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Into the Flix Mix

My wife decided we should join Netflix. Right now, in 2007. That’s just how hip and bleeding-edge we are. Next thing you know, we’ll be buying ourselves cell phones and motorized vehicles and trying out that ‘indoor plumbing’ thing all the kids are raving about these days.

Still, it’s better to have joined the party late — very late in this case, like when the host is flicking the lights on and off and cleaning up the empties — than to have never joined at all. My wife says she’s tired of people asking her, ‘Ooh, did you see that movie?,’ and always having to answer:

‘Nope. Never did.‘

“That’s just how hip and bleeding-edge we are. Next thing you know, we’ll be buying ourselves cell phones and motorized vehicles and trying out that ‘indoor plumbing’ thing all the kids are raving about these days.”

I told her she should just do what I do — lie. It’s not a pop quiz, after all. If you say you’ve seen a movie, your friend isn’t going to ask you which character jumps off a bridge in the scene after the car chase involving the circus clown in the hearse.

(“It was a trick question! The car chase had an ice cream truck; you never saw the movie at all, you big fat liar. Liar!”)

But the missus doesn’t approve of my methods. She wants to actually be able to discuss the movie with other people. In her mind, that means engaging in critical discourse about plot progression, dissecting the motivations of each character, and waxing poetic about comparative cinematography. For this, apparently, you need to actually see the film first.

(For the record, I like to discuss movies, too. The way guys discuss movies, like this:

Some Guy: Hey, you see that movie?

Me: Yeah.

Some Guy: What’d you think?

Me: It was okay. But dude — that chick.

Some Guy: The one with the boobs?

Me: Yeah. She was hot!

Some Guy: Yeah. Kick ass.

My way doesn’t actually require either of us to have seen the movie, or even heard of it before. Frankly, the movie doesn’t even have to exist.

Because hot chicks with boobs kick ass. Some truths are universal.)

Personally, I’m okay with joining the Netflix horde. I’m a little concerned that the mailman will have another reason to sneer over his glasses at me when my choices arrive, but with any luck they won’t plaster the names of the movies all over the packaging.

(“‘Teenage Mutant Nympho Turtles’, eh? Go figure. Freak.”)

But I think my wife’s overlooking one teensy but rather important point. The reason we don’t watch many movies, as a rule, is that we generally don’t have time to watch movies. And not just the ‘spend an extra hour driving to the theater and barfing up popcorn’ kind of movies, either. We usually can’t cobble together an hour and a half of spare time to watch movies in the comfort of our own house. I’ve got six movies, right now, TiVoed from HBO that everyone on the planet has seen. Except us. And they’ve been there for weeks.

(“You haven’t seen ‘Pirates of the Caribbean‘? Or ‘Lord of the Rings‘? You poor, backwards little man. Doesn’t your cave get pay per view?”)

So now we’ll have an entirely new way to not watch movies that we wish we’d seen. First, we’ll miss them in the theater, then we’ll ignore them on HBO, and finally we’ll leave them on our coffee table until we accidentally mistake them for coasters, break them, and pay thirty bucks for each DVD broken. And we still won’t know who jumps off the bridge, what sort of vehicles are in the big car chase, or whether the clown ever makes it back to Vegas for the big show.

All we’ll know is that the hot chick with the boobs kicks ass. I guess it’ll just have to do.