Friday, 28 September 2001 11:59pm

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etflix.com (link) -- I really hope these guys are making money cuz I just signed up for their service and man, it's totally cool! It's a DVD rental place. You pay a flat fee of $20 a month, and you can rent as many DVD's as you like. You make a list of all the movies you want to see and you get to have up to three movies out at any one time. They send them to you with a postage-paid envelope, so when you are done with the movie, you just pop it in the envelope and send it back. When they get that movie back, they send you the next movie on your list! Also, they have pretty much every DVD ever made, so their selection is unbeatable.
I signed up for this service only 2 days ago and already my first three movies have shown up! I got Driven, Chasing Amy, and Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. In my zeal for my newfound toys and this wonderful service, I ended up watching all three of these movies in one day. I guess I will review these three movies, as I have not seen any of them before.

Driven: For months, everyone on the riceboypage.com message board has been saying that this movie is p00p. It's become part of the language -- "driven = p00p". I haven't been able to go into a video store and see this movie without laughing, thinking about that old equation. Well, I decided I might as well watch this movie to see what all the fuss is about.
Driven, if you don't know, is a movie starring Sylvester Stallone. It's basically Rocky V, with the old retired guy teaching the young, up and coming guy, except with cars instead of boxing. And lemme say that this movie truly is p00p. Before even getting into all the niggling technical details that were wrong about this movie... it just wasn't a very good movie. Some of the effects were cool, and definitely the racing through the streets of Chicago part was cool, but man, this movie just didn't have a lot else going for it. If you're looking for a brainless action movie, maybe this will cut the mustard for you, but the racing circuit here was sort of a half-assed F1-but-not-really thing going on. And seriously, I've never heard of any open-wheeled race cars flying into lakes, streams and other bodies of water, but I'm quite sure that more race cars fly through the air and land in water in this movie than there ever have been in the history of all open-wheeled road racing series combined.

Chasing Amy: This is one of those Kevin Smith movies. I liked it, it was pretty good, and pretty much in line with the rest of Kevin Smith's movies. The plot was a lot more interesting than Driven, that's for sure. But I'm sure a lot of you have seen this movie, so I'll talk about the other stuff on the DVD instead.
When you watch the introduction to the DVD section, you see Kevin Smith introducing the DVD to you where he divulges the information that the stuff on this DVD is exactly the same stuff (no more, no less) than what was on the laserdisc when it was released in that format many years ago. But he also talks about how in a certain section, you may hear him talking bad about the DVD format and about how much it would suck. He recanted this statement, and declared that DVD is a really cool format for movies. That was pretty much the coolest thing as far as the non-movie content on this DVD goes.
The deleted scenes were just plain horrible (which is probably why they were deleted), and all the introductory commentary that is provided was shot on video with like no make-up. Ben Affleck looks fucking horrible.

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl: This is a film from Joan Chen. It was banned in China due to its content. It's in chinese, with english subtitles. Cami and Helen saw this movie at an indie theater some years ago, but I had never seen it before. Cami even has a poster from this movie hanging in the bathroom, except it's reversed so it looks normal when you look in the mirror. It's creepily cool, the poster is.
Anyway. This is singlehandedly the most depressing movie I have ever seen. You think Requiem for a Dream is depressing and fucked up? That thing isn't even close to how depressing this movie is. It did, however, draw me in and keep my attention, although due to some chemically induced impairments, I did have some difficulty reading the subtitles for the first half of this movie. By the end though, I pretty much wanted to cry. Why anyone would ever want to make such a depressing movie, I'll never know, but it's definitely an experience in film, and if you ever want to see something really good, yet really, really sad movie about a person with all the possibilities in the world before them and yet absolutely no hope for acheiving any of it... you should check out this thing.
As far as DVD special features content, this movie has none, except for chapter selection. It's in chinese with english subtitles which are built in to the movie (i.e. you cannnot turn the subtitles off, they are just there). Not like it matters to me though, I'm not chinese and I don't speak chinese so it's a good thing those subtitles are there!

Unbreakable: Actually I didn't get this movie from Netflix, I bought it used from Hollywood Video. A lot of people didn't like this movie, but I liked it a lot when it was out in the theaters. This DVD came with a supplemental disc with all the special features on it, and unlike most movies, the deleted scenes were actually quite good and featured great performances by the actors. These scenes were cut to control the length of the film, and the pacing, not necessarily because they sucked. Particularly fun to watch was a second weightlifting scene where Bruce Willis' character goes to the weight room at the stadium he works at to see just how much he could lift. It was a great scene, but totally redundant, so it was cut. The "making of" featurette was also quite enlightening and again, much better than the usual dribble you see on DVD's just to fill out a "special features" section. If you liked the movie, I highly recommend checking out this DVD as the special features are worth at least renting.
Other than watching a lot of TV and movies, not a lot has been going on, so I guess that's the update for now!!