Netflix Recap
Today I cancelled my Netflix membership after 4 months. In that time I saw 45 movies, so the average was 11 movies per month under the 2 movie at a time plan. That's a lot of movies to watch and I also wrote reviews of the recent ones on my website. This is about the same as I was able to watch the first time around when I could get three movies at a time.
Movies that I really enjoyed included Wedding Crashers, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Munich, Proof, The Last Samurai, Koyaanisqatsi, Garden State, Creature Comforts, Mystic River, Spellbound, United 93, Suicide Kings, and Riding Giants. So that's 14 really good movies.
Disappointments included Fog of War, Kill Bill Vols 1 and 2, Hotel Rwanda, Better Off Dead, Beyond the Sea, 24 Season 1, History of the World - Part 1, Secondhand Lions, Indiscreet, and Tombstone. Even so, I am glad I saw most of those.
Because Netflix doesn't allow you to cancel effective the end of the month, you have to wait until the end of the monthly period (mine is on the 4th of each month) or else they'll stop sending you things. I sent back movies Thursday and Saturday which they received today, so I waited for them to send out my next selections before cancelling. That way I got two more movies out of it. I don't feel bad because I think they were trying to slow me down. They only sent two movies from out-of-state distribution centers, but one recently came from Worcester, Massachusetts and took 9 days to arrive. In fact, I reported it lost after a week and they sent me another movie the following day. One of the movies arrived broken and that was the only unplayable one. And the dogs didn't eat any (last time they ate two DVD's as they were shoved through the mail slot).
The service was decent, but everything depends on the turnaround time. If you could count on one-day shipping every time then you could potentially watch 4 movies per week, even though Netflix is closed on weekends. While I came close to doing that early on, later on the shipping times were typically 2 days. I think they would wait to process movies they received from me and would wait until late in the day to ship movies so that I wouldn't get them the next day. I don't think the out-of-state ones were intentionally malicious, but I do think they should let you know in advance if they know they don't have a movie on hand locally. Apparently there was a class action lawsuit on them slowing things down, even though they claim "unlimited" movies in a month. In my case "unlimited" was 13, the number of movies I watched the first month. Subsequent months, the total went down to 11, 11, and 10.
I would definitely consider doing this again next summer. Since you can rent seasons of TV shows (one disk at a time) you can get caught up on shows like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, which would beat most of whatever else is on TV in the summer.
Here are all of the movies that I watched:
6-6: Wedding Crashers
6-7: March of the Penguins
6-10: Sin City
6-11: Enron: Smartest Guys
6-14: Dodgeball
6-15: Kill Bill, Vol 1
6-18: Seven Samurai
6-20: Fog of War
6-22: Kill Bill, Vol 2
6-24: Curse of the Were-Rabbit
6-27: Hotel Rwanda
7-1: Constant Gardener
7-2: Better Off Dead
7-6: History of Violence
7-8: Munich
7-13: Proof
7-14: Beyond the Sea
7-19: Last Samurai
7-22: Koyaanisqatsi
7-23: 24 Season 1 Disk 1
7-26: Garden State
7-28: Syriana
8-1: Munich (bonus mat'l)
8-5: Creature Comforts
8-8: 24 Season 1 Disk 2
8-10: Tristram Shandy
8-12: City of God
8-16: Alien Saga (documentary)
8-20: History of the World Pt. 1
8-21: Mystic River
8-25: Spellbound (documentary)
8-27: Laura
8-30: Matchstick Men
9-2: Secondhand Lions
9-3: Dogtown and Z-Boys
9-9: Young Frankenstein
9-10: United 93
9-12: Suicide Kings
9-16: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
9-18: Riding Giants
9-27: Three Days of the Condor
9-30: Indiscreet
10-2: The Thing
10-5: Tombstone
10-6: Cinderella Man
This was my queue at as of the time of cancelling. Seven of these were in my original queue of 25 movies I wanted to watch and kept getting bumped down in priority (marked with a *):
- The Cooler
- Lord of War
- The Royal Tenenbaums*
- All the President's Men
- Dirty Pretty Things
- Mulholland Drive
- American Splendor
- Seven Up / 7 Plus Seven*
- My Dog Skip
- Maria Full of Grace
- I, Robot*
- Bloody Sunday
- Brokeback Mountain*
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith*
- Charade
- The Producers
- Bubble Boy*
- Chariots of Fire
- New York Doll
- Pitch Black
- The Arrival / The Arrival 2
- Tears of the Sun
- The Sum of All Fears*
- Empire of the Sun
- Tuesdays with Morrie
- Diamond Men
- CSA: Confederate States of America
- BASEketball
- Baraka
- Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
- The Rookie
- The Parallax View
- The Notorious Bettie Page
- Brick
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