Raging Red

Joined Netflix, that is. I’ve been mulling it over for a while now. I’m not sure what was holding me back. The only rental option around here is Blockbuster, and there’s not even one in Charleston proper. There’s one in South Charleston and one in Kanawha City, neither of which is really conveniently located in relation to my apartment.

The first apartment I lived in when I moved to Portland, Oregon was directly across the street from the best movie rental place in the city - Movie Madness. They had everything there, including all of the indie and foreign stuff that is sometimes scarce at the corporate chains, and all kinds of obscure movies too. They had a categorization system that was both interesting and annoying. Movies were grouped based on director, actor, genre, or even whether it won an Academy Award. Obviously, an individual movie could fit into multiple categories, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how they decided where to put the movie. So, for instance, say you wanted to rent Taxi Driver. You wouldn’t know whether to look in Martin Scorcese, Robert De Niro, or Drama. I’d always end up having to go up and ask someone at the counter to tell me where to find the movie I was looking for. It was a good system if you were just browsing, though, without a specific movie in mind. It was nice to be able to just go straight to the Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers section if you knew you were in that kind of mood but didn’t know which movie you wanted to watch.

The place always smelled like wet dogs for some reason, but that wasn’t enough to keep people away. In addition to the stellar selection of movies was an eclectic collection of movie memorabilia, including the bust of Marvin, the character who gets shot in the face in the back seat of the car in Pulp Fiction, the knife used by Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and the hat worn by Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot, among other stuff.

Anyway, that was a long digression. Since my only movie rental option here is a Blockbuster that’s too far away for my liking, I’ve been thinking that I should join Netflix. Like I said, I don’t know what’s been stopping me. I finally signed up over the weekend after going to Blockbuster for the second time in a week only to find that all of the copies of Grizzly Man were checked out. That’s irritating. So, Grizzly Man will be arriving in my mailbox tomorrow, courtesy of Netflix, and I’m pretty excited about it.