Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

More films than you can shake a stick at

As someone who buys too many DVDs, I decided that for the twin reasons of not having any shelf space left and wanting to spent at least some of my money on things other than recorded media and geek toys I'd give one of the online DVD rental places a whirl. These services are quite nifty - you pay a fixed amount each month and can then watch as many DVDs as you want. When you send one back, the next one in your rental queue is dispatched by return of post. The advantage from my point of view is that I always forget to take things back to the local Blockbuster and have to pay extra for the late returns. Oh, and their selection is limited, to say the least.

The one I chose was LOVEFiLM - cheesy name, but great service. As I watch too many films I got the Gold subscription, which lets me keep 4 discs at any one time for £19.99 per month, or just over the retail price of one film on DVD. The discs arrive in neat little mailers rather than in the original boxes - keep them as long as you want (or for as short a time as you want), then just drop them back in the mailer, seal it and drop in a postbox. (Psst - if you want a trial subscription, enter promotion code FR25 and my email address (mpk@uffish.net), and you'll get four weeks trial instead of the regular two. Oh, and I get a free month, but that's beside the point.)

The best thing is that you're freed from wondering whether renting or buying a particular disc would be worth the money or not - as the subscription's fixed anyway it doesn't make any difference, so you're at leisure to watch all kinds of stuff just because it looks faintly interesting. Over the last few days I've discovered that School Of Rock is tongue-in-cheek enough to be very much worth watching if you appreciate classic heavy rock (it's worth it for the scene in which the bemused classical guitar-playing kid is put through a crash course in metal riffs - Iron Man, Smoke On The Water and Highway To Hell). I've also discovered that Lost In Translation isn't as bad as I thought it would be, and is in fact a searing portrait of the ephemerality of life, the alienation of the individual in modern society and the difficulty of finding a place in which one is truly comfortable, or something. I've also been reminded that Citizen Kane is still one of history's great movies.

Most interestingly, though, I've discovered that Akira Kurosawa really is all that, and not just one of those names film buffs like to drop to demonstrate how knowledgable they are about world cinema. The Seven Samurai (true film buffs will put on a snotty voice and say "You mean Shichi-nin no samurai?" at this point) is a truly fantastic film. Yes, it lasts three hours and it's in Japanese with subtitles. But those three hours are paced so the film doesn't drag, the atmosphere and action sequences are quite fantastic, the character and plot development is second to none, and as a bonus it singlehandedly spawned the "group of people assembled to fix a problem" genre. This is mirrored most obviously in the American remake The Magnificent Seven, but echoes of Samurai can be seen as far afield as The A-Team (who have recently been cleared of all charges against them). It's a splendid film, and after seeing it I've put a few more of Kurosawa's films on my Lovefilm queue. Indeed, it has the rare distinction for a three-hour film of being remarkably difficult for me to tear myself away from to go to the shops to get something to eat - usually after an hour and a half or so I'm ready for a break, but this time I'd have been happy to dine on spaghetti hoops and toast (all there was in the cupboard) in order to keep going. Common sense fortunately prevailed, however.

In short, it's an excellent service and well worth a try if you rent or buy more than one or two films a month. Next up for me is a bunch of old Dr Who episodes, part of Simon Schama's Complete History Of Britain and that Spiderman movie everyone made such a fuss about a while back.

Posted by mpk at August 10, 2004 11:07 PM | TrackBack