So It Begins
03/23/09 07:13 AM
Or it would be if I weren’t so blitheringly incompetent.
I’m the kind of customer Netflix loves. The type of person who is somehow incapable of completing the simplest of tasks, like putting a pre-paid-self-sealing-envelope in a letter box. Rather than watching a plethora of films with my subscription, as any rational person would, I opted to pay for the privilege of holding onto a single movie for months on end; not to watch said film over and over, but rather to play an elaborate game of hide-and-seek at which the DVD in question easily outmatched me.
It’s true I could’ve reported the disk as lost, but that would’ve meant publicly acknowledging that I’d been duped by an inanimate plastic disc and I just wasn’t willing to do that.
After nearly a year went by I was ready to admit defeat and quietly cancel my subscription. I was on the site looking for the official process needed to end my misery when I came upon an interesting discovery. Turns out Netflix had started streaming some of their films online which could be viewed for no additional charge using your computer, or better still, a media device hooked up to your television such as the X-Box 360 I’d recently acquired.
Suddenly I was the victor. My incompetence had paid off and they had eliminated the pesky postal part of their mail-delivery service. Now all I had to do was press some buttons on a controller and viola, instant movie. I’m sure that using a game console for this purpose might be daunting to some users, but I was a child of the Atari and Nintendo generations and had spent countless hours of my sun-shunning youth and subsequent “adulthood” mastering such devices; this was something I knew I could handle.
So I plunged headlong into a vast sea of cinema plucking items from my cue and devouring them one after another. In short order I had gone through everything available and once again felt as though I’d been defeated, this time by a rectangular, plastic brick, which had lured me in with promises of riches only to leave the cupboards bare after a few scant weeks of entertainment.
I was disheartened and downtrodden, but then a small ray of hope came to me. One day while riffling through my cue looking for something familiar to occupy my time, I discovered a film that hadn’t been there before. Cautiously I pressed the play button and proceeded to spend the next ninety minutes enraptured by a little gem of a flick that I hadn’t even heard of.
Apparently there were little, benevolent gremlins inside of my Netflix list and they had given my a precious gift. I began to scour the virtual stacks and added to my cue any film with a compelling description or saucy cover. Over the coming days I viewed this trove of curiosities and though many turned out to be ghastly ghouls disguised as celluloid beauties, a few of the movies were genuine treasures like my previous discovery and they gave me a reason to press onward.
This entry marks the introduction of a new series of film reviews for flicks I find off the beaten path using my newly-acquired streaming powers. Heaven knows that no one needs my opinion on something like Watchmen or any of the other blockbusters that are always given enough ink to fill a swimming pool.
Instead I’m going to focus on the overlooked movies that slip by with nary a notice. Films that fall left of center, independents and overseas productions that don’t make the major rags.
The first of these pieces will appear later this week.
I hope we all enjoy this new adventure together. It will undoubtedly take us to some interesting places.
-Quoth the Raven
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