Netflix has changed how I look for movies. The majority of the movies on my queue are ones I have never seen before – or are movies I saw when I was 12 and never saw again for this or that reason. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You know how when you rent movies at a local video store – you are limited by their selection – and most of the movies at, say, a Blockbuster are either movies I have no interest in seeing – or they have a bazillion copies of Spiderman 2 and no Charlie Chaplin. Not that there’s anything wrong with Spiderman 2 – it’s just that variety is the spice of life, and it’s so awesome now to be able to expand my viewing into movies you can’t find at Blockbuster. Some of them are famous movies, with great performances – like The Bad and the Beautiful … others are more obscure, but with great international reputations. And I lose track of what is on my queue and I purposefully don’t look at it too much so that when movies arrive they are a bit of a surprise. It’s so much fun!! I went to certain sites like AFI and the great Film Site and looked at lists of “100 Greatest Movies Ever Made” – and put on the queue ones I hadn’t seen. Some of my choices are just old favorites that for whatever reason Blockbuster and Hollywood Video don’t carry. Like War Games. Oh, and Marisa inspired me recently to put Some Kind of Wonderful on the queue – a movie I’ve seen, but not since I was a teenager.
The two movies coming my way as we speak are 2 I have not seen yet: The Terrorist – a movie about a female Sri Lankan suicide bomber – which I really feel I need to see. It sounds fantastic, and terrifying. And also The Fall of the House of Usher – I am extremely excited to see that one. Never seen it!! Ebert has it on his “Great Movies” list – and I love how he opens his review:
The great hall in Jean Epstein’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of the most haunting spaces in the movies. Its floor is a vast marble expanse, interrupted here and there by an item of furniture that seems dwarfed by the surrounding emptiness. An odd staircase rises from one distant corner. It is not impossible that this vision, in one of the best-known French surrealist films, inspired the designers of the great hall of Xanadu in “Citizen Kane.” In both films, shadows are made to substitute for details that are not really there, and a man and a woman, their lives ruled by his obsession with her, move like wraiths through the haunted space.
The hall is not simply cold, enormous and forbidding, but has surrealistic details. “Leaves blow ominously across the floor,” writes the critic Gary Morris, and the long white curtains “flutter menacingly, as if the house is under constant, quiet, insidious siege by a vengeful nature.” This is not a room for human habitation, but a set for a surrealist opera.
Can’t wait!
I just know that since I got back on Netflix, I’ve stopped my annoying habit of wandering around the movie store, trying to find something to jog my memory, trying to remember what it was I meant to look for.
I can’t tell you how many times I would leave the store, get a couple of minutes away and smack my head, saying “I meant to look for ____.”
Now I can just click it onto my queue…..
actually, the end of Spiderman 2 is what is wrong with Spiderman 2.
and we were so happy with Netflix last night. we had put Children of Men (in which we’ve been very interested) in the queue, but Netflix says there is a waiting list of several days, and it only came out on DVD yesterday. Netflix received back Stranger than Fiction yesterday and already shipped out Children of Men. i think they just like to tease us with the whole waiting thing.
and i LOVE War Games. such a fun serious movie.
sarah – oh my gawd, they DO that. I almost went into this panic when my next movie showed up as “short wait.” SHORT wait, and I was like…”I think I am going to DIE.” Grow the hell up, me. It’s just a bloody movie.
Sheila – you are so right about renting from the video store. 5000 copies of something that came out yesterday when I want to see Rio Bravo. Boo! Plus, hardly any foreign films, unless you count Jackass II dubbed in Spanish among them. And I LOVE the Roger Ebert thing they’ve got going on. He’s one of those rare critics you can kind of trust, one that can be funny without being snarky and mean. If he likes it, I know there’s at least an 80% chance I’ll like it too.
Jackass II dubbed in Spanish – hahahahaha
Sometimes I’m tempted to rent those. Seriously, you have not LIVED until you have watched Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit on Mexican TV.
I watched Some Kind of Wonderful courtesy of Netflix just a short while ago – I think it might be my favorite Hughes flick.
Blockbuster lost me when I went to check out Shane for a “Family” movie night at our house a couple of years ago. They didn’t have it, and one of the clerks actually had no idea what it was—and they call themselves a MOVIE rental business. When I first heard about Netflix, I didn’t get the concept, but I love the service now. My wife invariably opens up the new movies that have arrived at our house with trepidation and dread–“My God, another film I’ve never heard of.” Although, we watched Amarcord this past weekend, and she loved it, even after a few disparaging remarks before we watched it–“Fellini? Fellini???” I think she thought it would be “meaning-elusive.” Ha.
I didn’t get the concept either, DBW – kinda like the iPod, I was like: why is everyone raving about netflix? What’s so great about it?? Once I got my iPod, though – within 2 days I could no longer imagine my life without it. Weird!
So the moment my first little red envelopes arrived, I clicked into it, and saw how it was going to revolutionize (hee hee) my life. I went NUTS scouring what they had … old TV shows, old favorites … foreign films (Amarcord’s on my queue!! Too funny – it should be arriving next week, actually!) – stuff I saw once in some little art theatre when I lived in San Francisco and always wanted to see again, whatever.
I’m like a kid in a candy store.
“I’m like a kid in a candy store.”
Yeah, me too. It is intoxicating to have access to things I thought I might never see again, or be lucky to see again. My wife might have other thoughts, but I have gotten giddy when I find some forgotten treasure.
sarah – hahahaha with your brief comment on spiderman 2!!
and emily:
//SHORT wait, and I was like…”I think I am going to DIE.” //
ha! I know – that’s the thing with the ol’ internet. It actually encourages impatience – short wait? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.
Seriously? There’s a Blockbuster store that’s not carrying War Games? What the hell?
I’m sure you’ve received this link about a thousand times already, but here it is again just in case. What you’re describing is the Long Tail. Or, more specifically, the realization that you’re no longer alone at the end of the long tail.