Why do I have to stream or redownload my movies to watch them?

Question

Gotta admit, I don't really know much about iCloud as I rarely use iTunes on my PC so maybe I'm missing something here but I downloaded iCloud (it came with an iTunes update) several months ago and never thought much about it, as I said, I don't use iTunes a lot so I wasn't bothered about looking at the new features. Came to try and watch a movie today and I find that I can't. A bit of googling leads me to believe this is because, due to iCloud, iTunes is trying to stream my movies and songs rather than just play them from my computer? But every time I try to play any movies, I just get a black screen. I've sat here for at least 30 minutes waiting for a movie to load and it just doesn't. Most likely, this is because I have a poor internet connection.
I discovered that I have to redownload a movie in order to watch it. That's not a simple solution however as I have 26 movies that I own on iTunes. My internet provider has a cap on how much I can download and if I go over this, they charge me. Not only that, but it takes days, literally, to download a movie because of my slow internet. It took me 19 hours over 2 days to download Goodfellas. Doing this for 26 movies, taking my broadband cap into consideration, would take me months to be able to access movies I already own. That's insane, frankly, and I don't understand why Apple thought that was a good idea to make my movies inaccessable without an internet connection. Not everyone has access to super fast unlimited broadband.
Am I completely missing something here or what because this seems stupid as **** and I can't believe this is how it's actually supposed to work. I've tried uninstalling iCloud but it hasn't made any difference; when I open iTunes, I still have the cloud symbol and I still can't watch movies without downloading and my songs stream. I'm not happy about this, I don't want to have to be tethered to an internet connection to watch or listen to things I already own. Am I really unable to access my movies without spending weeks redownloading them? Streaming simply doesn't work.
Can anyone offer me a solution here or are streaming or redownloading my only two options? My movies aren't even stored on iCloud according to iCloud manager because I never bothered with it, but there's a little cloud symbol next to all my movies and I can't watch them without clicking on it and waiting until it's downloaded. I can listen to songs through streaming but I don't want to have to do that, either. I want to be able to listen to songs and watch movies I own if, for whatever reason, I lose my internet connection.
If this is how iCloud works then it simpy isn't something I can use and I want to get rid of it and be able to watch movies whenever I want without needing to stream or download but I've already uninstalled it and it's done nothing.
Any advice?

Answer 1

KOENIG Yvan wrote:
Because it's a widely documented Lion's feature.
When a document wasn't open since a month (at least if my memory is OK) documents created by Lion's aware applications are locked to prevent accidental deletion.
You may unlock them from their title bar.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 21 septembre 2011 21:14:18
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
Your memory is good, a month is one of the options. I think the default may be two weeks though.
Jerry