Seen any good movies lately?

I haven’t. The last thing I saw in the theaters was Despicable Me, which I wholeheartedly enjoyed. I’m not counting going to see The Little Fockers, which I saw with my brother over the holidays, it was his choice and out of respect for his feelings I won’t say anything else except that I wish I didn’t have to admit that I gave money to that franchise. I read something recently in which someone posited that Robert De Niro’s new year’s resolutions should include deleting Ben Stiller’s number from his cell phone, and I’d have to agree. I should watch Raging Bull as a palate cleanser.

But I digress. I actually love going to the movie theater, in large part for the popcorn and snacks. But I am hampered by two things: my significant other dislikes going to the cinema, and being somewhere, anywhere, on time is not one of my strong suits. And the movies is something you don’t want to be late to, not only do you have to try and find a decent seat in the dark, but you have to give yourself time to get the aforementioned snacks, and you don’t want to miss the previews. That’s part of the fun.

So I have to rely on cable TV for a lot of my movie watching. We had a Netflix thing going for a while (Blockbuster Online, same thing), but as it turns out not only does my husband not like going to the movies, he doesn’t even like the structure of sitting down to watch a movie at home. I guess he’s more of a freeform, catch something when it comes on the telly kind of person, I still don’t know really what his beef is. He also has something against coffee tables, but we’ll take that up in another post.

Anyway, since we had any movie we wanted at our fingertips (via the mail), I let our pay movie channels lapse, so no more HBO etc. I didn’t really miss it much save for the documentary film channel and East Bound and Down. Love me some Kenny Powers and a good documentary. (Note – if you haven’t seen Fistful of Quarters, rent it. Stream it. Whatever.) The whole movies through the mail thing was also convenient for our lifestyle because as it turns out, not only are we not good at being on time for things, but we are also AWFUL at returning movies on time.

But what was happening instead was we’d receive a perfectly good movie in the mail, and it would sit around the house for WEEKS AND WEEKS AND WEEKS. I was paying perfectly good money for a monthly subscription that was never getting used; cancellation ensued.

Red Box. At first I didn’t really get the appeal of this. But then when visiting my cousin I was introduced to the simplicity of this arrangement - $1. Lots of choices, easy to use vending machine. Cool machine that sucks the movie back in when you’re done with it. Want to keep the movie longer? No problem – they’ve got your credit card on file so they’ll conveniently charge you. I can understand why people queue up for these outside Walgreen’s or what have you, and why the franchise has become popular. So you’d think this could be an alternative for us, but nay nay, hubby has something against the nice Red Boxes too. (is this post turning into a rant against a particular someone?)

Movie channels. So we’ve come full circle, my friends. I gave up and added some nice pay movie channels back to our cable line-up and I’m trying to catch up on what’s been in the theaters. In a matter of about a day, I watched part of The Invention of Lying (intriguing), Clash of the Titans (disappointingly disappointing) and caught all of Primal Fear (why do I waste time watching movies I’ve already seen several times?) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (satisfying). Plus, there was a Firefly marathon on the Ovation channel. Huzzah.

The Golden Globe awards are this Sunday, too bad I will have seen none of the movies they will be talking about. Maybe by the time the Oscars roll around I can drag a certain someone to the local Cineplex.