Feaverish

I’ve been doing this Netflix thing for a few months now. Two problems:

1) I end up getting a lot of movies I’d be way too embarrassed to rent in person. By way of example, my last two selections were Be Cool and National Treasure. Movie Madness would revoke my rental card if I tried to get out the door with either of those.

This is tangentially related to why I don’t like cable TV. I end up watching too much, thinking “I’ve got hundreds of channels here, there must be something good on.” There isn’t.

2) They don’t have a lot of my favorite foreign movies — movies which aren’t available on DVD — so I end up going to the video store a lot anyway.

Recently, I got a hankering for Alain Tanner’s excellent Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. Netflix doesn’t have it, and I had to walk all the way down the street to the library to get it. I know! Like a sucker! Once I get something delivered to my door, it’s tough to go back to having to fend for myself. I’m like a polar bear that way. Only with Netflix instead of zookeeper flesh, and with walking to the library instead of eating penguins.

Incidentally, if you’re a foreign film fan living in Portland, you should really check out the Library Catalog. They have everything, and you can put movies on hold and have them delivered to the branch nearest you. A couple years back, when I was between jobs and taking some time off — ostensibly to write a screenplay — I would watch two or three films a day, mostly foreign, and all free from the library. When you’re writing a screenplay, that’s called “research.”

P.S. “Ostensibly” isn’t le mot juste (see how I snuck in that foreign phrase? Right after I mentioned foreign movies? See?), since I was actually writing and did eventually finish the screenplay. It’s never been “optioned,” though, or “purchased for six figures,” or whatever term movie types apply to successful screenplays. Maybe after I’m dead L will discover the lost masterpiece in a drawer and sell it for big bucks. Frankly, I’m not sure the world we live in now could handle a film like Fart Camp.