A Scanner Darkly
Have you seen this film? If you have, then hey, we have something in common. If you have not, then don’t bother trying to be a random bob copy, it’s just not worth it. It’s not that it’s a bad movie, so if you find yourself trapped in a room with it on, don’t try to scratch your eyes out to avoid it or anything. But if you’re in a room that has this movie playing, and there’s a door? You’ll be best served to use it.

It wanted to be very dark and disturbing, have plot twists, et cetera, but the thing was: I guessed the basic plot twist within the first 5 minutes, and I guessed the second major plot twist almost as fast as it was introduced. And I’m not good and guessing these things, so they were obviously not very well masked. And they went about making it a lot more confusing than it really had to be. Double-crosses, regular-crosses, triple-crosses, a few bridge-crossings for good measure, all so they could make it 2 hours long instead of, say, 25 minutes.

If they’d have done this as an episode of Batman the Cartoon or something, it’d have been much more enjoyable. That’s how much material they had. C-



Oh yeah, one more thing about it.
So if you’ve seen it, you know it’s shot live-action, but then they “animated” it. I asked myself, did they have the idea to do that from the onset? Or did they decide at some later point to introduce that effect? What are your thoughts? Me & The Girl both had the idea that they probably went with it so they could make their “identity suits” work. Because I think without those as a plot device, they really had half the material (and ‘plot twists’), and they couldn’t figure out a way to get those things to look even halfway decent.



Netflix experience workin’ out OK, with hitches
So I blogged about it before, so you know we took the plunge and got Netflix and have been using it for awhile now. It’s working OK for us, since we upgraded to the 2-discs at home plan, which basically translates to “one disc at home, one in transit,” but that works out well for us, I’m not complaining.

But we have had more than our share of issues, too. And what’s more, it was on the same disc. We wanted to put our Blu-Ray player to the test, so we put the BBC Planet Earth discs on our queue. A couple of weeks ago I had seen that Disc 1 (of a 4-disc set) was supposed to ship that day – a Thursday. Sweet, I thought, we’ll have it here on Saturday to watch! Friday rolls around and I log on to my Netflix queue and I see that now they’ve changed it to shipping on the following Monday. What. The. F*ck.

Monday rolls around and I give a call. They explain that it was discovered the disc in the nearest shipping center was damaged, sent out a courtesy disc (so I would have 3 out at a time), and gave me a 25% credit on my next bill, along with scheduling the same disc to arrive from a different location. Cool, that’s good customer service, make the situation right and take ownership of it! We’re good, and I should get the Disc 1 of the series in a day or so anyhow.

Cue this last Monday, a week later when we finally got time to sit down and watch it together. I go to pop in Disc 1, and instead of purdy moving pictures of Earth, I am greeted with this message: “Cannot play: Wrong Region Code.”

OK, so Netflix is US-only, right? How the hell did they manage to send me a disc that won’t play in a US-coded player? What gives?

C’mon, Netfix, I’m rooting for ya. Get it right, OK?

Peace.