So I just signed up for Netflix a couple of days ago, basically for the express purpose of saving money on DVD's, because I spend an extraordinary amount of money on bad movies. Most of the time, I know they're bad going in, but I really want to watch them at the time. However, thanks to the wonder of streaming video and $8.99 a month, I'm now able to watch a ton more movies than Hulu offers at a level of quality that's unparalleled by anything short of the new release wall at Blockbuster.
For example: Yesterday, I watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, because it'd been tempting me on the ten-dollar rack at work. Ten dollars saved, because I'll never have to watch that movie again. True fact: Michael Cera is the best actor in the world when it comes to playing Michael Cera. After that, he's right up there with Richard Grieco.
Speaking of Grieco, I watched If Looks Could Kill, which is just an awful, awful movie, also known in some countries as Teen Agent. It's got Grieco in it, so how good could it be, really? Well, it's almost as bad as Leonard Part 6, starring Bill Cosby, that's how bad it is. But I had to watch it. Had to.
But there are a lot of good movies on Netflix, too. Most of them are bad, and I totally intend to really plumb the depths of horrible movies, such as Captive, Point Doom, and Against the Law, all of which are Richard Grieco movies, but that's not really the point.
For good movies, I currently have queued up Synecdoche, New York, which Roger Ebert named the best film of the decade, and I watched The Answer Man, starring Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham, which I thought was a particularly good movie, or maybe Lauren Graham hypnotized me again. She does that. There's no good reason to watch Bad Santa other than her. Don't argue with me, or I'll make you watch a Rob Schneider movie.
But my favorite discovery on Netflix so far is... well, it's a rediscovery, really, because I used to see this sort of thing a lot back when I worked in a video store. There are these B-movies, made for video rental joints (because who's going to buy this crap), with names like Alien Species, which is neither Alien, nor is it Species, but it's enough to catch the attention of people who are looking for the latest Steven Seagal movie and stop them in their tracks. But the thing that I want to close out with, here, before I watch a movie (yes, I'm aware that it's six in the morning), is the way that crappy movie studios would rip off the art from a popular film to market their crappy straight-to-video fare:
Popular movie:
Not so popular movie:
