65.0°,
Partly Cloudy ‘District 9,’ the costliest DVD in the history of the world
All I wanted to do was sign up for Netflix. Again.
This is a true story. I was a Netflix member when the company first went into business, but somehow there came a time when I got a DVD movie from them in the mail and I forgot to return it for two years. This is the kind of lapse that sometimes aggravates my husband.
So, to pacify him, I paid the two-year bill, and, since he uttered a few less than encouraging words (“Never again, dammit”), I avoided all of the company’s enticing entreaties for years. Also, the movies I had put on my rental queue during my membership weren’t really compatible with my husband’s taste in cinema. I was into Dickens and Austen and Poe; he was into movies that ended like Shakespearean tragedies, with dead bodies strewn all over the stage. Of course, the dismembered corpses were the only elements his movies had in common with any works by the Bard.
Times passes. We were stuck in the house recently, recovering from various medical adventures. I got yet another ad from Netflix on my computer and it grabbed my attention. All the rules had changed. I could get two DVDs a month for only $4.95, and they wouldn’t send a new one until I returned the old one. Also, I could add all kinds of fancy extras, with the DVDs streaming on my computer or on my Wii, if I had one, or the back of my hand. I can’t begin to understand all the new technology.
So I decided to sign up again, and my husband agreed. I sealed the deal with a promise that our first DVD selection would be “District 9,” which was reviewed as “Gruesome ... explosive ... filled with bloody violence.” Toxic viruses, concentration camps and biotechnology run amok all play a part.
Apparently it’s a story, not unlike a Jane Austen saga, in which extraterrestrials land in South Africa and do bad things. The population is terrorized, DNA gets mutated and there are thinly veiled, coded references to the horrors of apartheid. Mind you, I was willing to do this to eventually get my kind of movies on the queue.
