Hello everyone! After a year hiatus, Unstreamable — a column that recommends movies and TV shows you can’t watch on major streaming services in the United States — is officially back in action, baby. WaHOOOO!
I – arts writer and Scarecrow employee Jas Keimig – am so stoked to be back on the Unstreamable beat once again. Now, I am behind the counter, stumbling upon weird stuff and forgotten classics you can only find on disc or tape. Truly could not imagine a better place to be and I’m so blessed to have officially joined the ranks of Video Store Dirtbags. Our legacy is both sacred and profane.
Things will go something like this: I’ll publish one new recommendation and one recommendation from the Unstreamable archive (or a guest rec) every other Wednesday. And before the column goes live on Scarecrow’s blawg, it’ll first publish on the Unstreamable substack (which you should absolutely follow) along with some event/reading recommendations as well as some random Scarecrow finds. It’ll be fun, local, global, silly, tasteful, and, above all, a perfect lunch break read.
Anyways, enough admin – let’s get to the good stuff. This week…
THE SMASHING MACHINE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF EXTREME FIGHTER MARK KERR
USA, 2002, 93 min, Dir. John Hyams
Early on in The Smashing Machine, fighter Mark Kerr is sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, explaining what goes into extreme mixed martial arts to another patient. “I don’t go out and try to punch a guy’s face in,” he tells the older woman, who looks doubtful. “Sometimes I have to.” He speaks of the no-holds-barred sports with a deep tenderness despite the knees to the face, the bloodied noses, the bruises. Martial arts are art after all.
Shot over the course of several matches, the documentary follows Kerr during the early days of MMA, when the sport was banned in the United States but continued to find audiences in places like Japan. Kerr was considered a pioneer of MMA, known for his domination on the mat before his addiction to prescription opiates forced his career into a decline. The cult documentary explores Kerr’s issues – including his codependent relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn – with a frankness, as he injects drugs on camera and reflects on the pressures and loneliness that come with competition. It plays like a time capsule of a sport still wrestling with its own boundaries from the perspective of a performer just missing glory.
Josh Safdie’s 2025 film, also named The Smashing Machine, is based on this documentary and stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Kerr (despite the near two-decade age difference) and Emily Blunt as Dawn. Johnson had wanted to adapt Kerr’s story into a film for years, telling the New York Times that he saw Kerr’s failure as an alternate path to his own success. While the Safdie-Johnson version doesn’t reach the same heights as Hyams’s film, the more recent movie still moved me with its performance and glittering Nala Sinephro score. I see it fitting into Safdie’s larger project of exploring “reality” and film – are the fictionalized versions of real-life events more real than the ones originally captured on camera? Can a greater truth of Dawn and Mark’s relationship be revealed with Johnson and Blunt recreating a fight using the exact same words? I mean, no……but kind of also yes.
Find it in the Sports sleeves section under ‘Extreme Fighting (MMA).’
USA, 2009, 77 min, Dir. Steven Soderbergh
It’s the lead-up to the 2008 election, and Chelsea’s clients are tired. As a high-end escort, she works with men who fret over the stock market collapse. Men who advise her to invest in gold and pay her for the “girlfriend experience.” But at the end of the day, Chelsea (Sasha Grey) sheds her alias to become Christine, a woman who lives with her boyfriend. He’s a personal trainer who services the same sort of men but in a different capacity.
The Girlfriend Experience has an understated Soderberghian cool. People dress in expensive clothing and talk at low volumes against swanky backdrops. The sex is implied, never explicit. Soderbergh is more interested in the emotional experience Chelsea gives her clients, as well as the 2008 financial collapse and the mundanity of sex work. In her first mainstream picture, adult film star Sasha Grey is appropriately enigmatic and alluring, if not a little stiff. The character of Chelsea/Christine seems lived-in, which makes the film almost feel like a documentary.
Produced for $1.3 million, The Girlfriend Experience premiered on an early version of Amazon Prime Video but has since disappeared from the platform. Soderbergh retooled the premise for a 2016 Starz TV show of the same name.
Find it in the Directors section under ‘Soderbergh, Steven.’
Looking for more? Browse our big list of 400+ hard-to-find movies over on our website. This column also publishes on Substack as a newsletter. Give us a follow over there.
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. Yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.
