DVD Voice

I got that message when I logged onto NetFlix tonight when I got home. The past couple of weeks haven’t been the best for me and NetFlix. They have tried my patience! For the past 3 weeks I’ve been doing good to get one new DVD per week! Delays in getting DVDs back in to them (3-4 days?), delays getting DVDs to my mailbox, and just weird things going on.

Yeah, some of it may have been the USPS issues and I’ll gladly cut them some slack since they’ve been so great thus far.

But having my top 30-40 DVDs skipped over to ship me something from the other coast of th US just baffled me. And that DVD came cracked! Still waiting for the replacement.

ANYWAY … not trying to gripe, because they really have been great. I still recomend.

But today, I really was looking for the number for NetFlix Customer Support! I was asking myself how to contact NetFlix. I had sent two DVDs in, they’d gotten them and they showed up about 8 am this morning on their site and the two new titles they were sending were listed too. But when I got home, they showed as “Shipping today”. wtf?

But then I noticed the message from NetFlix at the top of the screen: “IMPORTANT: Your DVD shipments might be delayed…” In a straightforward way it plainly says that they’ve been experiencing issues with their shipping system and that some DVDs were delayed. They are issuing credits.

Wow. I’m impressed. I mean, I wasn’t expecting that. If they’d just of gotten things sorted out and explained it to me I’d of been happy. But this goes a little beyond what I expected. Maybe my expectations are low. But I’m happy.

Ever wondred just how much a particular DVD costs you each month on NetFlix? You know you’ve signed up for the 3-at-a-time or whatever plan and that it is so much per month, but how much did each DVD cost you this month? Are you actually using the service enough or would you be better off running to the local video store when you want to watch something?

Good questions aren’t they? Well, thankfully there is a great and easy way to keep track of this information. It’s called FeedFlix. It is really simple to do, go to their main website, and plug in the RSS feed for your NetFlix queue (you’ll find it here). Copy the one under “Personalized Feeds” called Queue. This one you’ll drop into the box on the FeedFlix site and it’ll go and get your queue. Every night it’ll do the same thing and keep track of what your rentals are costing you and how you stack against all the other users. Do you return the DVDs fast enough, are you watching way too much tv? (lol).

Basically, start this up, bookmark the link, and come back in a few days — or a couple of weeks — and it’ll have more detailed statistics and charts about you. You can give away a free link to your friends and remember that you’ll be the only one to see the details about how much you pay and how long you keep the DVDs. It’s a wonderful service. I love using it.

Try it today!

The Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan’s 8th film (I believe) is a very simple, delicately told tale (a bedtime story he told his daughters) of a lady who lives in the pool at an apartment complex and after having completed her “mission” needs to get back home and protect her from danger.

You know, I have yet to see any of M. Night Shyamalan’s films at the movie theater. Since his new one, Happenings, is out now I thought it might be good if I went ahead and saw his latest one from Netflix before I did. (Still not 100% if I’ll see it or wait for it to make it to DVD).

And that’s the rub. You know, every one of his films, with the exception of The Sixth Sense have been dissed as “not so good” or not required viewing to me by friends. Even the Sixth Sense was made fun of for certain reasons. I don’t understand why people think so poorly of his films. Especially this one. Because with any of his films, especially Signs, I find that if you find the central theme of the story, and take that message to heart and really ask yourself the question, then you’ll become a better person for it.

I’m not saying that you take your morals and ethics of life from the movies, but in his case, the question he asks of you through the movie is well worth looking at and thinking about.

So what’s The Lady in the Water about? It is entertainment. It’s entertaining. It’s well made. It will keep you with the story, the special effect monsters are rather cool. But as a movie, well, it almost doesn’t do it. It is almost something that half way through you wonder if there is something better you can be doing with your time. But if you stick in there, you’ll be very pleased.

Not trying to give away too much here, but Paul Giamati (Cindarella Man) is the super of the apartment and finds Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) in his pool. Because of his past and the bad things that happen to him, he is essentially hiding from the world in the inferior job and knows quite a good bit about the other residents of the apartment building, and he sets out to help her complete her mission and get home safely.

The little message of the movie is that every being has a purpose. So as you finish watching the movie and you see how this applies to the characters in the movie, ask yourself - what is my purpose? What am I to do? What do I contribute?

That is quite the question, and as one of the characters in the movie mentions, that when you find your purpose you find your grace in life. It is also interesting to see that many of the characters you may characterize as being down on their luck. Some you see as being too young, or too old, or too eccentric or whatever. Also important is that you have to see beyond your first impressions, or misunderstanding or stereotyping of people and see some of their true value.

So … what is your purpose? What is it that you can do? Because as the movie indicates, and I believe too, you do have value and you should find it!

I have yet to see a M. Night Shyamalan movie that I’ve not enjoyed. The Village was disturbing for me because of my past, but was enjoyable. Loved Signs, and loved the Sixth Sense. If you haven’t seen any of his movies, I recommend you do. He isn’t quite our generations Alfred Hitchcock, but everything has a heart and is well worth your time.

Oh, and before I go. I loved the little bits about the film critic in this movie. Not that I want you to know what happens with the guy before you’ve seen it, but it is hilarious how wrong his assumptions are and jaded his opinions are. Rote. And gives me a little pause as I’ve just taken up being a film critic (essentially) on this blog. Hopefully I’ll not turn into this guy. If I start to, let me know, ok?

Today I get this interesting email from Netflix Customer Service. It is that Netflix will be removing the “profiles” from the accounts. Now, by removing profiles I don’t mean that they will stop profiling you as a customer or even that they were making a profile about you, that I don’t know.

This is what they will be doing. As of September 1, 2008, Profiles on your Netflix account will be gone and the queue of those profiles will be unavailable. They state in the email that they are doing away with this feature to continue to improve the website for all of their customers.

If you’ve never used it, the profile feature I felt was a great one. It would let families sign up for a larger Netflix plan and allocate 1 or 2 DVDs to a member of the family. That way, the Disney movies would be on their daughter’s plan, and the war movies on the fathers, and the kids would get their new movies only when they’ve returned their current ones. I thought this was a great plan especially since the owner of the account could always reassign any of the profiles allocated DVD amounts and restrict the types of movies they could get through the system. But alas. Who knows, really, maybe the Netflix people have something truly greater up their sleeves!

I have no reason to use the profiles system. I did try it. I set up a second profile (for myself) and put a few movies in the queue. I let it have 1 DVD at a time, and could tell by the “name” on the envelope which movie it would be. Pretty cool, actually, kind of like a “mini” account. And, a little embarrassing to admit, I did this primarily to put a few horror films into that profile. I turned off the ability of that profile to use the “community” features and had The Shining sent out. I had my parents on as a friend, but later one day when I was at their house and looked on their account I could see where the movie showed up in my list of recently watched. Yikes. Ok, I know, I shouldn’t care, but since my folks don’t approve of horror, I’d rather not let them know. (I’m scared of them, I admit it).

Netflix customer support is at 888-638-3549 if you’d like to talk to them about it.

NetFlix is a wonderful service for watching DVDs and Bluray movies. Sometimes you wonder why everyone isn’t using something like this?

And for those of us here in the US, Father’s Day is coming up soon. And I know that I frequently have a hard time picking something out. Enter the NetFlix gift subscription! This is an easy way to give away a free subscription to NetFlix to your family and other loved ones.

It’s easy to do. Simply get to your account, and go to this page. Then choose the plan that you want to start them on, and choose the “occasion” that you want the gift card to show. Father’s Day for example is a good one! But you can do all sorts of “occasions” like Mother’s Day, holidays, Birthday, Valentines, etc.

Next step is to personalize your gift card, pay for the gift subscription and either print the gift certificate and put it in the Hallmark card, or email the gift certificate to them. That’s all there is to it! A great way to introduce someone to the joys of NetFlix and an easier way to rent and watch videos!

So, this week I had a lot of new things in my queue. I decided to shuffle them again using the handy-dandy shuffler I talked about earlier. It still works! Imagine that!

The only thing I noticed was that one entry got a “DD” entry instead of a number. Hmmm… Well, I changed it because I was looking through the list and numbering the previously grouped tv series back into a sequential ordering.

I like the tool. Only thing is that since I was in a rush, I don’t remember exactly what it put on the top of the queue and so my movies that it is shipping tomorrow might be a little weird. Ok, I admit it, I put weird stuff in my list sometimes! Schlock!

Holidays must make for weird times at NetFlix. Heavy volume of incomings (including mine on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings). My new DVDs will arrive on Thursday and none of them can possibly make it back to have new ones shipped this week unless I play hookey from work tomorrow and watch one after it comes in the mail and before the post office closes!

Yesterday I was about to return some videos to NetFlix when I looked at one of the return envelopes and noticed that it was torn at the window. You know the little window where the barcode shows through when you get a DVD? Well, at first I thought about looking at Netflix Support online or reading the FAQ and then I remember the little “help” that is plastered seemingly everywhere about Netflix, how many different ways you can return discs.

So, I figured, what the heck, give it a try. So I stuck both DVDs into the one return envelope and mailed it back. I was a little paranoid, for sure, not knowing if it would take them longer to get the second one or something (because I always put them back in the envelope with the barcode visible). But I was more paranoid that the torn envelope could tear more in the mail and perhaps loose the DVD so I gladly went ahead and shipped them in one envelope.

Well, per usual, the next day they logged both of them in at the same time. Pronto! So … that little test is out of the way, returning two DVDs together works just great!

And later I got to thinking, why wouldn’t they prefer that I return multiple DVDs in one envelope whenever given the chance? I mean, they’d pay postage on one disc and get two, their cost on doing that return just went way down. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it!

Well, today I looked at my Netflix queue and noticed that it was over 200 movies. Ouch. This was just an experiment and now I’m looking at a boatload of movies and tv shows to watch! My problem now is the queue.

Bascially it works like this, I’ve found a movie I want to watch — say Indiana Jones. When I do I’m presented with all sorts of great movie choices that are similar. (We’ll get into the poor recommendation system later - but for now especially for a new user, at times it can be ok). So I’m given Star Wars, Die Hard, Back to the Future, Jaws, etc. And they all sound like great movies, so I add them to my queue.

Later I add a classic movie, Casablanca, and get another great round of selections: North by Northwest, Citizen Kane, All About Eve, The Maltese Falcon, etc.

This goes on for several movie genres - comedy, drama, etc. And when you look at the list, there is big clumps of action movies, followed by big clusters of comedy, etc. When one movie type starts, I’ll be watching action for weeks, and then Disney movies for another month. What’d be nice would be to mix these up, and have them in a more random fashion.

Netflix Queue management is easy. If you want to move a movie, just change the # in the queue listing and press “update” or “drag” the movie to the spot where you’d like it to be. Works great, if you have 10, 20 movies or so. I’d just like a nice big reshuffling! I’d like all the movies jumbled up for me, and the tv shows to stay at the bottom.

I searched the Internet looking around for NetFlix Hacks, and other ways to do this. The one that seems to work the best is this little “bookmarklet” that you add to your favorites or bookmarks, and while you are on your queue, click on the bookmark. You don’t go to a new webpage, your queue #s are all randomly jumbled. Yeah, tv shows and sequential movies (for instance the Indiana Jones series will be jumbled as well, but they are fairly easy to straighten out yourself. (I’d rather do it this way than not have the help!)

How To Do It
Ok, here’s the scoop, this is the bookmark: Netflix Queue Reshuffling

Take the above link, and right-click on it, and add it to your bookmarks. That’s it. Now, bring up the page with your netflix queue and click on your bookmark. Presto! It’s done.

Thanks to marius.org for the great tip - he refers to another blog, badsegue.org, which unfortunately isn’t opening for me today so I can’t see the details behind this great little bookmark! Enjoy!

I know there are a few holes in my Disney movie list - some classics that I’ve never seen before. For instance, I’ve never managed to watch Cinderella, Peter Pan, or … . And some of the newer ones I’ve missed (Pocahontas, Aladain). Well, The Aristocats was one that I’ve missed and I had a down day from NetFlix and went and pulled this one from the collection and take a look.

I like it! At first glance, I thought it was just a Johnny-Come-Lately version of the 101 Dalmatians for cat lovers. But it was a very simple, elegantly told, and touching tale about a family of cats (Eva Gabor - Green Acres, The Rescuers) who are “catnapped” by the butler so that he could inherit the family fortune. Never mind the logic holes that the estate would probably not be left to him if there were no cats in the picture, or that the lady wasn’t even sick and that she’d just replace the cats (probably — yeah, yeah, I know not all cats are the same).

But regardless of all that, it was a very fun, safe, little movie that was entertaining and fascinatingly human. It isn’t too long and I recommend this to just about anyone.

If you haven’t seen, then do take some time to watch it!

Before The Devil Knows Your Dead [bluray] is interesting film by Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon [bluray]) held my attention pretty well through it. Normally not liking non-linear films, the kind that bounce around forwards and backwards in time, however I do like that approach when it goes back to reveal motivations of characters. This film though, baffles me — and not because it isn’t good but rather for some of the “issues” it brings up.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson’s War), and Ethan Hawke (Lord of War [bluray]), star along with Albert Finney (Miller’s Crossing) and Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny). The movie was well acted, the characters went about their life trying to solve their various problems in what I thought was a very realistic manner. All-in-all I enjoyed watching the movie.

Without giving anything away, Andy and his brother Hank plan a robbery to get some cash to solve their immediate needs. The robbery goes badly and, well, Rosemary Harris’ (Spider-Man [bluray]) character is killed during the robbery.

Her character is the brother’s mother. They are robbing their father’s jewelry store! This is where I am disturbed. How can someone be so evil as to even plan something like this in the first place - let alone of their parents, their own family. Why is it that people find it so easy to hurt, and far too often very deeply, or in this case, fatally the people they are supposed to love, care for, and hopefully protect the most?

So that’s what the film is about. There’s your essence. There are better heist movies out there. But for one that plumbs the depths of depravity of some human souls, and the way they go about systematically hurting, ignoring, saying things, and most importantly not saying the things they need to, well this is it. So many times you see characters reach out or exhibit emotional needs and the ones who should meet it are too preoccupied or too drugged, stressed out, or whatever to notice or even care.

It’s a sad state.

Oh, and by the way, this movie is rated R, so definitely not for the little kiddies. Sure we all want to see Marisa Tomei topless, but know its rated R for a reason.