Tuesday, July 05, 2005

FACETS and NETFLIX

I am very happy to report our two newest links: FACETS Video and NETFLIX.

What's nice about them is not just that they are very significant links for us, but that they seem to have written their own descriptions of the film. You see, there is the "official" synopsis, which is what you will find on the website and on the back of the DVD box. We wrote that, and it is something that a retailer can use as part of the "Product Description" when they are selling the DVD. But FACETS and NETFLIX are both using synopses which are completely different from the provided text, which would indicate that someone, an actual person, took the time to either watch the movie, or to artfully paraphrase what was given to them.



FACETS Video has been around for a while. When I was a kid, I remember ordering their enormous phone book-sized catalog of obscure and hard-to-find home videos, and circling all the titles I wanted to order from them. (I never actually ordered anything, but I did enjoy perusing that catalog and dreaming of all the movies I could own if I had the money.)

They are based in Chicago, but they sell and rent movies by mail, on both DVD and VHS. And now they will be carrying our film. It looks like they still publish those huge catalogs (for purchase) which I guess means by this time next year, I'll be able to order one with our film listed in it.

Here are the very kind words they wrote about the movie in their description:

Missouri rhymes with misery in this shrewd piece of independent filmmaking about the lives of career losers in suburban St. Louis. Connor Ratliff and Ian McConnel star as 30-something friends with dead-end jobs, estranged families, and and a lingering love for Star Wars memorabilia. As their circumstances go from bad to worse, director Shaun Peterson hones in on the emotional complexity of his characters' torpor, offering up a darkly comic, acutely observed piece of "Low-to-no budget filmmaking at its best" (Kansas City Star).



Of course, back in the day, FACETS was pretty much the only place to go unless you were lucky enough to live in a big city with a world class video store. Now, of course, people have a lot more options, the most popular of which is NETFLIX. I was a subscriber for about a year, and I found it was an easy way to burn through a lot of movies that I probably wouldn't pick out on a trip to an actual video store. (For instance, I have passed over classics like Rio Bravo or The Seven Samurai many times in favor of some new release or obscurity that half the time turns out to be a disappointment.) Having unlimited rentals mailed to you means you can take a lot more chances, and it is a great way to discover all kinds of great films.

The only reason I'm not a current subscriber is that after 12 months of non-stop DVD rentals, week in and week out, I started to get burned out on DVDs. But I'll no doubt resubscribe at some point, because it really is a terrific way to rent movies. And for those of you who want to see Living In Missouri without buying it first, it really makes things easy, particularly if you are already a Netflix subscriber. (Of course, deep down, we hope that some of the people who rent it will enjoy it enough to want to buy a copy to keep. But some people are more into renting than owning....)

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