I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the old fashioned video store.  Currently there are over 13,000 movies in my queue over on Netflix and, invariably, on any given Saturday night, none of my choices are in the mailbox.  Whew, good thing I’m out drinking on Saturday nights.

Before I start pummeling on Netflix, I have to say I do enjoy the free play option.  Sure, it has cut down on my reading, my meditating, and my thinking, but at least I can now say I’ve seen every episode of Will & Grace.  Heck, a few more years of this and I might even vote republican.  Having said all those positive things about Netflix, here’s why I despise the thing:

1. Unless you know exactly what movie you are looking for, you may never find it.  There is no feature to search all films in a given genre.  You can’t search horror and scroll through everything they have. You can only look through the “popular” models, deemed worthy by the masses.  So unless you know the title and enter into the search option, you are shit out of Lucky Fritz (2009) NR. 
2. And did any of you realize Netflix jumped from $16.99 a month to $19.99 a month in January?  I don’t think, with all the dipshit they send me, I was ever notified of this hike. Oh wait, here’s the email from 12.21.2010.  Let us know if Zoolander arrived. Oh, and don’t forget to rate Godzilla vs. Mothra.
3. They also have this “Suggestions for you” feature, which doesn’t really work out all that well with my wife and my daughter adding to the mix.  So, I’ll choose the genre Horror. I get,” based on your own ratings, here’s our best guess at some selections you might like:  Twilight, Saw, and Scooby Doo: Pirates Ahoy!”
4. Perhaps the most insidious Netflix feature is how you can bump any movie up to the front of the cache.  This is akin to those new jukeboxes where you can spend an extra 50 cents to bump your selection to the front of the line—to the chagrin of all those other folks waiting all night to hear Sweet Home Alabama.  This feature breeds ill-will toward our fellow drunken man.  At times this triggers a kind of bump-war, where people return time and time again to the jukebox, pay that extra damn 50 cents, to gyp their fellow bar goer.  There are no winners in this game (except the jukebox), only losers. 

“Why is daddy in jail, mommy?”

“Well, this guy kept bumping Sweet Home Alabama for some Phil Collins song.   Your father hates Phil Collins and the rest is on the police report.”

I was in a bar once and…I’m kidding, I’ve never been in a bar just once.  Anyway, I was in this bar where the jukebox shut down at 1:45AM, cutting off a number of people who never got to hear their songs because of this bump feature spawned by Satan (BFSS).  BFSS…we don’t make the jukebox, we added the feature where you can screw up your friends selection.

And in that other awful jukebox war I never did get to hear that Monkees’ song.  On a related note, I am no longer a believer.  And there are no Jukebox Heroes anymore.

Sorry for the tangent, but a similar phenomenon now occurs in my Netflix cache.  My wife bumps the first season of Twilight over my choice, my daughter then bumps my wife’s selection for Saw, ad infinitum.    At this rate, I may never get to see Scooby Doo: Pirates Ahoy!

The video store is gone, and the only alternative, besides Netflix type shit, is the evil machine box thingie at the front of the grocery store.  Have you seen these?  They represent a nearly complete selection of every modern movie I would never want to see and every obscure movie that I would never want to see.  Just approaching those things makes me feel a little queasy.

In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn, “I say, I say there’s something kind of aewwueuieeee about a grocery store video machine.”

What are you supposed to do when your friends come in for the weekend and you want to have Scooby Doo: Pirates Ahoy! on hand?  Sure I own it, so that’s a bad example, but what if I didn’t?  That’s my point.  Damn these new-fangled soulless gadgets!