Tuesday, July 7, 2009

   Netflix has brought out the movie geek in me
My wife and I recently signed up for NetFlix - I think the tipping point was when movie rentals got up over $5 per movie.

I'm not sure if Netflix is a worldwide company or local to America, so I will give a brief recap of what it is. It is an online movie rental/streaming subscription service. For a monthly fee, you get unlimited rentals and streaming movies. The streaming movies I watch on either my computer or using my HD Tivo, I can watch it on TV. The limitation on "unlimited" is the number of movies you can have out at once. We have a 3 disc limit, so it runs about $20 a month. We can keep the discs as long as we want - there is no due date & they come with a prepaid envelope to return them. Generally, when we return a disc, we will get the next one 2 days later. I dropped 2 discs off at the post office on Monday morning & I already got confirmation that the next 2 discs on my list have shipped (today is Tuesday).

So, since we have had it - about a month now - we have watched all 24 episodes of Gankutsuo - Count of Monte Cristo, The Man Who Would Be King, a documentary on string theory, some Addams Family episodes, Tales of the Black Freighter, a Burns and Allen episode, The Bank Dick with WC Fields, The Secret (remake of a japanese movie), Definitely Maybe, The Day The Earth Stood Still (original), Children of Men, True Blood and... well, yeah - quite a few movies.

I almost forgot how much I enjoy so many different kinds of movies & how much the older ones can tell you about the time they were made. The Bank Dick for example, was somewhat of a distasteful film by today's standards. The main character was an alcoholic habitual liar (I know - some people think that would be redundant) & in the end is rewarded for his lies. I did however, appreciate WC Fields'... I'm not sure if it was acting, but the persona he portrayed on screen. Based on his actions, I should have liked his character much much less, but I was still happy and sad for him at the end (happy, he was a millionaire - sad, he was still the same old drunk he was at the beginning of the movie). At the time, the drunk aspect of it had less of a stigma than it does today, so the final shot of WC Fields running after his bartender would have just brought laughs instead of the twinge of sadness it brought out in me.

I think I have another 20+ DVDs already queued up. The ones I am most excited about - The Reduced Shakespeare Company (all of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes - not 90 minutes each, 90 minutes total). Freedom (sci-fi anime) and The Great Dictator. I may have seen the Great Dictator before, but I think I have only seen clips from it & not the full movie. That was a brave movie made by Charlie Chaplin. It is a parody of Hitler made in 1940 - before the US got involved in WWII. It obviously had a strong political message. This was not a film Hollywood wanted made at that time.

Well, I just wanted to ramble about that for a while. I hope you all are doing well.

-bunraku
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