Netflix

News of the decline of Netflix made me think back to its heyday, when they were mailing out DVD's. My niece disapproved of me signing up with them because they were killing off Blockbuster and Hollywood video. She was too young to remember those two chains driving the local mom & pop video stores out of business, and if she did remember that, she was still too young to remember the art house and second-run theaters being wrecked by local video stores. 

I assumed Netflix was a big mailorder version of Blockbuster, stocking a limited selection of mainstream movies.

But one day, I was at work. I was a warehouse boy. The company mostly sold stickers and one of them had retro artwork showing a woman on a settee being served a drink by a chimpanzee in a tuxedo. I told a co-worker it reminded of a movie I saw years earlier about the unhappy wife of an English diplomat in France who began an affair with a chimp at the zoo. I couldn't remember the title.

He wandered off to the computer. Came back and told me it was Max, Mon Amour starring Charlotte Rampling. It was available on DVD through Netflix.

I signed up for it. Saw movies I had heard of but had never seen---Soviet and East German westerns among others. And there were things I never knew existed. I didn't watch any, but it turns out there's something called "nunsploitation"---exploitation films about nuns. I watched Japanese gangster movies, a couple of them about murderous gangs of Japanese schoolgirls.

I stayed on Netflix far longer than I should have---had their streaming service which got worse and worse. It would sit there. I'd never watch it then remember I had it and looked and found nothing I wanted to see. Finally canceled it  and never regretted it.

But I just paid ten bucks and subscribed to their DVD-only thing. Their selection is way down. But I'll give it a month and see how it goes.