Welcome

Hello and welcome to One Man's Flix. This blog will be the dedicated outlet for me to satisfy my bizarre need to review movies I see whether I get paid to do so or not. Like the tagline says, I am not a professional movie reviewer. I'm just a hack. You could do this too, and why aren't you?

A little about myself. I am a husband and step-father with limited expendable income. I live in central Vermont, where less than 10 years ago it was impossible to see a theatrical movie in anything more grandiose than muddy 2-channel audio on a worn old screen that nobody cared enough about to maintain. I'm happy to say that Vermont has emerged from the movie-going dark ages and now features theaters with modern technology, run by people who care about their patrons' experience. Still, with a wife and two kids it can be hard to get out to the theater as much as I'd like. (It goes something like this: 4 tickets + 4 concessions = yikes!; 2 tickets + 2 concessions + baby sitting = not much better.) When I do get to the theater, it's not always to see a movie I have chosen. For example, I probably won't make it to see Grindhouse because the next few months are going to be a very kid-centric movie season: Shrek the Third, the next Harry Potter, the next Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. I'm happy to see each of them, but left totally to my own choice I'd probably sacrifice one of them to see Grindhouse. But that would be selfish.

Enter Netflix, the best thing to happen to home video since the defeat of the CSS copy protection scheme. Video stores are nice, and I've lived near a couple of terrific ones with great staffs and funky selections, but let's face it--most of them have the same assortment of big-name Hollywood fare (though never on the night you want it) and a poor selection of smaller titles and older fare. Netflix to a movie-loving Vermonter is like Randall walking into Big Choice Video in Clerks--the jaw drops at the sheer wonder of it all. Theatrical movies have to be planned according to budget, time off, and weather. For one monthly fee Netflix is always there with a new movie--all I have to do is send one back. It's the Tao of Netflix: to receive, one needs only to give back. But why am I wearing the watermelons on my feet?

On this site I will review movies, TV shows, music videos, comedy performances, stand-up tragedy, that video of a log burning in a fireplace, pretty much anything they shovel onto a DVD. Anything Netflix carries is fair game, naturally. If you're still here you've no doubt noticed the Netflix queue feed showing off my next 5 selections. If you're wondering what articles you'll see here in the near future, that's a pretty good indicator. My Netflix rentals come two at a time. We have the 4-at-home plan, and my wife has her own queue (even split of 2 each) for herself and the kids. My goal is to review each title I get from Netflix, along with whatever I manage to see at the theater. I'll sometimes review something from my wife's queue, but she gets plenty of stuff I don't watch, so I won't include her queue here. For example, right now she has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie from the '80s at home for the kids. I'm not going to review that. I didn't want to watch it in 1985 and I don't want to watch it now. I might, however, randomly pull a DVD off my own shelves and review it for no good reason. Don't think I won't! I'll do it, man!

To paraphrase one of the rules of Fight Club, reviews will go on as long as they have to. I fully expect them to range in length from one word to something Coleridge would've written while on mescaline. It's unreasonable for me to expect myself to write a feature-length review of every single DVD I get from Netflix, but I can write something, some critical acknowledgement of time spent. And then you can read it. What you do with it from there is up to you and not really any of my business, unless you decide to post a comment about it. Like I said before, I'm just a hack. A hack with a blog.

Welcome to One Man's Flix.