Your Overly Emotional Quizo Update

I was a Netflix subscriber back in the day, and if you are any kind of movie-loving (or even liking) person Netflix is just ten kinds of awesome. Then, a few years back, after enjoying the bountiful fruits of Netflix’s generosity for a good while, I got a DVD burner in my computer and Netflix became about nine million kinds of awesome. Having Netflix, a DVD burner and a little program called [REDACTED] essentially turns your desk into the movie section at Best Buy, only without having to go to the Death Star. It is entertainment perfection.

That is, it is perfection until Netflix notices that you are going through movies at a truly prodigious rate and while it is certainly POSSIBLE that you are watching 40-50 hours of movies and TV a week and that your life consists of nothing but watching DVDs and trips to the mailbox, it is highly UNLIKELY that you are doing these things. Netflix, not being stupid, realizes that you are almost certainly just taking all the discs they send you, making quick copies of them with [REDACTED] or something similar, and shipping them right back. Netflix will then say, “listen, jerkoff, we’re in the movie rental business, not the turning-your-computer-into-Best-Buy business,” and Netflix will stop sending you new DVDs as soon as you send your used ones back.

They will, in fact, not send you new DVDs for quite a while after you send your used ones back. This is a practice known as “throttling” and, frankly, it makes perfect sense. It does, however, chop Netflix down to being only two or three different kinds of awesome. When you would send in a DVD and get the next one in your queue a day later that is pretty freaking great. When you send in your last DVD and the next one in your queue doesn’t arrive for almost two weeks that is, suffice it to say, less than great. Over the course of two weeks I could just save up the change in my pockets and buy the actual DVD, thus obviating the need for Netflix. So once I got on the “this guy is a DVD-burning douchebag” list at Netflix I cancelled the service. We had had our fun, and I had no regrets.

However!

A couple weeks ago, the “Netflix on Xbox 360” service was rolled out and the prospect of streaming HD movies on demand was too much for the feeble, movie-addled part of my brain to resist, and I signed up once again for Netflix. After going through the requisite signup motions I headed directly for the “HD On Demand” section of Netflix and found precisely ONE movie – Sidney Lumet’s “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead” – I wanted to watch.

ONE MOVIE. ONE FUCKING MOVIE.

“Well,” I said to myself. “It looks like there’s a new Best Buy opening up in Mayfair.”

This attitude would actually subside somewhat. I had a very cool experience shortly thereafter where a writer whose blog I read recommended a movie I had never heard of and, quite literally, three minutes later I was watching it on my TV, all without ever getting up from my desk. Even though the movie wasn’t in HD that is pretty freaking cool, you must admit.

(The movie in question here is Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” which I, like the Kung Fu Monkey, heartily recommend.)

Eventually I tossed some actual DVDs into my queue, mostly Oscar bait I had missed the past 4-5 years because I was doing shows over the Christmas period. The first one to come in was “Atonement,” which I sat down to watch on Friday.

Atonement is an interesting film inasmuch as it has three distinct parts. The first is the opening 30 minutes or so of the film, which are absolute death. It is painful to watch. At one point about 20 minutes in I texted a friend of mine who I knew had seen it and asked “the movie does stop being… THIS… doesn’t it?” She assured me that it did. Those opening scenes are truly horrific. They are completely unbearable and have almost no stylistic relationship to the rest of the film; at the time I summed up the first half hour as “imagine Jeeves and Wooster if it wasn’t funny.” Half an hour of watching the idle rich of inter-war England cavorting on a country estate. I wanted to kill myself.

Then, about 35 minutes into the movie something happens, and it transitions into the second part and becomes something else altogether that is tremendously, stupidly great. It’s fantastic. I loved it, and not just because it has Keira Knightley (though that certainly helps). The second part is this war-slash-romance, and when one considers that two of my all-time top five favorite movies are Casablanca and The English Patient, Atonement has now become something that is clearly right up my street. Just as the movie is chugging along and I am completely entranced by it in a very 17-year-old-girl kind of way, we come to the third part. This happens as I am watching the film approach its end saying, “this is awesome! True love prevails! Woohoo! This is the best movie since – SPLOTCH!”

The splotching noise is the sound made when, about five minutes before the credits roll, the movie hits you in the back of the head with the flat side of a 20-pound sledge. I’m sitting there watching it and, when this happens, I quite literally shout “WHAT THE FUCK?!” at my television. Now it’s not a stupid ridiculous double-twist ending like “Deckard is a replicant,” nor is it as jarring as the end of Million Dollar Baby – which I once famously reviewed as “the cinematic equivalent of a trip to a very relaxing if slightly meandering spa, where after 90 minutes of deep-tissue massages and hot mineral baths the cabana boy stabs you in the eye with an icepick” – but after how emotionally invested the film gets you the last five minutes just suck all the joy out of your life and the film ends up leaving you hopeless and broken and wanting nothing so much as to crawl under the covers and softly cry yourself to sleep.

Overall the movie is still freaking amazing, though, and it’s certainly a damn sight better than No Country. Stupid Oscars.

I mentioned my thoughts on the film to a friend of mine the next day, and he said, “what do you expect? Jesus, look at you. Your favorite movies are Casablanca. Gladiator. The English Patient. And now you like Atonement so much. It’s like you’re sexually attracted to misery.”

We had a good laugh at that until I said, “wait, now that I think about it that actually explains a lot.”

JLK