I Have Seen the Enemy, and it is Netflix

netflix_ql.jpg

Or so says Time Magazine critic Richard Corliss, who might have overreacted a bit to the closure of his local video store in his new piece, "Why Netflix Stinks." In addition to walking readers through the checkout-and-wait process most of us have experienced for seven or eight years now, there's the concern that renting movies and processing other media from home makes you "what the online corporate culture wants you to be: a passive, inert receptacle for its products." Unless, of course, you decide to share his plaint via blog, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, or another electronic exchange, in which case your discriminating, thoughtful media consumption is to be saluted. I think? [Time]



Comments

  • John M says:

    Okay, but he does have a point....
    I feel like you're rushing on to the next indictment before taking this one on... He's not talking about Twitter, he's talking about film culture.
    I for one absolutely hate that, IN NEW YORK CITY, I have no local video store. My Kim's closed over a year ago. So goes all spontaneity from movie-watching.

  • NYer says:

    Yeah STV, I'd think you'd be on the bandwagon considering that Netflix had a hand in shuttering every single Kim's and TLA Video in NYC.

  • Susan says:

    When I clicked on the Time link, I got a pop-up ad for Netflix.

  • I don't think it's that black-and-white. Corliss makes Kim's sound like some temperate oasis of progressive film culture, when everyone knows that's anything but the case. All I ever got there was a scowl, an attitude and sharp, successive superiority jabs to my face. I know that was part of its appeal to some, but also I know I'm not the only person who avoided Kim's and numerous other neighborhood joints because they treated customers like shit. Their continued operation wasn't some inalienable right or something, and anyway, if Mr. Kim still wanted to be in business, then he would be. He got just as tired of the bullshit as everyone else.
    Anyway, I'm not a Netflix subscriber. I still go to Video Room in Yorkville, where the condescension is a little less severe, I get charged nearly $5 if I drop a rental off mere minutes after the cut-off time and they once responded to my request for Monterey Pop and Wattstax by saying, "Sorry, we don't really carry music films." But still I do my part when I can, at least until they underserve their way into extinction as well.