This Is What I'm Thinking About (#2)

Here’s another thing that I’m thinking about. I love Netflix. Have I mentioned this before? I know that it’s been around forever and that I was late to the party - although you might as well rename yourself Sisyphus if you want to attempt to catalog how many technology-related parties I’ve been late to - but now that I’ve started using it, I honestly can’t imagine ever going back to a bricks-and-mortar video store.

I just added four movies to my queue that I wanted to see to varying degrees when they came out, but never got around to seeing. I don’t know that I ever would have thought to look for any of these movies at the video store, and that they came to be added to my queue just now is pretty much completely random. The only reason I even loaded the Netflix web page when I did was to see how quickly it loaded in the new public beta version of Safari 4, which I downloaded and installed earlier today. (Initial reaction: I like the new browser, and the much-maligned new feature, which has the tabs for tabbed browsing positioned at the top of the window rather than below the toolbar, doesn’t bother me at all.)

So anyway...I loaded Netflix, logged in, and found that it did, in fact, load pretty quickly. For no good reason, other than that I was there, I arrowed down the page to see what the wacky movie gurus at Netflix were currently thinking I would be interested in, and somewhere down the page was Gia, with Angelina Jolie. Never saw it, but remember hearing about it because much of it featured Angelina Jolie naked. Never would have occurred to me to rent at a video store because I always go to the video store with Amy, and it’s not her kind of movie; but with Netflix, it’s easier to watch movies that Amy wouldn’t want to watch because I can keep them as long as I need to in order to fit them in after she’s gone to bed or in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when I’m watching Jackson. In this way, I’ve already managed, in less than a year, to catch about two dozen pictures I wanted to see when they came out but somehow managed to miss.

I added Gia, and then saw Girl, Interrupted in the overlay that popped up, showing me movies most like Gia. Again, never saw it but sort of wanted to - even though I read the book and didn’t think it was anything special. Added that, too. Somewhere in there, I also came across Bringing Out The Dead and Corpse Bride and added those. Not sure if Amy will want to watch any of them - okay, I know she won’t want to watch the Scorsese, but then I can’t think of any of his movies that she would want to watch, other than maybe The Age Of Innocence - but I do know for sure that I might never have thought to rent any of them at a video store.

And yeah, this isn’t much more than a testimonial for Netflix, but it was on my mind so I thought I would write about it. I’ve been making a conscous effort to do a lot more writing of late, including daily entries in my journal and around a page a day on the current version of the phantom novel I’ve been working on for...um, yeah, a long fucking time now. And hey...if I can sell someone on the joys of Netflix, there’s that as a bonus, too.