Word: netflixing
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...Nuts to Netflix...
Richard Corliss's article about Netflix was obviously written based on big-city experience [Aug. 10]. What about small-city dwellers and rural folks who do not have a large choice of movies or a movie theater nearby? I'm a big fan of Netflix. I've never had any delay in delivery, and I enjoy a wide choice of foreign movies, old and new. Netflix is a service I could not live without. Therese Namenek, LYNCHBURG...
Most online retailers try to interest customers in items similar to ones they've bought. Netflix offers "Movies Most Like ...," but the similarities can be baffling. Rent the Indian drama Fiza and you'll be pointed to Season 1 of Scrubs and the Bakker biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye. This is when I yearn for the guys behind the old Kim's counter. Not that every video-store clerk is a budding Quentin Tarantino, eager to point renters toward some arcane masterpiece from Italy or Hong Kong, but you do miss out on a face-to-face with...
Beyond the mail delays and the botched orders, the lack of human interaction is the big problem with Netflix and its cyber-ilk. Thanks to the Internet, we can now do nearly everything - working, shopping, moviegoing, social networking, having sex - on one machine at home. We're becoming a society of shut-ins. We deprive ourselves of exercise, even if it's just a stroll around the mall, until we're the shape of those blobby people in WALL?E. And we deny ourselves the random epiphanies of human contact...
Getting movies by mail is, Netflix hopes, just a stage between the Blockbuster era of video stores and the imminent streaming of movies. You can already get 12,000 Netflix titles on your TV (if you have a Blu-ray player or spring for a $100 Netflix box). So, O.K., soon there will be no more waiting for DVDs. But it'll come at a price. You'll be what the online corporate culture wants you to be: a passive, inert receptacle for its products...