You may not think of Letterboxd as a source of video rentals, but it is. I was actually planning to rent a movie through Letterboxd back in January, through its Video Store application, but the movie a friend recommended that he'd rented there, It Ends, was not something I could find, for whatever reason. So I couldn't add that movie to my 2025 list, because it was a Letterboxd exclusive -- except not for me, apparently.
When I saw that a movie from my 2026 watchlist, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (feels like there should be some punctuation in there), was available through Video Store, I felt the urge for a delayed scratching of that "new platform itch." I'm sure this movie is available to rent through other means, but that itch made me dive in for a Sunday night viewing.
A Sunday night viewing that almost wasn't.
The rental went fine, it picked up my payment details and everything. Clicking the start of the movie registered the start of my viewing window, since it said I had 48 hours to complete my viewing.
But the movie wouldn't start. The little colored circle just kept on spinning, and this did not change through multiple refreshes, uses of the backward arrow on my browser and even a reboot.
I was about to click "send" on a complaint message to Letterboxd, asking for a refund before quickly switching to another movie even though it was now 10:30 and we'd gone for a long hike earlier in the day, when I realized that perhaps the internet issues that had plagued me all weekend were a factor here.
You see, my older son must be playing some sort of new game that sucks up the available internet, because starting with his student-free day on Friday, when I was at home working, I've struggled to complete normal tasks that involve the internet. And that's almost all tasks, especially since I am connecting in to remote servers for work, where I am accustomed to high-speed processing. He says this is a game he's been playing for weeks, but the evidence is pretty strong that something had changed, and that he was the one hogging our bandwidth.
He was still playing the game on Sunday night at 10:30, so I decided to switch to running my laptop off my phone, whose WiFi I would also turn off so I'd be running the whole thing just from mobile data. And suddenly, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was ready to play.
After this, no issues. Letterboxd is still in my good graces. Though I did check just now, and I could have rented it for the exact same price from Amazon anyway, so perhaps the novelty was only the new platform, not the scarcity of the movie's availability.
And the movie did not disappoint -- or if it did, it only disappointed very slightly. How could this movie with a lofty 7.9 rating on IMDB disappoint? The only possible way is because Matt Johnson has such a successful track record with me. Of his three previous features, the one I rank lowest is Operation Avalanche, and that movie got four stars from me. The Dirties and BlackBerry were both 4.5 star movies on my Letterboxd. So when Nirvanna was "only" another 4 stars -- though I did consider 3.5 -- it couldn't help be not quite the level of achievement I was hoping.
But this is a very fun movie, which pulses with Johnson's trademark shaggy charm, not to mention an intense love of Back to the Future. Plus multiple scenes of people parachuting off the CN Tower in Toronto. Who could ask for more? In the end, I realized that it was a silly usage of the milquetoast 3.5 star rating on a movie with this much creativity, joie de vivre, and deployment of unsuspecting real Toronto citizens.
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