The right day to choose Kanopy

In my last post I touched on the desired random factor in my viewing schedule in terms of what ends up being a landmark hundredth movie for me, the sort I inexplicably keep track of -- and wrote a whole post about on Saturday.

I have enough "viewing commitments" each month that most nights I have a good idea what movie I should be watching, or at least the sort of movie I should be watching.

Then there are other nights where I just go through my streaming services and say "Hmmm ... that one."

The choice of Lyle last night was dictated by two things:

1) It was short, and I was tired on a Sunday night. How short? It was 62 minutes. There's probably a longer post sometime about figuring out how to throw in 15 more minutes of material to make a 62-minute movie 77 minutes, but then again, considering that I gave Lyle four stars out of five, perhaps it shouldn't have been a single minute longer than it was.

2) It was the last day of the month, which meant that my Kanopy credits were about to refresh -- and that the previous month's three remaining credits would be "wasted."

Hey, it's as good a reason as any.

As far as I am aware, Kanopy is the only service that operates this way, and of course it only operates this way because it is a free service. You get a huge selection of movies, albeit sort of an odd selection, just for having intelligence enough to get yourself a library card, so they need to place some sort of restriction on it. Five viewing credits per month seems more than reasonable, especially since the lack of paying anything for it deprives you of your right to complain. (But be careful what you spend them on -- it takes a viewing credit just to watch a short, which I'd say I once learned "the hard way," except I almost never expend all five credits.)

But I was raised with a puritanical mindset about not wasting resources, so if it's month-end and I still have some Kanopy credits remaining -- and I don't know what else to watch -- might as well spend them there.

To me Kanopy seems a bit like MUBI, in that there's a lot of stuff on there you'd probably never heard of, and might be enriched to watch. However, sometimes it also feels like homework. But then again, the offerings on Kanopy are often surprising. If you are expecting just classic Hollywood or archaic foreign films you've never heard of, you haven't visited Kanopy lately. As just one example of a movie on there I found weird, you can stream Serenity on Kanopy right now. Not the feature-length movie of the TV show Firefly, but that Serenity from four years ago in which Matthew McConaughey is some kind of modern-day seafaring adventurer, who it eventually turns out is part of a video game. (Oops, spoiler alert.) In any case, I didn't expect to see it on there.

So if it's still the 30th of April where you are when you read this -- though you'd have to read it pretty soon -- don't forget about your Kanopy queue. No longer how long you've been away, it hasn't forgotten about you.