A Movie Weekend

We've been signed up with Netflix for a while now - definitely more than a year and we love getting movies in the mail.

I knew that under our plan, we were able to watch movies directly thru the Netflix site, but had never really thought much about it. Usually, the Evil Twin orders the movies and if it's something I'm interested in watching, I'll watch it with him. If not, then I find something else to do with my time.

If there were movies I wanted to see, then I'd add them to the queue. The only problem with that is that the Evil Twin has about 300 movies on there. If I moved mine to the top, then I would mess up his carefully calculated list - so I just hadn't really bothered with it much lately.

On Friday evening, sitting here at my new laptop, I wanted to look for something on Netflix and when I went to the site, I was reminded about the "Watch it now" feature. I clicked to see what was available and was surprised to see something I actually HAD been wanting to see there. Wow.

It was the Ben Stein documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed". I happen to like Ben Stein. It was a really neat little documentary and I'm glad I checked it out. (I know there are people out there with a differing view of the ideas that were explored in this documentary and I'm really not interested in getting into a debate about any of that - I'm just mentioning that I watched the thing).

After I watched that, I looked to see what else was on there. I saw a Woody Allen movie "Sleeper". I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but I know there are plenty out there. I thought perhaps I just needed to give him another shake and check that one out. Probably not the best choice if I wanted to change my opinion about him as a director and his weird 70s hair was a distraction.

But, I watched it - didn't really get it, but it was entertaining.

On Saturday night, I figured I'd try my luck again and pick a different movie. I chose "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" - with a bit of trepidation. I had heard horrid reviews and figured if it really stunk I could just click the stop button and maybe find something else more interesting.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. No, it's no Oscar winning film, but it did have several funny moments and it was just over the top enough (ridiculous funny) that I actually thought it was better than the reviews I had heard.

In order to watch the movies from there, I have to use Internet Explorer - which is fine, but I prefer using Firefox... oh well.

Using this feature will give me the ability to watch many movies that the Evil Twin wouldn't really be interested in. He does want to see the Ben Stein documentary, but he likes to get his DVDs in the mail and watch them on the main TV - as opposed to watching something on his computer. He'll probably end up putting that one in the queue at some point and I'll watch it again when we get it.

Plus, I'll be able to take a chance on things (like the Woody Allen flick) that I normally wouldn't put on the queue. So, I'm really excited about my new little discovery... even if it's not a "new" idea on Netflix. I'm just slow on the draw, I guess and late getting around to doing things.

If you do Netflix, check it out. It's a neat feature!