The annual Netflix movie I'm blocked from streaming

Tonight I am going to an advanced screening of Nouvelle Vague.

Why, you ask, should I have to go to an advanced screening of a movie that's already available on Netflix? In fact, why should I be seeing a movie that's going to be available on Netflix in the theater at all, given the other priority decisions I must make for theater viewings at this time of year?

Ah, because Richard Linklater's latest movie is not available on Netflix -- in Australia.

We tend to get a "one world" idea of Netflix, like if a movie is available in any location, it's available in all locations. I may not have taken the time out of my schedule to complain about it in past years, but I know this not to be true.

Oh it might be true for their small buys, or the films that are fully branded as Netflix from the ground up, like Rian Johnson's Knives Out sequels -- one of which I could see tonight in the theater after Nouvelle Vague, which would be quite the unusual double feature considering that I've only ever seen one other movie that would soon be available to me on Netflix (David Fincher's The Killer) in the theater. 

But each of the past three years, there has been a prestige release that simply wasn't going to be available on Netflix in Australia -- possibly ever. In fact, I'm still not sure if the other two have ever made their Australian Netflix streaming debuts.

In 2023 it was May December, which made my top ten that year, but only because I got wind of its imminent lack of availability on Netflix and went to an advanced screening like this one. 

Last year it was Emilia Perez, which also made my top ten even higher than May December, which I was able to see in that case because I was in the U.S. at Christmas, making it available to me. In fact, I think there were two like this last year, as Maria was also available there, but I did not prioritize seeing it and still have not seen it. 

I'd be able to get Nouvelle Vague on my list this year because it's coming to Australian theaters on January 8th. But I'd rather spend those January theater hours on movies I can only get in the theater, in any part of the world, than be reminded that I can't see this movie otherwise because of Netflix's capricious distribution strategies.

Look, I know this whole thing is more complicated than I'm making it out to be. I'd rather just whinge (Australian word) about the unfairness of it than to look into why it's done this way. There are different deals for different markets. I know this.

But maybe I'm just feeling a bit sensitive to these exclusive arrangements these days. Just this morning I was reminded of the fact that Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, which is getting some of the year's best notices, is a MUBI exclusive -- but that even if I were subscribed to MUBI, I still probably wouldn't get it in Australia, because that's what happened a few years ago when I was subscribed, but I still had to find another way to watch Ira Sachs' Passages.

I also feel like it should be possible to predict these things better. I understand all the cheapo buddy comedies going to Netflix simultaneously around the world, and would expect nothing less. But if the restriction is only on prestige films, why was I able to watch Train Dreams this week? (Speaking of Netflix movies that might make my top ten.) And what will happen with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which is also available in Australian cinemas right now? I haven't even looked into when/whether that one will be coming to my local Netflix.

As for Linklater, seeing Nouvelle Vague tonight will mean I get at least one of his 2025 films in my 2025 rankings. Blue Moon, which does not hit Australian cinemas until the end of January, may just go by the boards. 

A return to streaming at its streamingest

I stopped watching DVDs on Thursday night, then it was three straight nights of streaming -- including one digital rental, not quite streaming in the same sense as I had to pay for it.

I shouldn't have had to pay for the digital rental, only it was an instance of the Netflix regional distances we used to suffer from all the time, but which haven't plagued us for years. I'll get to that in a moment.

When I say it was a return to streaming at its streamingest, I mean it was three different but very common ways I use streaming, especially as distinct from DVDs: 1) a Netflix new release, 2) a terrible horror movie from the dregs of Amazon's collection, and 3) a not-so-recent Netflix streamer but one that everyone is talking about, only I had to rent it through iTunes rather than watching it on Netflix.

Let's go in chronological order.

Although I wanted to watch the third one first, what I actually watched on Friday night when I couldn't find it available was Netflix's first new movie in a couple weeks that wasn't some foreign language genre film they picked up on the cheap. And that was Awake, a movie with a dynamite premise, even if I was bothered that it had the same title as another movie on my list (the 2007 hospital horror of the same name).

This Awake stars Gina Rodriguez as the mother of one of the only people who can sleep after some kind of solar flare functions as an electromagnetic pulse -- and also robs human beings of their ability to catch some z's. As one character puts it, "There is no longer such a thing as an unconscious person. You're either on, or ... you're off."

A pretty cool idea for a movie, a race against time to find a cure to the sleeplessness epidemic, as human beings are estimated to be dead after a week (and insane well before that) if they can't sleep. Rodriguez' daughter, one of only two people our characters have identified who can still drift off, is obviously going to be key to this possible cure, but the best scientific minds are obviously significantly less than that after even one day without sleep, let alone three or four. 

It's a better idea than it's executed. There were some weird plot leaps where I thought I had missed ten lines of dialogue that would have explained where we'd suddenly found ourselves in the story. If I'd thought this were intentional, a way of putting the viewer into the foggy brains of the characters, I would have forgiven it better and even embraced it, but it seemed like a narrative failure at the script level. Still, director Mark Raso is obviously talented as there are a couple virtuoso sequences here involving camera placement and difficult single takes with impossible choreography, which put me in mind of Children of Men now and again. (There'll be a review of this up to the right shortly, possibly as soon as you read this, depending on when you read it.)

On Saturday night I decided to dive into Amazon's bottomless cheap-o horror section and go swimming.

You can literally go on forever passing over interchangeably terrible movies until you find the Platonic ideal of a terrible Amazon horror movie, but I didn't spend as long in that section as you might think. That's because I quickly found the 1993 movie Ticks, about mutant ticks killing people in the woods, and found its parts were less interchangeable than I might have thought.

Yeah, there were familiar faces here, from Seth Green to Alfonso Ribeiro to Peter Scolari to none other than Ron Howard's brother and father, Clint and Rance. Fun fact: I was not even aware this familiar character actor was Ron Howard's father until I saw his name listed next to Clint's in the opening credits and made the connection. Fun fact #2: Clint Howard has actually appeared in some films that did not have his brother attached in any way, shape or form. Never knew that.

So yeah, Clint Howard is one of the early kills -- a guy who is feeding some kind of growth serum to a marijuana plants in a secret manufacturing facility in the woods. The stuff, which looks like green toxic sludge, oozes out and infests the local tick population, causing them to grow to about the size of a human hand -- or actually, I should say, to spawn new ones birthed out of some kind of gross egg sac that are that size, and are particularly aggressive. And that's a problem for a trip to a cabin in the woods that's kind of like an outward bound program for wayward inner city youth. 

I was all ready to write this movie off entirely -- I knew it would be a surefire way to end my streak of 14 straight movies that I had given a positive star rating of at least three stars, and indeed, it did do that. But Ticks does find that perfect "so bad it's good" quality that we all seek in terrible horror movies, made all the more enjoyable by the familiar faces you never knew were involved in this movie (in part because you never knew it existed). There are some great practical effects here, and though the overall quality of the filmmaking is poor, it's poor in the right ways. I expected it to be a one-star experience on Letterboxd but I actually gave it two stars as an acknowledgement of the enjoyment I derived from it.

Okay, now the movie I teased at the start, whose poster you have already seen.

Sunday night was the third of a long weekend (it's the queen's birthday, don't you know -- though only observed, as she was born in April). So I settled in for another night of streaming schlock, the one with which I had hoped to open the weekend.

I heard about What Lies Below on an April episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. It's a sign of of how far behind I am that I just listened to it on Thursday. I immediately lined it up for my Friday night viewing, and since I knew it was on Netflix I thought it would be easy peasy. 

Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's only on Netflix in the U.S. It's gotten to the point where if I hear that a movie is on Netflix, it's because it's a Netflix original film, and it plays everywhere. I guess not everything falls into that bucket, even though on the podcast they talked about how it was the stated ambition of the director -- Braden R. Duemmler by name -- to make a movie that would get talked about and appear in the Netflix top ten, which it did. That truly is streaming at its streamingest.

As I hinted at the outset of this piece, we used to always bemoan the fewer titles available here than in the U.S., which is the reason we tried to watch Netflix through a VPN for our first few years here. (In fact, for about the first year we got here, that was the only way to watch it, as it had not yet debuted in Australia -- hard to believe Netflix wasn't available in Australia only seven years ago.) As an indication of how much has changed since then, I can't remember the last time I thought about whether there were movies available in the U.S. that aren't available here. At first we were precious about the titles that had been in our queues in America, which seemed like important viewing guidelines rather than just the dumping grounds they've become, where titles you're vaguely interested in go to die. To quote something we sometimes tell our kids, since then it's been "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."

Until Friday night, when I did get a little upset to hop on Netflix and discover that the movie I planned to watch that night just wasn't there. That was when I pivoted to Awake, which I'd been planning to watch this weekend anyway in anticipation of reviewing it.

Instead of giving up on the dream of What Lies Below entirely, I decided to just bite the bullet and rent it on iTunes on Sunday. 

Why a dream, you ask?

The reason it had been discussed on the podcast was because What Lies Below had attained a sort of zeitgeist breakthrough. Not only was there the director's stated desire to be a hit on Netflix -- a strange and very 2021 reason to make a film -- but there was how this movie was such an odd duck. It's kind of a 1990s throwback erotic thriller, which features throwback actress Mena Suvari as the recognizable face in the cast. One of the podcasters talked about how it feeds what he believed was a hunger for softcore pornography in an era where hardcore porn is always in our face, though really, it was more the promise of that material than actually containing it. He believed we sort of want to go back to a time when we referred to Cinemax as "Skinamax" because it hosted such content, even though What Lies Below doesn't actually deliver on that front as such.

What it delivers is far weirder, and though it was spoiled for me on the podcast, I won't spoil it for you. I'll just say that you will likely think of H.P. Lovecraft as you watch this movie, and leave it at that.

And though this is not a "good" movie by any stretch of the imagination, like Ticks, it succeeds at being a perfect specimen of the weird thing that it is. There's lots of bad technique, some good technique, and enough truly out-there surprises to make it a delicious viewing for the third night of a long weekend.

And now that I've had a long stretch of DVD viewing followed by a short stretch of deliberate palette cleansing, I will go back to just watching whatever movie is next on my slate, available through whatever delivery method presents itself. 

This will also end another lengthy stretch of movie watching in general, as I will finally rest on Monday night after watching at least one movie for 17 straight days. That's probably not a record given the flurry of activity that frequently attends the end of my movie-watching year in December and January, but I do feel pretty tired.

Forsaking our DVD collections

There's something sad about the first time you watch a movie you own on DVD, but you can't be bothered to pull out your actual DVD, so you watch it on streaming instead.

I can't say for sure that my Friday night viewing of Vanilla Sky was actually the first time I did that. In fact, I reckon that if I scoured my post history on The Audient, I might find that not only have I done it before, I've written about it before. But since I can't be bothered to do that either, I'll just write it again. 

It was all the more strange that I did it, because one of the things I was actually looking forward to in my first Vanilla Sky viewing in four years was the DVD menu. 

(As a side note, I can't believe I've only written about this movie once before on this blog, considering that I rewatch it at regular intervals -- 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2017 before Friday night.)

Remember how good DVD menus can be? As you contemplate which of your options to select, you may get a little montage of images from the movie, some good music, even an independently conceived interactive experience that builds on the themes of the movie and incorporates the menu options into it.

With the Vanilla Sky DVD menu, the thing I find so compelling is a little melancholic piece of the score that plays on about a 15-second loop, both preparing me for the viewing and amplifying its themes. Even with that four-year gap since my last viewing, I can still remember that music as I sit here typing this.

But Friday night, I just said "To hell with all that."

I had decided to watch Vanilla Sky after contemplating the "sacrifice" Tom Cruise made earlier in the week when he returned his Golden Globes to the HFPA. He didn't win a globe for Vanilla Sky of course -- the film was generally not well received, though Penelope Cruz did get a globe nomination and Paul McCartney's song of the same name got an Oscar nod. But it got me thinking about the "serious" performances Cruise has given, and Vanilla Sky contains one of my favorites.

But instead of going to the trouble of flipping through my DVD folder to find the disc, then making sure there was currently an HDMI cable connecting my TV and the DVD player, I just went hunting for it on my streaming services. And it took until the third service I checked, but indeed, it was playing on Stan. 

Obviously we'll soon reach the point where most people don't even own a DVD player, and another great chapter in media history will close. But until that point, it would seem worthwhile to enjoy our DVDs while we can. Especially when they have lovely mood-setting DVD menus like Vanilla Sky.

All is not lost, friends.

Also within the past week I have made my first proper return trip to the library since the start of the pandemic. We've been returned to full normalcy for quite a while now here in Australia, but the libraries were one of the last institutions to drop their COVID restrictions. I'd tried to go on a couple previous occasions, but had been greeted by security guards and librarians helpfully yet aggressively querying what my business was. At that point, they would go to the shelf for you to look for the thing you wanted, while you waited in the foyer. Until recently, it wasn't an environment that supporting lingering and browsing in any way, shape or form.

But on my day off last Friday, I walked home and swung by the local branch, where all the restrictions had been lifted and they were as happy to have me browse as to go put my head down on a desk for a nap, if that's what I'd wanted to do. 

I came away with a stack of about ten DVDs. The collection did not feel like it had been recently refreshed -- all the titles seemed to be ones I had considered on my last visit, and none were 2020 movies -- but for the time being, they are still offering these, as well as CDs, to a general public still willing to consume them.

So whether it was for Vanilla Sky or not, my DVD player should get some run in the coming weeks.

I'll also say this: Vanilla Sky did not look "just as good" on streaming. I'm not really sure how these things work, but I suspect that Stan did not get a very good transfer of the movie, either because that would have been more expensive, it wasn't available, or they just didn't care. And since a lot of people don't appreciate this movie the way I do, they probably don't care either. The quality of the version on Stan is not making any new converts, in all likelihood.

DVD/BluRay may continue to have the quality advantage, and I'll remember that the next time I'm faced with one of these scenarios. 

Prime time

Earlier this year, I considered writing a post entitled "Movies I can't access," which would have commented on the growing phenomenon of not being able to see specific movies unless you subscribed to the one service where they were available. Whereas in the past, you could either see them in the theater or wait for the video window, now there are certain films that you just can't see unless you subscribe. 

That's been true for several years in terms of Netflix, though it hadn't been affecting me because I was a Netflix subscriber. But earlier this year I really started to notice that I couldn't see all the movies people were talking about unless I ponied up for at least a few more subscriptions.

And though I hate the idea of subscribing to a hundred different individual streaming packages, yesterday I took another step toward that eventuality. 

That's right, following on the heels of recent additions of Disney+ and AppleTV+, I am now an Amazon Prime subscriber. 

It's my second time as an Amazon subscriber, I should say, but the first was a number of years ago, and totally unwitting on my part. I had accepted a free trial of Amazon Prime when I purchased something on Amazon, just in order to get free shipping I think. It was long enough ago that I hadn't really realized what such a subscription entailed, or what it could get me, and I never even watched any movies using the subscription. In fact, I even forgot entirely I had done it. It was only a year or so later, when I realized I'd been paying for it after my trial period ended, that I got wise and cancelled my membership.

I don't really need another service to look up old films, though I can't deny it will probably be helpful to me. But I do think it's time to remove my obstruction to certain new releases. 

The one I watched last night to celebrate the new service was Blow the Man Down, a small-town crime thriller that holds a special place in my heart because it's set in Maine, where my dad lives and where I went to college. I'd heard this discussed on two podcasts ages ago, probably back in March when it was first released, and had been wondering since then when I'd ever get the chance to watch it.

The answer was simple: Just plunk down $59 for the first year of an annual Amazon Prime membership.

There's a reason for this decision beyond just wanting to be a bigger part of the conversation about new releases on the podcasts I listen to. And that's so I'm no longer Netflix's bitch.

As you may recall, I am writing most of the reviews on ReelGood now that my former editor has departed to focus on other things. (He'll be back to write the occasional review, such as Mank and Tenet, when they both become available to us here in Australia.) During COVID, I've had to turn to streaming content to continue regularly posting new reviews. Unfortunately, that content is limited by the streaming subscriptions I actually have. 

When it was only Netflix, I was basically all Netflix, all the time. Now, of course, not all my reviews of Netflix movies were good, and in fact, I've slammed several of their 2020 releases with ratings of 2/10 or lower. But if your argument is "any press is good press," then indeed I have been doing Netflix's bidding this year. If not for screeners sent to me through my ReelGood contacts for other theatrical and VOD releases, my 2020 content might be Netflix or nothing at all.

Now, at least I can say I've got a second service to select from. I've also got Disney+ and AppleTV+, but they don't seem to release new movies as frequently. Whereas with Amazon Prime, there are a whole host of new Blumhouse movies coming out starting next week, as part of a new(ish) deal between Amazon and Jason Blum. 

I would normally hand off horror to my other writer on ReelGood, as that's his specialty, but I won't in this case as I want to put my new membership to work for me. 

There are still some movies I can't access. Like, I'm not sure when I'll finally get to see the Andy Samberg-Cristin Milioti vehicle Palm Springs, which remains stranded on Hulu, which is not a service you can get in Australia. I'm also still impeded from Seth Rogen's An American Pickle, which is the sole property of HBO. 

But before I figure out whether I'm going to make myself dependant on two more streaming services in order to get my much-desired full coverage, I'll appreciate Amazon for a bit, including Selah and the Spades, which was another movie I heard talked about earlier in the year. Not to mention all the low-budget horror Jason Blum can churn out, starting next week.

This has been a year about trying to figure out how we're going to access movies in general, with theaters closed. Considering that I'm at about my same number of total new movies seen as in previous years, it tells me that by hook or by crook or by an umpteenth new streaming service, I'm managing it. 

Streaming savior

The calendar turned to April, and our fortunes changed.

But first some background.

For a long time -- years now -- we have been hearing about how the "NBN" was coming. "NBN" stands for Nationwide Broadband Network, and it meant an entire upgrade of the infrastructure for how we do internet here in Australia. I could get into the technical details but then I'd have to do a lot of googling, and besides, who cares.

It's been rolled out region by region, but not in the manner you might expect. Or I should say, not in the self-centered manner I might expect, as a city dweller. I kind of figured everyone in the most densely populated areas might get it first, and it would slowly roll out to the small country towns. It seems to have been the opposite. In fact, it started to be a joke that some areas had enjoyed the NBN for years, and a district like ours -- which actually has the world "Melbourne" in its name (North Melbourne) -- was still puttering along on inferior technology.

And boy was it inferior. I think the experience differed from household to household and provider to provider, but we have not been able to rely on our home internet at all lately. I've taken to using my phone's data whenever possible, made practicable by the fact that they randomly boosted my data from 10 GB/month to 40 GB/month without any additional cost to me. But that was no help when it came to our smart TV, where it's too tedious to change the internet setup depending on whether my phone is in range or not. And it's gotten worse -- perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not -- since they've done the necessary subterranean work, some of which was literally right outside our house.

But then we also heard that some people were not happy with their NBN, and that it actually represented a downgrade in service for them. This was a tad alarming. Now, you can't really go down from zero, so we didn't figure it would be a downgrade for us. But what if it was not demonstrably different? All our hopes and dreams, bundled up into these three little letters, might be shattered.

Our box came on Wednesday. It was supposed to just plug into the wall and be ready to go. But we had our trepidations, not only about the possible unchanged quality of our service, but also related to logistics. It requires an ordinary phone port to plug in, but our house is wired in such a way that we only have one of those way up in the kids' bedroom closet. And it involves a splitter, which is not supposed to be used in our NBN setup.

It all felt like too much of a hassle for me. This working from home is starting to exhaust me.

But my wife rolled up her sleeves, and last night, we flipped the switch.

Instant gratification.

All buffering stopped. All dropouts stopped. We watched the second episode of Tiger King (I know, we're behind) without a single hitch. It was a stark contrast to the other night, when we had to plow through the first episode on my computer, connected to my phone, and even then it had some issues.

Our grins could not have been wider.

I promptly connected my computer to the TV with an HDMI cable (I can't get to Kanopy without my computer) and streamed Roy Andersson's 2007 absurd film You, the Living, not for any particular reason other than that it was the movie I'd been planning to watch last night anyway. If the internet cooperated.

Well, now the internet was cooperating like a motherfucker.

Life was no longer a Roy Andersson film, an absurd war against technology waged by lunatics. We had returned to the land of the living.

It's probably too soon to write a post like this -- people who believe in jinxes would be going crazy right now.

But you gotta write while the iron's hot, and for the first time in years, we've got a hot iron in our house, internet-wise, metaphorically speaking.

All hail the NBN.

Presto goes poof!

We never intended to have three subscription streaming services.

When we first got to Australia, we had none -- well, no legal ones anyway. We still had our American Netflix subscription, but we had to connect via VPN, something they had yet to crack down on. Then Netflix entered the Australian market and we could just use it without any adjustments to our account -- only an adjustment to our expectations, as there was a significant disparity between the amount of available content.

We signed up to Stan for reasons I can't fully remember -- cheap price, available content, it being an exciting new Australian-owned venture, something like that. And indeed it made a useful complement to Netflix, especially once Netflix got hip to the use of a VPN and blocked access to the American-only content.

Presto was meant to be a very targeted, very short-term relationship on our part -- in fact, I think we only meant to use a month's free trial and then drop it. It seems strange to recall it now, considering how much we ended up liking the show -- not very much -- but we got Presto primarily because it was carrying Mr. Robot. We thought Mr. Robot was going to revolutionize our lives, I guess. It didn't. In fact, it took us months to even get around to watching the final episode of the first season.

Needless to say, that meant we kept the service, in part because we ended up watching plenty else on it. In fact, it seemed to be getting better new/recent releases than either Stan or Netflix, and it had a number of shows my wife wanted to binge as well. (She's the TV binger of the family while I'm the movie binger.)

However, in just two days it's going poof!, maybe not as suddenly as it arrived, but with as little a trace as before it was in our lives.

We've gotten a good six weeks of warning, hence the lack of suddenness, but yes, it's leaving the Australian landscape and making our streaming lives a little less complicated. It struggled to gain momentum originally, and then it kind of did, but then they decided to subsume its offerings into the Foxtel cable service, probably in an attempt to make Foxtel even more dominant than it currently is.

I'm a little sad to see it go.

Yeah, I've had my fun at Presto's expense -- it never felt like it was ready for primetime, either in terms of its presentation or its browseability -- but the truth of the matter is, I've used it for movies as much as I've used Netflix for movies lately (though Netflix has greater overall viewing time because of its original content). And when I heard it was closing its doors on February 1st, I had a list of relatively recent releases that still felt like "good gets" that I wanted to watch first, among them Legend (2015 version), Rock the Kasbah, The Theory of Everything and 45 Years. (I didn't say they were "great movies," just "good gets.")

The one of those that most qualifies as a great movie, probably, is 45 Years, and I did indeed squeeze it in before the deadline. Didn't love it as much as it was hyped, but it gets a solid four stars from me.

Why the "squeeze"? Well we've also been plowing through the most recent completed season of The Walking Dead, which seemed like another "good get" for the service. It wasn't necessarily what we wanted to spend most of our Christmas season watching, but at least now it's late January and we're almost done with it. (Last episode is tomorrow night, also the last night of the existence of the service.)

Enforced consolidation does seem like a good thing, though. To speak of the "limitations" of any streaming service is to forget the hundreds of available movies on each that you haven't seen. And now that my 2016 film watching is over, I can choose any of those hundreds of available movies on Netflix and Stan.

As for Presto in all its purple-hued glory ... we'll wish it goodbye by looking back to when it was just saying hello:

And in case we get lonely with "only" two streaming services ... well, Amazon Prime just made its big Australian debut last month, opening a whole new can of worms.

The Vudu that you do

So well, it makes me want to shoop shoop shoop.

I've heard of this streaming service called Vudu primarily from listening to the Filmspotting: SVU (Streaming Video Unit) podcast, in which it's frequently mentioned as one of the places you can get such-and-such a film online. But like some of the other names of streaming services I don't recognize (Crackle), I didn't know what distinguished it or how it worked, and I kind of assumed there would be something difficult about -- some obstacle that left me disinclined to try it.

And I probably -- definitely -- wouldn't have tried it if Netflix carried Mississippi Burning. See, I'm watching Alan Parker's 1988 film as part of a project I'm doing for another blog, but the bright green Save button on Netflix left me scratching my head about how I'd get it to my eyeballs.

Then I remembered the handy website www.canistream.it, which allows you to type in any movie name and get an immediate report about where the movie is available for streaming. Vudu came up when I searched for Mississippi Burning.

"How hard can it be?"

Not very, it turns out, but it did come with an annoying marketing red herring.

See, when I went to the Vudu website, I was met with an advert telling me that I'd get ten free movies when I signed up for the service. Since signing up for the service is free, I thought they must be really desperate to get people to use it. It seemed too good to be true, but I dove in and signed up as quickly as I could.

On the Mississippi Burning page, I saw that I could rent it in any of three formats: Standard for $2.99, HD for $3.99 and something called HDX (I don't know what that is, and I can't be bothered to look it up) for $4.99. I had entered my credit card number as part of the signup, and I expected there to be some indication that I could use one of my ten free movies to buy Mississippi Burning. When that clearly wasn't happening, I decided to go to the help section.

At which point I determined that it's not any ten movies, it's a specific package of ten. They could have teased me one step further by having them be ten downright awful movies, but they're really not. The biggest problem with these ten movies is that I've already seen most of them: Behind Enemy Lines, Ghost, Lethal Weapon, Never Been Kissed, Paranormal Activity, The Perfect Storm, The Producers (2005), Psycho (1998), Valentine's Day and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. Of the three I haven't seen (Behind Enemy Lines, Psycho and Wrong Turn 2), it's possible I will eventually watch use Vudu to watch Psycho, but I won't be prioritizing it any time soon. I'm told that these movies change, so if you sign up for Vudu three weeks from now, you may get something different.

The real advantage Vudu has in terms of my own setup is that I can watch it easily on either of our TVs. We have an LG BluRay player in our living room and our bedroom, and both have Vudu as option. That's no given, since I think Netflix may be the only other service that appears on both players. So it worked quite nicely to fire up Mississippi Burning on Wednesday night in our bedroom, and as a measure of how gripping I found it, I didn't start to fall asleep until the very end of the two-plus-hour movie, and only then because it was approaching 11. (The comfort of the bed usually knocks me out much earlier than that. In fact, last night, I fell asleep during the opening credits of the TV show I was trying to watch.)

Verdict on Vudu? Now that I've done the "hard part" of signing up, I will definitely use it again. Sure, my first option will always be Netflix streaming, because I get that free as part of our monthly subscription. But it's refreshing to know that the streaming universe doesn't begin and end with Netflix. As I've found more and more holes in the Netflix catalogue the more I look, it's nice to know that there are other reasonably priced services out there that can fill those holes.

Next week: I see what the deal is with Crackle, because that's the only way I can watch Ishtar, the first movie in my Famous Flops series.

Knocking streaming, trying streaming

I've been playing fast and loose lately with the idea that streaming movies sucks.

So instead of just resting on that general pronouncement, I thought I'd put it to the test. Get some actual evidence to support my claim by watching Big Fan, which I recently discovered is available through Netflix for immediate streaming. My wife has a Netflix account, so I got down to business yesterday after work.

The results were mixed. Some of the problems I encountered had to do with my computer, some had to do with the streaming itself. But since all the problems are germane to the experience of watching a streamed movie -- you need a computer to stream, after all -- they are all relevant in this analysis.

Forthwith:

1) I couldn't get the position of my laptop screen correct for the night shots. Daytime footage in Big Fan was fine, but at night, I couldn't get the right angle to make out the contrasts. I'd angle it either too much past 90 degrees, and the light from the window behind me would wash it out, or too much short of 90 degrees, which meant I was getting my own reflection in the screen. (Why not just do exactly 90 degrees -- ha ha). With the smaller laptop screen, you have to position it closer to yourself to create the same screen size you'd get while watching the TV screen from your couch. But I really don't want a reflected image of myself watching the movie while I'm watching the movie.

2) The image was stuttering and freezing. I kind of knew I wouldn't get actual buffering, where the movie stops while the progress bar shows you how much buffering is required before you can start watching again. The combination of Netflix' product and my internet (to be honest, I don't really know how it works) would ensure that my viewing experience would exceed this minimal standard. But that doesn't mean there weren't problems in the smooth delivery of the movie. In fact, when Patton Oswalt and Kevin Corrigan, the incurable Giants fan of the title and his equally incurable buddy, showed up in the parking lot for some tailgaiting -- and, without tickets, ended up staying in the lot for the entire game -- I thought the quick freezes might have been some kind of hip technique utilized by director Robert Siegel. So I jumped back a minute in the movie just to see if the freezes were in the same spots, which would confirm or refute that theory. They weren't in the same spots, which meant this was purely a shortcoming of the streaming. The fact that you have to check, because it might be a problem with the delivery method, is a big difference from watching it through a DVD player, where you'd be certain it was an artistic feature intended by the director.

3) My laptop overheated. At about the 30-minute mark of the movie, the computer shut down. Given that the laptop was sunken into the comforter on my bed, I shouldn't have been surprised -- cut off the air flow from underneath, and the computer takes evasive action to protect itself. However, I also have a method to prevent this kind of thing from happening, a laptop cooling pad that slides under my laptop and projects cool air through a fan onto the underside of the computer. The actual fan is broken, but the square slab of plastic should still provide a buffer between the computer and whatever surface it's resting on, using the opening for the fan as an airstream that prevents the computer from feeling smothered. So streaming this movie must have really required a lot of effort from my computer, because it still overheated despite the presence of this buffer.

At this point I was feeling pretty pessimistic about streaming. Because the computer needed a few minutes to cool down before it would power back on, I walked around and put away some laundry, sharing my observations about the experience with my wife. Being a strong Netflix proponent and a regular streamer herself -- albeit on a Mac rather than a PC, and here I go again opening myself up to being chastised for preferring the "inferior product" -- she seemed to take the fact that it wasn't working out for me a little personally.

And then:

4) The final hour of the movie went by without incident. In fact, in a happy bit of unexpectedness that I attribute to both Firefox and Netflix, the movie resumed in the exact spot where it was when the computer crashed. Firefox did the job of restoring the session, and Netflix did the job of not canceling my viewing. I didn't dare hope for that, since my wife prepared me for the fact that I'd have to start over and search forward to the spot where I'd left off. What was really strange was that the movie was no longer halting and stuttering. Maybe my computer needed to be rebooted for some other reason, which is why Big Fan wasn't streaming perfectly to begin with. In order to prevent another overheating, I added a second buffer underneath the cooling pad.

So I'm glad I did it. For one, it was really nice just to finish watching Big Fan, and not have to do anything more -- not have to return it to the video store or drop it in the mail to get my next movie, not even have to eject it. Nor did watching Big Fan "count" against my wife's account, either by delaying her access to her next title, or by being one of a limited number of streamed movies she can watch per month. Accessing it instantly is obviously a huge advantage, especially since that's one of the main ways I give Blockbuster props: I credit them with allowing me "instant gratification" by being able to pick out a movie at the store, rather than having to wait for the mail. It goes without saying that picking something out online is an instanter version of instant gratification than that, even if the selection is limited. Finally, there's the fact that I wouldn't even have been able to watch Big Fan yesterday without this method, due to the inability to procure a DVD that I discussed on Sunday.

But I'm still not entirely sold. I can't deny the problems that plagued me -- and really distracted me -- during my first half-hour of watching Big Fan. Whether I need to get a different computer, or have a method to hook it up to my TV, is not really the point. The point is that for me, streaming involves using the tools I currently have, at this point in time. It's only as useful to me, practically speaking, as those tools allow it to be. Watching a little indie like Big Fan on my laptop may work out fine, but if I want to watch a grandiose epic, I'll still vastly prefer a physical DVD that I can slide into my player, for the largest picture and best sound available.

Baby steps, streaming, baby steps. Hey, only two days ago, I was cursing your name.