Word: stores
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...Friday night, and you want to watch a movie at home with that special someone. You could go to a video store and rent a film, and instantly it's yours; popcorn extra. Or you could go to Netflix, and the movie will arrive, earliest, on Tuesday. Here's hoping you had a Plan B for your big date...
...professional (and obsessive) movie watcher, I find Netflix a helpful reference source for my never-ending entertainment education. (B-movie serials! BBC miniseries! Bollywood musicals!) But I have misgivings about the service's usefulness, especially compared with that of a real, well-stocked video store, and about the possibly harmful effect that Netflix and other online retail outfits may have on American society...
...question, Netflix serves a need. It's a virtual video store with more than 100,000 titles - movies and TV shows. And it's cheap: for the four-at-a-time price of $23.99, you could conceivably see about 50 videos a month - if you devoted your life to the task. In a deep recession, Netflix has also taught film fans that renting a movie or TV series not only is way less expensive than buying but also takes up no shelf space when you move from your foreclosed home into your parents' basement. That could be one reason...
...Netflix ad has one contented couple purring, "We don't miss the video store at all." Well, I do. Specifically, I miss Kim's Video, a lower-Manhattan movie-rental landmark that housed 55,000 DVDs and cassettes of the vastest and most eccentric variety - until it closed early this year and shipped the whole stash to Sicily. Admittedly, Kim's was one of the gems, but cities large and small used to have video stores with all manner of movies that you could see right away. With Netflix, you surrender those basic American rights: impulse choice and instant gratification...
...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 a knowledgeable cinephile...