B movie of the week: The Boondock Saints

Netflix downloads are becoming a staple of our weekend. B movies have taken the place of drinking through the wee hours. Earlier this morning, The Boondock Saints graced our screen. Gloria thinks it may set some sort of record for the most gratuitous use of the F-word, but I think it may have been surpassed by another early-morning Netflix download about a post-nuclear Elvis impersonator and samurai on his way across the wasteland to Las Vegas, Six String Samurai.

Such comparisons aside, The Boondock Saints is some good entertainment. I guess there's an active argument going on as to whether it qualifies as a cult classic, but that misses the point: The film's a hoot. The two brothers McManus, Billy Connolly as Il Duce, who turns out the be their long-lost dad, Willem Dafoe camping and then in drag, it's all just too incredible. The film walks a thin line and bounces between horror and humor. The Wikipedia write-up covers a lot of ground.

Download it tonight, out of earshot of the little ones.

time to get that huge monitor

Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC - New York Times --Once again, Netflix is out ahead of the pack, and we all stand to benefit.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said of the doomsday predictions. But Mr. Hastings also said he understood why questions about his business kept coming up. “Because DVD is not a hundred-year format, people wonder what will Netflix’s second act be.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.