With the local Hollywood Video going out of business and a new Samsung networked Bluray player I decided to sign up again for Netflix. As I've mentioned before I used Netflix over 10 years ago when DVD first came out because few if any of the local stores had DVDs to rent. Then they began getting them and I stopped using Netflix. So upon Turq's recommendation I put Starz's "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" in my Instant Watch list. Last night I watched the first half of the first episode. Interesting series though nowhere as well produced as HBO's "Rome" but quite interesting how they put green screen and CG to work to create the episode. Not sure if it's my cup of tea as I found plenty to fill the queue otherwise. Of course I've seen enough to see why Turq liked it. ;-)
The first thing I watched in HD on Instant Play was was a quirky psychological thriller which could easily make the "weird film" list called "Order of Chaos". I had stumbled across the movie looking at the Alan Watt www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com site as they used a couple of Alan's Internet radio raps in the movie and he had put a link to Amazon's listing there. Those not familiar with Alan is he is a Scotsman living in Canada doing historical conspiracy podcasts. You can find these on his site and they can be very entertaining. One interesting thing is he claims that TM was an attempt by the Freemason's to create a new religion using Maharishi. I suspect that Alan may have at one time practiced TM or was even a teacher. The movie was interesting enough that I had Netflix send me the DVD so that I could listen to the commentary and see what was behind the making of the movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1159721/ Between Netflix, Vudu, Redbox and Amazon's service I might ditch most of my cable bill. Cable companies are so yesterday. The MPEG-4 (AVC) encoding for these Internet streams looks far better than Comcast ever looks because Comcast starves the bit rate on their MPEG-2 streams. The Amazon app is yet to appear on my player but Samsung has it on their TVs so it is undoubtedly in the works for the players too. With Amazon I can ditch extended basic because they have many of the current series for rent that I watch (and way overpay for with the subscription).
