I just joined Netflix, and I'm not sure why.

[thewayne]

I've had a hankering to watch the original Mel Brook The Producers recently, and I was surprised to find that I don't own a copy. We had been planning on signing up for Netflix anyway, as my wife is a fan of Daredevil, and there's lots of obscure movies that I'd love to watch without having to buy them.

Well, I guess I'm going to have to buy it.

They did not have the 1968 The Producers. The only Mel Brooks that they had was To Be Or Not To Be, which I have on DVD.

They did not have Robot and Frank.

They did not have A Beautiful Mind.

They did not have The Gods Must Be Crazy.

But they did have Steven Chow's first big movie, God of Cookery. So I guess that's something, I'm just not certain what.

I'm very disappointed. I guess my video library will continue to grow.

In all fairness, Amazon Prime also did not have the 1968 Producers, I'll have to check it for the others.

Comments

[cp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Netflix is nice to have, but I haven't been too impressed with the variety either. I like a good bit of their original programs--Daredevil is very good, House of Cards is very good, and I want to check out Jessica Jones. There are some other shows we like on there too, and plenty for the kids, which is the main reason we keep it going. But movies are definitely not their strength. I suspect it's due to various licensing chicanery--license holders wanting too much money to make the content profitable for Netflix, and/or trying to hang on to their stuff so they can eventually start their own streaming services.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Jessica Jones is indeed good, and I'm not big on the whole wretched "it's got to be gritty" theme that's infested superhero flicks of the last ten years or so - I love what Nolan can do, and did with Inception and Interstellar, but haven't been interested in his Batman work.

And elsewhere on Netflix, there's Orange is the New Black, another of the very few shows I make time for.

Indeed, the state of digital film distribution is still rather like the music scene, pre-iTunes, with little oases of content scattered around, all independent of each other. I can have a measure of sympathy for not wanting to undersell one's assets, but this antipathy toward digital distribution seems endemic in the film industry, and book publishing as well, where even now, it's quite possible to find Kindle editions more expensive than paper books, as with Little Dee and the Penguin.

Of course, push the "we're holding the strings here" angle too much, and you wind up with situations like Netflix coming about in the first place, and now Apple aiming to join them too.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I was ambivalent about Interstellar, it rated no better than OK with me. I liked Inception because it was thoroughly original IMO. Batman was a mixed bag with me. There were elements that I liked, elements that I didn't, and it boiled down to being disappointed with the trilogy overall.

The best thing about Netflix on the Apple TV is the latest OS improvements: you can now use Siri to dictate the name of the movie in to the search bar. I'm intending an experiment, perhaps on Saturday, where I'll go through my DVD library and see what is available and what is not. As my DVD library has 500+ titles in it, I expect it to take a bit of time. Still, I think the result will be interesting.