Netflix, How I Love Thee

With my partner out of town for a week chaperoning a youth event in Montana (I know, lucky) I’ve been filling my evenings with movies. And thanks to Netflix we can stream movies through our Wii, since we already have three discs out that both of us want to watch.

We’ve known the joys of Netflix for a couple years now and it has made our movie purchases practically nonexistent. Working for the biggest retailer in the world I used to simply buy new releases we either wanted to watch or wanted to watch again and quickly that overwhelmed our office closet with DVDs. Eventually when the need for cash arose, aka, the layoff, we began the process of downsizing our collection, selling the movies we no longer wanted, some of which were still in their original shrink-wrap and packaging. Thank you Amazon Marketplace!

After careful deliberation we picked a plan that worked for us, which turned out to be three discs at a time, which is especially helpful during those television season and series marathons. However, with the Watch Instantly feature we had to hook up the laptop to the TV and stream that way… until recently. When Netflix created a disc for the Wii to stream movies through it we quickly ordered a copy. My partner and I have pretty similar tastes in movies, but I have to admit that I also enjoy some of the quirkier, darker and wittier independent movies, most of which he wouldn’t so much want to watch. Also while we both enjoy sci-fi flicks, I have a much broader appreciation of the genre beyond the box-office hits. And of course, growing up on horror films I still like to watch the occasional slasher movie. So what better time to view them than while he is out of town?

Let’s face it, I’m a movie geek. I love watching movies and when I was younger even had aspirations of becoming an actor, writer, producer and director of them. I enjoy well acted, well written, well directed and especially visually stunning cinematography. I’ve seen some pretty awful movies that failed in the first three things but was filmed so amazingly that everything else didn’t matter. Then again, I’m weird like that. And if I am watching a period piece, like, say, The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn and Olivia deHavilland and can clearly see a car drive by in the background, I’m okay with that because the movie as a whole is great. Of course, it doesn’t help that Patric Knowles as Will Scarlett was a hottie.

But alas, while my partner is away I shall enjoy my evening double features of weird and quirky independent movies he probably wouldn’t want to watch. Then again, of the four movies I’ve watched so far I think he’d like them all so I might have to watch them again with him.