Friday Night Movies

Netflix isn’t really working for us. We signed up for the three-movies-at-a-time standard membership. But the thing is, every time we get movies, we need three: an E movie, an M movie, and a grown-up movie. Say, Blue Talks, Princess Diaries 2, and Sex and the City, Season 6, Part 2. Or Clifford’s Puppy Days, The Music Man, and Monster’s Ball. Which means we can’t do the thing where you get three movies, watch one, send it back, watch another, send it back, and by the time you’ve watched the third, the replacement for the first has arrived and you can just keep watching movies. Instead, we watch three movies, or watch them again and again, as in the case of Clifford’s Puppy Days, or don’t get around to watching them, as was the case for six weeks with Monster’s Ball. Then we realize on Thursday night that we haven’t sent our movies back, so we put them in the mail and update our queue, but that means we don’t have any movies for the weekend, so we end up at Blockbuster anyways (it’s the heartland: Blockbuster is all we’ve got) (actually, that’s not true, but the movies at the other place are really bad and they only have one copy of the halfway-decent ones and it’s always out, and the library has no good kid DVDs, which is why Blockbuster continues to thrive, even off those of us who consciously attempt to evade the hegemony of the national chain, especially the national chain that censors its movies).

S says we should keep Netflix because we can get cool documentaries and the Almodovar movies we’ve missed (like, when did we last watch a cool documentary or Almodovar movie?). I say what about those Friday nights when we don’t have a movie, or when I don’t want to watch the high-quality Netflix movie we do have? He says go to Blockbuster. I say fine. Netflix is only $20 a month, and so long as I know I can have a Friday night movie I want to watch one way or another, I’m ok.

But this Friday night I finally watched Monster’s Ball. And--no surprises here--it was excellent. And I felt bad about all the time I spend watching stupid movies when I could be watching good movies. And I thought about endings and the fact that the open ending seems to be becoming the de facto smart movie solution to the conflict between the inevitable banality of the happy ending and the hopelessness of the sad ending (though in Sideways the open ending suggests happiness, while in Monster’s Ball it gestures toward unhappiness). And I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.