I lurv Netflix

I don't know who the guy is who came up with Netflix, but he deserves to be as rich as he probably is, 'cuz he's a frickin' genius.

I love going to the movies - it's one of the things I enjoy most in life that doesn't involve being naked. Yeah, I hate sitting thru the twenty minutes of commercials as much as the next guy, I want to kill the guy who answers his goddamn cellphone during the movie just as much as anyone else, I hate the noisy morons and their noisy moron children who don't know the difference between watching television at home and being in a movie theater...but I love actually sitting in a big dark theater, watching a moving image projected on a huge screen - I love the trailers, the smell of popcorn, the seat-rumbling subwoofers, the whole nine yards.

But when you come down to it, there's a lot worth seeing but not all that much that's really worth spending $10 apiece for tickets to see. Okay, I know that real cinephiles, the kind of people who make a big deal out of a distinction between a "film" and a "movie," will say that any movie worth watching is worth watching on the big screen. I used to say the same thing. But these days, I don't buy it. I can see why it's worth ponying up the dough to see King Kong, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the upcoming new Superman flick (which, speaking nerdly, looks fuckin cool as all hell, dude). But I don't think that the big-screen experience could really enhance my viewing of "Good Night and Good Luck" (which arrived in that lovely red envelope recently; good, worth watching, but not as great as a lot of folks said it was) or most movies that don't rely on spectacle and bigger-than-life scale for much of their effect.

And that's what's so great about Netflix. I get to see everything I want to see without having to actually go to the movies, I can add things to the queue and not have to remember what I wanted to see, I never have to go to the video store...and I get to watch good TV without sorting thru bad TV, and without commercials, to boot.