Cookie-Cutter Romantic Comedies

I was just rating a recently rented movie on Netflix and after I was finished, it gave me visual list for DVD covers of movies that I supposedly might like based on that rating (it was rating "The Hammer" starring Adam Carolla by the way...I gave it three stars). Two DVD covers positioned right next to each other instantly encapsulated just how cookie-cutter romantic comedies have become, specifically those starring Matthew McConaughey. Behold the creativity of Hollywood marketing:



I can just imagine the design meeting now. "Make sure that Matthew McConaughey is leaning with his back to [insert "comic" actress here] and his hands are in his pockets." I suppose that this really is the ultimate truth in advertising since they are trying to get you to see the exact same movie again. I have a feeling that if someone showed me the first half of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" and then switched the DVD without me knowing and showed me the second half of "Failure to Launch" I wouldn't even notice.

Roku

Here it has been almost another month since my last post, but work has been keeping me very busy. We are now going six days a week as our project deadlines get closer. In my limited spare time, I am playing with a bunch of new toys that we have gotten for the Wii like Rock Band and Mario Kart, but my new favorite entertainment device has to be the Roku. Roxi gave it to me for my birthday and since we have set it up, we have been loading up our Netflix Instant Queue and ripping through movies and television shows.

For the uninitiated, a while back, Netflix started to offer movies in streaming format on your computer instead of having to wait for the disk to arrive by mail. As a "Mac guy," I couldn't participate as the streams were and are still only availble on PC. Initially, there was also a limitation to how many "instant" movies you could watch per month but now any unlimited movie package through Netflix includes unlimited "instant" movies. No one really wants to sit at their computer and watch a movie and few people have the patience to move their computer near their TV so that they can watch movies that way. So it was only a matter of time before devices would be available for transferring those movies to your television. Roku is one such device and it couldn't be easier to use.

We connected our Roku in a matter of minutes and the device was linked to our Netflix account and activated in almost no time. Then it was just a matter of populating our new Instant Queue. The movie selection is definitely limited right now, but so was the selection of DVDs when Netflix first started doing business. The selection will only get better with time and we are finding plenty of things to watch. The movies are streamed wirelessly to the TV and the picture quality is as good anything else we watch. The movies only take a minute or two to initially load and so far have run uninterrupted as long as we don't fast forward or rewind. Those actions do cause the stream to rebuffer, but again it only takes a minute or two.

The most beautiful part of all is that there is no additional cost beyond the regular monthly Netflix fee. On top of that, any unlimited movie rental plan includes unlimited instant movies. Right now we are paying $16 per month to get three DVDs at a time, but we will be downgrading to one DVD at a time for a mere $8 and will still enjoy unlimited streaming movies. That's a pretty great deal if you ask me!

I love the Roku so far and look forward to expansion of the instant movie cataloge. It appears that Netflix has finally lived up to its name.