Paint it Black, other free films

I discovered a decent movie to watch and then, quite by accident, an entire platform where you can stream movies and TV series for free – legally of course. I recommend both the film and the platform.

Whenever I find something of interest, it gets noted either in a Google Keep Note, on a OneNote Notebook or even a MS To-Do item. Every now and then I have a full session of consolidating said scraps of things to buy or download into a list and then going through each one to check I don’t already have it and it’s worth acquiring. It’s a tedious process as the list is messy – screenshots of Shazam identifying songs or a link to a film blog with a list of the top 25 underrated films of the 2000s. I wittled that list down today from a couple of hundred items to eighty and I will get it done – just needed some time out – hence this post.

One of the items that stood out (perhaps because it shares a name with one of my favourite songs by the Rolling Stones) is Paint It Black (2016). It’s a drama with the synopsis:

A young woman attempts to deal with the death of her boyfriend while continuously confronted by his mentally unstable mother.

It only commends a 5.7/10 on imdb and I would have perhaps dismissed the film (I have a backlog to get through, no time-wasting here) but if it wasn’t for a quick cross-check with rotten tomatoes where, although it has a 48% audience rating, it has a striking 88% among critics. To be honest I can predict when a critic rating or an audience rating will align to my own – it boils down to an instinctive decision on whether I will afford a movie that previous two hours.

I don’t think the giving a warning about how the film centres around the emotional aftermath of a suicide, for anybody affected by such matters, presents much of a spoiler as this is apparent faily early. The film seems to negate the how and why of the suicide and really just focuses on the two main characters contrasting methods of coping and the conflicts that arise between them. Despite a huge experience of cinema, I’m not film critic so I’ll just say if you like emotional dramas, this film’s worth a watch.

WeDoTV

When I searched for the film in my almighty Plex Media Server, it wasn’t present but as I scrolled to the bottom of the search suggestions, I noticed the ‘More Ways To Watch’ and under one of the services, that magical word ‘Free’.

This appears to be an ad-supported streaming platform called wedotv and you can watch Paint It Black (2016) for free. I found the two or three sets of adverts to be fairly innocuous in terms of contents and duration – a total of 2 minutes. The media player enables you to skip back and forth (a must have for any multi-tasking movie watcher) without instantly punishing you with adverts.

When you consider that Amazon has imposed advertising on users via its paid subscription service (unless you increase your monthly tithing), ad-supported streaming doesn’t seem so bad. I hate adverts but then again, adverts interrupting films was the norm when I grew up terestrial TV. I do have to acknoeldge that the platform enables users to use chromecast – a feature I no longer take for granted since I was stung by its ommission on a Kindle Fire device I inherited.

I briefly scanned through other movies on the site and granted, the films where I did recognise the name were old (Predestination, 2014) but I did recognise some faces from Snipes, Stallone, Nicholas Cage through to Willem Dafoe and Patrick Stewart. It looked to be a decent offering for free. I can’t say I rcognised any of the series-es in there; and the sports and live tv have no appeal to me. I don’t think it’s simple to say ‘you get what you pay for’ and be grateful because it’s time that’s precious and so even if something is free, I won’t waste my time with subpar content.

A while back I’d given a media server system, Jellyfin, due diligence because I was a little concerned about how Plex seemed to be locking user data into the application by killing off plugins. I’m sure there are many other uses for plugins that others have been deprived of but for me, I just wanted to be able to export a list of my media – data portability. Fortunately one of the few plugins that can be hacked into Plex, WebTools-NG, enables me to do this so I’ve stuck with Plex for the time being. One of the reasons why Jellyfin came about and users migrated over was because of dissatisfaction with the way that Plex seems to now be more of a streaming-broker portal rather than just a local media server.

I initially found the changes to having every search suffixed with recommended commercial streaming services, frustrating but if I get recommendations for streaming platforms like WeDoTV that seem to be quite decent, I’m happy. I have access to a handful of paid streaming service providers (YouTube, Prime, Apple and Disney) so it’s also nice to see these services present in the results when serching for content in Plex.

Final Thoughts

Well you got a twofer from me today – a decent movie and platform. And as for Plex: Well I enjoy actual content and not particularly the process of finding it, which seems to be a combination of what to watch and where to watch. If Plex then takes care of the ‘where’ by listing relevant platforms, that saves me time – so now I just need to wait on an implementation of AI that can start making good recommendations to cover the ‘what to watch’.