In Praise of Netflix

Is it ever going to stop raining? I hope so, since we’re leaving tomorrow for a week’s vacation. Meanwhile, there is an interesting article on Netflix (“What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood”) in yesterday’s NYT that I’m seizing on as a sign of hope in these days of cultural blandification. The author reports on having asked his friends how many Netflix titles they would guess to be in circulation on any given day. Most of those friends, going on the assumption that Americans have rather limited tastes and therefore flock mindlessly to the same old stuff, guessed about 1,000 titles. But it turns out that the real answer is about 35,000 to 40,000, or almost two thirds of all titles ever put on DVD. That’s a pretty great factoid, suggesting a much larger diversity of taste than people are usually given credit for, and Netflix deserves praise for recognizing the potential in stocking the 60,000 or so titles they carry. Other companies haven’t come anywhere close to that (Comcast, for example offers only 800 titles through its video-on-demand service), and thanks to Netflix a lot of tremendously good movies (the article gives the example of Coppola’s nearly disappeared The Conversation) are being rescued from the dustbin of history. Now if only Hollywood would wake up to the fact that it doesn’t have to keep serving us imitations of imitations, that we might, in fact, want to see something vivid, intelligent, and a bit different.

Of course, the article also talks about how a lot of people think Netflix is actually doomed. Let’s hope it’s not.

I have a few subjects in mind that I’d like to tackle when I get back from vacation, including the following:

* Flaubert’s Sentimental Education
* STNG’s Borg and “dirty” technology
* Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Palm Beach Story (another great screwball comedy)

Stay tuned!