Watching Movies Instead of Blogging

Tonight the wife and I saw the new Pride & Prejudice, and, luckily for me, she's one of the legion of women who have the plot and dialogue nearly memorized, so that she could explain the confusing bits to me, and point out the things that were changed. ("Not how it happened in the book," she hissed. [Yes, I know you can't literally his a sentence with no sibilants in it, but go with me for once.])

It's a very pretty movie, in that standard English period-piece style, and I certainly do like looking at movies like that. (And even more do I like looking at Kiera Knightley. She's almost old enough now for me to stop feeling guilty about looking at her, too.) But it does get away from both the book and the period at times, which I've heard some huffing about on the 'net. (Women readers are to Jane Austen as men readers are to J.R.R. Tolkien: discuss.)

This has been part of a general Netflix onslaught lately. We're on the two-at-a-time plan, which usually means one for me and then one for The Wife, but we've watched a bunch of things together lately (the rotten King Kong, the amusing Forty-Year-Old Virgin and the only moderately dull The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe), which has meant even more movie-watching. In fact, I saw three movies over the weekend, all aimed at kids. The Wife and I saw the aforementioned Narnia travelogue (Day Three. Pointed my sword at a monster again. 3 cigarettes, 5 units of mead, 3 large salads. n.s.g.) on Friday; the two Things and I watched Nausicaa and the Valley of Wind on Saturday for our gala Boys' Movie Saturday (and I don't think I've actually seen that in English before); and then we all went out to the utterly unnecessary but amusing Ice Age: The Meltdown in a theater on Sunday. Now I need to watch some R-rated things to regain my street cred.

Over dinner after my brother's move two weeks ago, we got to talking about Netflix and what a wonderful thing it is. Something that struck me then is that their model has found a way to subvert the old tendency of a movie renter not to watch the movie and to delay returning it -- with Netflix, you get another movie when you send one back. So the faster you watch movies, the faster you get more movies. This might not work for everyone, but, for a person like me who always wants to get on to the next thing, it's the perfect motivator.

In fact, it works so well that Netflix's problem now is that people return the movies too fast. You know you have a successful business model when your biggest problem is the precise opposite of what used to be the norm in your business.