Prologue

I think that it's safe to say that we've all been there: sitting in front of tv, Netflix titles scrolling past, arguing over what to watch.  For Becky (my girlfriend and movie partner of 4+ years) and me, this was par for the course.  Sometimes we would find a movie that we both wanted to see.  Sometimes one of us would give in to the other so that we could at least watch something before we had to go to bed.  Usually, however, we'd just settle on old episodes of Archer or The IT Crowd.

I was tired of the tedious negotiations.  Tired of always circling back to the same shortlist of safe choices that we had already seen ad nauseam.  Tired of my watchlist hopelessly outstripping my ability to keep it in check, especially when so many movies on it were streamable on Netflix.  Mostly, though, I was just tired of all of the excitement being sapped from sitting down to watch a movie.

After this last week's debacle, I told Becky to make a list of movies in which she could say either "I have not seen this movie, but want to" or "You have not seen this movie yet, but should" about each one.  When she was done, I combined her's with a list of my own.  I printed the list out, cut the titles into strips, folded the strips and put all of them into a massive pilsner.  From now on, whenever we wanted to watch a new movie on Netflix, we would give the cup a few shakes, pull out a random movie title and watch that.

When all was said and done, we had 138 movies consisting of a diverse mix of genre, acclaim, subject matter and release dates.  Some were there just to show the other person (War Games, Grave Encounters).  Some had won Academy Awards (Midnight Cowboy), AFI Awards (Lost In Translation) or the Palme d'Or (The Wind that Shakes the Barley).  Some were silent (Metropolis), in a foreign language (Tsotsi) or just plain weird (Lars and the Real Girl).  Some were action (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol), comedy (Duck Soup), horror (The Hamiltons), western (True Grit), documentary (Jiro Dreams of Sushi) or drama (A Late Quartet).  All told, it was pretty impressive.

The account which follows is our 100% reel journey into the savage, unexplored reaches of Netflix.