on torrent sites via the in-browser search feature, and a total of two clicks (magnet link, confirmation in torrent app) would've had the movie viewable on my laptop within, at most, a few minutes of downloading.
Ethics of torrenting aside, I can't think of a faster way to get the results you want.
For books, again, ethics aside, usually Library Genesis is equally fast.
Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free.
With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)
However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.
Inland Empire - David Lynch / The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci / Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw / La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci / (I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)
The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.
I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.