It's the most moneyful time of the year

("Moneyful" is not a word, but this was the only way I could make you think of both expenditure and that holiday earworm we all stopped hearing a few weeks ago.)

Watching movies is no longer a costly proposition for me. With the rare exception of a special event or a non-participating theater chain, all the movies I see in the theater are free as a result of my membership in the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA). I pick up most of the rest on Netflix and when they come up for rental on iTunes for 99 cents.

There's one time of the year when this model does not suffice, though.

When it gets to the second half of December/first half of January, and I'm really starting to target the movies I still "need to see" (however I define that) before I close my list, I'll pretty much pay whatever they cost.

I do have my limits. As you read last month in this post, I was not willing to actually buy Glass in order to get it in my 2019 rankings. That was a bridge too far.

But whatever ridiculous price they want me to pay to rent something, I will.

Case in point. Thursday night I rented and watched Ma from iTunes. It never came up as the 99 cent rental, but I always intended to see it. So now, with just days left before I close my list, I'm shelling out the big bucks.

How big? Six dollars and 48 cents, including tax.

And that's American dollars. In Australia, using current exchange rates, that comes to $9.46, which is just a ridiculous price to rent a movie. It rivals -- nay, exceeds -- the $8 a rental store charged me to rent The Internship back in 2013, as discussed in this post. Though that was more than six years ago, that rental remains, in my mind, the high watermark for what I've ever paid to rent a movie, a financial outlay necessitated by the special circumstances of being out of town for my 40th birthday weekend. Well, I guess these are special circumstances, too, and now I have my new high watermark.

I don't think iTunes used to charge $5.99 before tax for a new rental, but I guess that's inflation for you. It's increasingly difficult to get people to spend money on movies in any form, so I guess when you do get a poor sap like me willing to do so, you need to take him for everything he's worth.

If it were just Ma I'd survive. Okay, I'll survive anyway. But I'll feel the pinch because of the many similar decisions I've made over the past month. Let's take a quick stroll down my iTunes rental history, excluding a couple 99 cent rentals, to get a better idea:

Ma - $6.48

Ash is Purest White - $5.40

Honeyland - $6.48

Fast Color - $5.99

Ready or Not - $5.99

Diane - $4.99

The Last Black Man in San Francisco - $4.99

Why some of those movies have tax and some do not, I could not tell you. A change in the way these transactions are taxed starting in 2020? I can tell you that that's $40.32 spent on seven rentals, an average of $5.76 per rental. Or $8.41 Australian.

Now granted, at least one of those movies is going to make my top 20 of the year, so you can easily argue it's worth it. But you can also easily argue that it pains me to do it, nonetheless.

You can play the world's tiniest violin for me if you want. I am also the guy who has seen 51 movies in the theater since my last renewal of my $75 AFCA membership, with a few more likely to come in the three weeks before the 2019 dues run out. That's $1.47 Australian per movie seen in the cinema, or only $1.01 American. In other words, it all balances out.

Besides, there's something I enjoy about the decadence of this period, about telling my New England Puritan to go stuff it for a few weeks. There's no kind of typical cost-benefit analysis in which I think Ma is worth nine-plus of my hard-earned Australian dollars. But at this time of year, I just throw all that out the window, and spend freely as needed. The only thing that matters to me is "Do I want to see Ma in time to rank it for 2019? Then this is what it costs."

I'll tell you that Ma is not the movie that is going to make my top 20. The name "Tate Taylor" as the director was probably a pretty good guarantee of that. But I will say that Juliette Lewis was great in it, and that Octavia Spencer is always great, even when she is not.

Would I pay $9.46 for that Juliette Lewis performance?

Probably not, but you can't put a price on completism.