Watch This

This is probably a sad commentary on what a shallow person I am, but I almost miss my Netflix movie subscription as much as I miss family and friends. Go on-line, click on the movie you want, two days later it’s in your mail box. What’s not to love?

And yes, I already checked. Netflix does not ship overseas. Drat.

Since I teach American history, I’m anxious to find a place where I can rent or buy videos so I can show selected clips to my students.

Last Friday, I finally had time to duck into a local video store. I was pleasantly surprised at the selection. They had all the new released and a lot of the classics. They even had the World War II movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

I did the money conversion. Movies were only US$3 to US$4. Instantly, I had visions of building up my movie library on the cheap. I was going to be so well prepared for teaching American history. This was awesome.

The movies were clustered together into labeled sections but I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was too busy grabbing movies.

I narrowed it down to two movies: one chick-flick for Julie and one action movie for me. The movies for the classroom would have to wait until next time.

I was so excited that I opened both of the movies on the train. That’s interesting, each movie has two discs. Just four bucks each and you get the bonus features on a second disc? Nice.

At home, I popped one of the movies into our DVD player. It worked, but it wasn’t the best quality. Oh well, good enough.

But then, halfway through, the movie abruptly stopped. What was going on here?

Then it occurred to me, that second disc wasn’t filled with bonus materials, it was the second half of the movie. Argh.

This was going to be a real problem.

Later in the week I ducked back into the video store to confirm my fears. Sure enough, in Hong Kong they sell BluRay discs, DVDs, and something called VCD. While legal (I think), they are low quality and split the movie between two CDs.

I’d been duped. VCD are the poor man’s DVD.

While in the store, I found the DVD section. Sure enough, a DVD will run US$15 - $18. Right back where I started. So much for the rapidly expanding movie library.

What’s that mom? Yeah, yeah. I know. “If it too good to be true, it probably is.”

My students will just have to live with Mr. VanNoord’s flannel-board rendition of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Oh Netflix, my Netflix,why won’t you ship overseas?

-Jack