Much has been said and written about Netflix’s “Watch Now” or “Watch Instantly” feature. Most things I’ve read but am too lazy to look up again and link to seem to agree that the selection could use some improvement. I do know that some dude from Slate wrote:
I found the offerings impressively bad, as though some schlock curator from an Ivy League cinema studies department was called upon to select the dreckiest soft-porn screwball comedies ever made
I’ve never studied film at an Ivy League school, but I did take film classes at a school just up the road from one, and I take offense at the suggestion that soft-porn screwball comedies are somehow an anathema to the cinema. A world without Jewel Shepard is a world I don’t want to be a part of.
In fairness, that Slate review came out when the service was brand new. Title selection and quality has greatly improved since then. Sure, there’s still loads of stuff like The Double-D Avenger, but there’s also a metric tonne of quality flicks, the type of movies that even the fuddiest of Princeton fuddy-duddies would have no problem adding to his syllabus.
In addition to fourth-rate titty flicks, there’s Eisenstein, Herzog (including Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, which took me forever to find back in the days of VHS), Hitchcock, Kubrick’s finest (Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange), and a handful of kickass Westerns. In 10 minutes of browsing through genres, I found about 37 movies that I would legitimately like to watch now. And isn’t that what the “Watch Instantly” service is all about?
Earlier today I configured my Xbox, Again? to work as a media center extender capable of watching Netflix streams. The UI is painfully slow (I don’t know if that’s the fault of the plugin, Vista, or the miserable service I’ve been getting from Cox), but after queueing up some movies online, I can sit down in my faithful recliner, Osama bin Loungin’, kick back, and enjoy quality movies at any time. More importantly, now I can watch Real Genius at my leisure, without having to dig out the old laserdisc player. That’s worth my Netflix subscription right there.
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