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Interesting parallels between two of the best movies to come out of Hollywood lately. Not only about a crotchety widower in an old house who has a change of heart by leaving its confines, but also that he was encouraged to do so by an Asian sidekick. (Indiana Jones’ came too early in his career, it would seem.) And good for Clint, making like JCVD and not miraculously returning to form—as depicted in the Dirty Harry collection advertised in the previews on the disc—amidst his sunset years. I look forward to a similar retirement, and being cheered up by the Jewish kid next door.

Last week’s experience with Redbox was the last straw: $1.07 (or $1.08, depending on where the higher taxes round to now) does not factor in the drive time and mileage between locations with faulty machines, 2/3 among the nearest Albertsons. A ratio only to worsen. So 老婆, she of the torrents and myself more at home on the Amazon, we decided finally to take the plunge—see what I’m doing here with the metaphors; it’d impress in high school English—and become a Netflix couple, which is surely some salient stage of household settlement.

I moved the Xbox to the big TV from the small monitor where it’d been running FFXI, and poorly at that, though the fault there’s less in the hardware than lazy programming from SquareEnix. That the app requires paid Gold membership, however, I’m not forgiving. Fuck them, a 48-hour code from 남재 proved streaming through Live (even with DD-WRT priority over a wired connection) is no superior to just hooking up my notebook on WiFi; in fact, Ping Pong Playa jumped after a ten-minute pause into YouTube resolution …speaking of which, that Jimmy Tsai sure looks like 송강호’s son. Oh, and those two White devils? Ted & Emmett from Queer as Folk.

I spent an hour or so yesterday (not including my drive-time back and forth) giving back to the Wal-Mart community—you know, the one that is so hell-bent on destroying everyone else’s in America—by supporting the Redbox there, stuck on the return screen, despite their service line’s efforts to reset it remotely. As cheap as their rentals are, and as “simple” as they’re making them out to be, let’s not fall victim to the inevitable weakness in their business model, i.e., failing hardware, and call (866)733-2693, option 1 to check the transaction histories on locations before reserving to them. But the one recourse that’s sure to follow any innovation in vending machine use is our inclination, perhaps since evolved into the human genome, to commit violence upon them, as I myself considered, had I not turned over my account info on the phone.

Update [24 hours later]: They must’ve gotten someone to come in and do what I wanted to, and yanked the power cord. Occurred to me that the mom & pop’s like the place across from my new 親戚’s with $1.50 specials on Tuesdays might trade in sabotage how-to information, but the downtime’s hard to beat. So I suppose with the freebie codes they’re generous about handing out to callers I came out on top. Picked up スキヤキ・ウエスタン ジャンゴ, of all movies. One more thing, online reservations come with sales tax, whereas walk-ups strangely don’t.

Update [24 more hours later]: What I suspected proves true, that the “9pm tomorrow” you have until to pick up an online reservation counts as your first night. So much for simple—in reverse order, then: rent and return; reserve; call to confirm machine working; check to see if desired title there; check to see if location allows reservation; and now, check to see if schedule permits pickup by, say, eight the next day at the latest, with some slack for DVD Shrink.

I had already read what was, back when critics panned it, but wth, House wasn’t on yet and it made for カレーライス-eating fare. (NFusion’s latest bin seems to have reduced our watchable movie channels, as if I’ve been keeping track, so we settled on a Redbox rip from last week.) What puzzled me about the premise, apart from how cool M. Night must’ve thought it’d be to do the old Monty Python bit about people going by the window, is how the wind or plants or whatever managed to get this suicide signal by so many layers of cognitive insulation then to assert itself in such gruesome, yet arbitrary fashion. Maybe we’re asked to accept there’s a part of the unconscious that assesses every element in our immediate surroundings, whether it’s a loaded gun or cornfield-sized thrasher, for its potential to inflict deadly harm and that’s what was being tapped into? Occurs to me if God in His Infinite Wisdom were behind this so-called rapid evolution, He’d be neater about it and just target one of our autonomic processes instead, spare us from all the gore, and reduce the chances of these directives being misinterpreted and letting someone like me decide to kill myself with high fructose corn syrup or an STD.

Redbox’s $1 rentals reminds me of the old dollar cinemas in Houston (certain to make a comeback, in this economy), and last night I scored Steve Carell’s Get Smart—scored, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to time the returns of new releases as people catch on—which worked better, I think, when he wasn’t reciting Don Adams’ lines. Terence Stamp is fucking awesome, but he’s no “everybody hands up!” Siegfried. And Patrick Warburton’s Hymie is just plain wrong.

Brendan Fraser’s Journey to the Center of the Earth didn’t even have me bothering to compare it to the 50’s classic, wondering rather if this (and Made of Honor, which is sort of a remake, too, and an awful one, of Julia Roberts’ My Best Friend’s Wedding) would be the last movie I’d see before Bell went all nagra3.

But the worst of the lot? Steven Spielberg and Wil Smith for OldBoy. Oh, hell no. Please, take Captain America instead. I wonder if this news was the reason Chris sent me that text message earlier today about wanting to kill everyone? If so, let me join you.

Thanks to the cliff-hanging driving in Indiana Jones 4 (which, alas, like the rest of the movie, was spectacularly tepid—they managed to follow the formula well enough, suspension-of-belief escapes, swarming insects, bad guys vaporizing at the end, but maybe all that proved is that formula just doesn’t work anymore) I dreamed of getting onto an on-ramp high above the water, then, as so often happens, the perspective changed to outside the car, like in a videogame whose critics complain about stiff camera angles, and I lost control and ran off a portion without guard railing. I watched from my overhead perch and saw it dive into the ocean, then flew to another side of the bridge where a school of dolphins had gathered. Swooping down to join them, I found myself in an underwater station that teleports its passengers to Alpha Centauri. A bright light shimmered around me, and I soon stepped out onto the deck of a vessel near the alien city. The plain but densely-packed buildings didn’t particularly impress as other-worldly, so I looked up to the night sky for passing star-liners.

After landing I was ushered into a crowded theater lobby, accompanied by many visitors from Earth. My old buddy Reynold was there, asking someone about an engineering problem he was having with a surging circuit, but the response was a snicker, because, as everyone apparently knew, you shouldn’t expect any benefits from advanced civilizations. Another rule in effect was that everything of value had none and vice versa, so when I went to a nearby shop to have rips and creases in a poster I was carrying repaired (which was possible with their technology, by first marking the damaged areas with stitching), and the one I thought was from the Shining turned out to be a B-movie called “Shining Monsters” instead, I offered it to the proprietor for another I’d rather have. Might as well barter my credit away, since there’s no use in keeping currency.

Its Wiki warned me that this new print, as pristine as it looks, is missing enough to be considered a new work—”under Chinese law”, it adds—but I guess I can’t see how the original could add any more to the limited premise, unless maybe Lo Meng showed up in those 20 minutes, to categorize this another Chinatown Kid calamity. (Come to think of it, “Iron Face” did disappear at the end. He just didn’t live up to his name, like Brass Head, or even having one.) The final scene, which alas requires too much setup to be included in my tribute video, came back to me from the awful Mandarin-language VHS copy I bought from a collector in New York more than a decade ago; what times we live in now, having the English dub a button away!

Seeing Kuo Chui and Lu Feng go at it again is worth a hundred Jacky Chan-Jet Li first time-togethers, but The Forbidden Kingdom did have a nice opening credit sequence harking back to the good ol’ days, when choreography prevailed over editing, an assembly line statistically guaranteed a gem or two instead of working backwards, and movie poster collections were a bookmark away. Chinese laws, maybe.