you’ll love chuck norris!

My dad has been a Netflix subscriber for some time. If you aren’t familiar with it, basically for $20 a month you can rent as many DVDs as you want. You go to their site and select what you want to rent and they’ll send you three at a time. You keep them for as long as you want and when you’re done with one, you send it back (postage-paid, in their envelope) and they send you another one. So. Dad loves it and kept telling us to go onto his Netflix page and pick some stuff we wanted to rent. So I did. And my movies never came, and I’m like what is up? I definitely put Vertigo on the queue before Dad put Action Movie 32 on there. So I asked him if there was a problem, and it turns out there was. The problem was DAD.

See, Dad would go on there and decide that he wanted to see whatever movie he’d picked RIGHT AWAY, so he’d knock mine to the bottom of the queue. Because you can rank which ones you want to be sent first. So mine were perpetually at the bottom.

So finally I signed up for my own account last week.

I’m a big fan because I have a pathological inability to return movies to Blockbuster on time, so I’m always paying late fees. Besides, it’s really hard to find a lot of indie and/or foreign films at all around here, much less on DVD. So Netflix is great for that. It’s also great for renting TV series, because you don’t have to pay separately for each disc.

I sound like a spokesperson. That’s not the point of this entry. The point is that Netflix has a feature where they recommend things for you to rent based on what you’ve rated and/or rented. A cool way to see some movies you might not think of checking out otherwise, right?

In my queue are the following:

• The first season of Sex and the City
• The first season of Felicity
• Bowling for Columbine
• The Pianist
• 3 Days of the Condor
• Capturing the Friedmans (on hold till it’s released)

Based on those choices, Netflix felt that I would looooove movies like:

• Dr. Doolittle (the remake)
• Air Bud, and Air Bud 2
• Dunston Checks In
• assorted Mary-Kate and Ashley movies
• Pokemon movies
• The Mummy Returns
• Delta Force 2

Um, what the fuck? It really concerns me if people who rented the movies in my queue also rented the movies in my recommendations.

So I went on a mad rating spree to try to prove to them that I wasn’t that kind of girl, and finally I’m getting movies like Igby Goes Down – stuff I actually want to see. But for every Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, I’m getting a Children of the Corn 4: The Gathering.

Basically, I guess I would highly recommend Netflix if you know what you want to rent. The recommendations are kind of sketchy so far.