Everyone's Gone to the Movies

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Even though the Accidental Blogist’s subtitle describes me as a “Movie Snob,” I rarely post anything about movies. Truth is, like most parents of small children, the missus and I don’t get out to see movies very often. And because I am such a movie snob I usually can’t even find a film I would want to go see or even rent. Ads that attract most people out to the movies don't work on me. Hearing that deep-voiced “movie-trailer guy” (you know him, the one who always starts with “In a world where…”) is enough to turn me off. The missus and I are lucky if we get to go out once a month, and we don’t want to waste that night on a bad movie. It’s too dangerous to go into Blockbuster without knowing exactly what you want, you’re more likely than not to come out with garbage.

Recently, however, we have been determined to have on-the-cheap “at-home” dates where we eat a late dinner alone and watch a DVD. We pay our seven-year-old 5 bucks to stay upstairs with our 2 ½-year-old and we keep the baby monitor on (the boys are in bed for most of our "date" and we do go up and check on them every so often. Please don't call DYFS). As much as we have tried to keep this up, our dislike of going to the video store, along with the fact that we almost always forget to return movies on time, was working against us.

So I crunched the numbers and realized that it would be worth it to join a DVD by mail rental service. It’s about $20 a month, but if we rent two movies a month that’s about what we would be spending at Blockbuster. We could research the movies better and rent some of the older movies we’ve wanted to see that Blockbuster no longer stock. Plus, if we joined Blockbuster’s program (instead of Netflix) we would get two coupons a month for free in-store movie or game rentals. The 7-year-old has agreed to accept these coupons as payment for babysitting (have we gone into the child-labor violation area yet?). It’s a win-win for everyone.

So hopefully we will be seeing many more quality movies in the near future. In addition to our date-night flicks, I hope to watch at least one movie a week that the missus might not want to watch. Right now I’ve loaded our queue up with a lot of Paul Newman, early Coen brothers, and some music DVDs (the Clash, Wilco, Alison Krauss). We’ve also put some cool older things on there for the kids. I’m thinking of putting films that are on the top of our queue somewhere on my sidebar, but for now here are the first three movies being sent to us: Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (my pick), Catch That Kid (for the kids), and SNL Best of Phil Hartman (the wife’s pick).

Stay tuned for my first attempt at a movie review tomorrow.