Since I signed up for Netflix, I’ve been watching movies constantly. Previously, my movie-viewing habits were relatively simple: I went to the movie theater with my friends when there was a palatable movie to watch and sometimes watched a rented movie with someone. I seldom rented movies on my own, with a few exceptions, so the choices had to be somewhat moderated to the taste of the group rather than the individual. Well, with the addition of Netflix’s thousands of discs, that’s changed a bit.

In the month or so since I signed up for the service, I’ve watched:

• Seven Samurai
• Taxi Driver
• Chungking Express
• Touch of Evil
• Yojimbo
• Fanny and Alexander
• Reservoir Dogs
• Sanjuro
• Le Doulos
• Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters

Now, I didn’t like all of these movies. Reservoir Dogs was little more than Quentin Tarantino experimenting with violence, while Touch of Evil was hopelessly dated and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander bored me to tears. What’s interesting, though, is that I don’t think I would have been able to find any of these movies in one of my local video rental stores except Sanjuro and perhaps Taxi Driver. It’s certainly affected my viewing patterns!

Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that due to the easy availability of his films I’ve become a Kurosawa fan. The one piece I had watched before, Rashōmon, felt badly paced and a little dull. Within the last month, however, I’ve watched and enjoyed Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and Ran. I checked the last out from a local library, but the point stands. I intend to make a longer post about his movies in the future, if I can find something to say that hasn’t already been said.

I’m also venturing further back into movie “history” than I previously have. Movies are a young medium—barely a century old—and yet many of its works are considered antiquated and unwatchable by people who call novels from the same era “modern.” More and more, I’m discovering that it’s the dismissal of the older movies that’s the problem here, rather than some deficiency of the movies themselves. Touch of Evil was a rare exception, but I blame this on the censorship of the period and some truly bizarre casting decisions rather than merely its age. It’s hard to make a convincing movie about crime when there is essentially no violence and the antagonists are “comic” racist caricatures. It’s also hard to make a convincing Mexican when he’s played by Charlton Heston. I much preferred Le Doulos—a roughly contemporaneous French film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville—to Welles’s noir.