t 'n t luoma

Why Blockbuster Online instead of the better-known Netflix?

Simple: With Blockbuster Online I get a coupon every week for a free in-store rental. Rentals are about $4.50/movie. If we use all 4 of the coupons (and so far we have) it pays of the cost of Blockbuster Online. 1

The turn-around speed has been pretty good. I get an email from them when something is received, and later that day another one goes out, and it is usually here in 2-3 days. About all I can say against it is that it appears that if movies are received back on a Saturday, nothing happens until sometime Monday.

There are a couple of up-shots to the whole deal. You’ve probably heard about the whole “End of Late Fees” thing that Blockbuster has been promoting for awhile now. You’ve probably also heard that it isn’t so much that they stop charging you late fees, it’s that you get to keep the movie longer, but if you keep it too long you effectively buy it from them at a price that they set. 2

Sidestepping the whole debate, the fact is that the price you pay for to buy the movie you don’t return (call it “$X”) takes into account the amount of your initial rental fee (call it $4.50). $X of course changes depending on what movie it is, otherwise I wouldn’t have called it $X. But if you have ever rented a movie and thought: “Wow, that’s pretty cool, I wish I had bought it (generally $15-20) rather than renting it. If you buy it after you rent it, you’ve spent extra money ($4.50 for the rental plus $15-20 to buy it). You could wait and see if it ends up on the “Previously Viewed” table and hope you get there before anyone else, but who has that sort of free time?

Well we’ve already bought one movie that we rented using the in-store coupon. So the $4.50 that we saved on the initial rental then gets applied to the cost of buying it.

Not a bad deal. Of course it depends on the movie, as I said before (remember $X?) and my guess is that you will get it for a better price if it is a newer release and they are likely to get stuck with a bunch of copies of (what do they tdo with 87 copies of The Ringer that they guaranteed to have in stock after the 34 people who actually wanted to see the movie have rented it?)

This works out for Blockbuster, of course, because we peruse the “Previously Viewed” racks when we go into the store and have bought several (yesterday’s big find was The Incredibles which is currently Ethan’s favorite movie).

It also works out for me because: A) there are a lot of movies which never make it to Gallipolis; B) even if they do make it here, we rarely get out to the movies, and C) I like a lot of movies that Tracey doesn’t. So, for example, I’ve seen both Saw and Saw II (and enjoyed both).

However, the problem is that there are a lot of movies out there that I know I’ve never heard of, and going by random reviews has not worked well on a few occasions, namely this one (yes, I get why it’s supposed to be funny, but with a few exceptions, the movie wasn’t) and that one which was so bad that I really think it might have been the first movie to go from “So godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity.” to “Proof that Jesus died in vain.” (Both of those quotes are lifted directly from Mr Cranky.com which is always a delightful place to go after you’ve seen a movie you didn’t like. He actually liked it more than I did and deemed it only “Consistently annoying” — high praise indeed!)

Actually, Mulholland Drive (which is the 2nd movie above, in case you don’t know how to figure that out) reminded me of Superman.... no, not the new one, one of the old ones. Remember when Lois Lane died and Superman is so upset that he flies around the earth so fast that it spins the other way, and therefore (wait for it) causes time to travel backwards? (Brilliant!)

Well, after watching Mulholland Drive, I wished Superman would come spin the world back around on its axis so that he could prevent me from ever being born. Yes, that’s how bad it was. I have no one but myself to blame. I believed some review I read somewhere which said that if you liked Memento then you’d like Mulholland Drive. (Actually I take back what I said before, I would like Superman to prevent that person from ever having been born... is that wrong?) Well I really enjoyed Memento because like any really good movie, it makes you want to watch it again immediately so you can know at the beginning what you don’t find out until the end. Some great movies (12 Monkeys, Shawshank Redemption, The Game, and Se7en, to name a few which come to mind right away) make you want to see them again, but it’s never the same because “the secret” is out and the suspense is gone. The next best thing is to watch it again with someone who has never seen it and watch their expression as it unfolds, and marvel as you watch their Movie Virginity get swept away...

(By the way, don’t mistake Mulholland Drive for Arlington Road which was also a good suspense-but-not-scary movie with Tim Robbins, Jeff Bridges, and Joan Cusack. That’s a good movie too.)

Ok, where is all of this going? Well, I want you to feed my Blockbuster queue. Suggest movies that you love, especially (but not only!) ones that you think probably were not seen by a lot of people. (Extra credit if you link to IMDB.com.) Note: I will briefly turn off the need for you to be a TypeKey user to post comments here, at least for a few days.

It doesn’t need to be some fancy art-house black-and-white sub-titled tragedy about how crappy the world is, nor should you prevent yourself from suggesting popular movies that might have been overlooked, such as Playing By Heart (a chick-flick, but a good one) and Sneakers which seemed to go right under everyone’s radar but I thought was pretty good.

ALSO feel free to post about the movie that everyone else loved but you hated. For example: Titanic which was only good because what’s-his-name died at the end.... DiCaprio... who was also in the oh-God-please-let-me-take-an-ice-pick-to-my-brain-this-is-so-dull Aviator and Gangs of New York. They were almost as bad as my least-favorite of all-time movie Conspiracy Theory which I am convinced had a completely different ending when it was originally written, but was corrupted much the way that the sub-plot movie in Short Cuts which starts off as a movie script where the lead actress (“Who must be played by a nobody!”) dies after the lead actor (“Who must be played by a nobody!”) gets made into a movie where Bruce Willis eventually saves Julia Roberts “because the test marketing showed people hated the other ending”). Conspiracy Theory could have turned the audience on its ear by making Mel Gibson the unexpected bad guy, or by killing off his character (or both!) but in the end it chickened out and went for the safe Hollywood ending.

So, let me have it... what are your favorite and least favorite movies? Feed my queue!

Footnotes:

1. Plus, I’m sick of companies which sue to keep a monopoly on an idea. Patents are not supposed to be anti-competitive, or at least shouldn’t be, IMO, and in this case, as the customer “MO” is all that matters. If Netflix can sue Blockbuster over rentals through the mail, why can’t Blockbuster [or whoever “invented” the idea] sue Netflix over the idea of renting movies rather than buying them?! ↩

2. NJ sued Blockbuster over that one (printer-friendly) and I guess they might be right that it’s “deceptive” but I don’t know anyone of sound-mind over the age of disaffected college students who didn’t figure out that there was some fine-print somewhere. I love how Blockbuster has new ads where someone says “Great! I can keep it forever!” and someone else says “I think you’re a little unclear on the meaning of rental” or some such. ↩