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Browsing through NetFlix’s online streaming collection is not unlike those late Friday nights spent browsing through the movie maze in your local video store. The search for that perfect movie is often tricky. Sometimes you have to deal with a fuming partner and/or a melting tub of ice-cream in the car. The pressure is compounded by a listless, unhelpful store clerk in some cases. This column aims to be that clerk for NetFlix Instant Watch – maybe just a little less listless and little more helpful. This is what I waded through recently – at NetFlix.

Went Looking For…

Believe it or not, I sometimes do have a predetermined playlist while browsing for movie titles. Generally, there is a week between my adding them to the playlist and actually watching them. The movies under “Went Looking For…” are typically the movies that I had slotted as “Ended up with…” the previous week.

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid

The movie starts engaging you from the opening montage itself. The pair of Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are respectively the loudest mouth and fastest draw in the west, with such merriness that the label "lovable rascals" might have originated here. It was my pleasure to watch the movie in its entirety for the first time ever. Paul Newman carries the movie. An outlaw clearly aware of his limitations, Butch Cassidy uses glibness and guile in place of the gun as much as possible. Sundance, on the other hand, is the quick draw king of his circle and beyond. He has limitations, too. Their collective strengths and drawbacks crop up at the most inopportune moments. Especially their drawbacks. After messing around with one group too many (including their own) they are forced to go on the run all the way to Bolivia. They lie low for a while before the gun culture catches up with them again one final time, or so it seems.





More than a gun slinging western, the endearing part of this movie is the banter between the leads. I liked the way Will Ferrell channeled the “Don't you get sick of being right all the time?” line from this movie in Land of the Lost. Not that he cares, but I liked it.

The Count of Monte Cristo

To some it might seem pointless to watch a movie whose story is already known. To me, there is some excitement not so much in anticipation of the story but in the treatment. Alexander Dumas’ revenge saga, The Count of Monte Cristo, is worth being retold many times over. It could be a complete character study or a swashbuckling entertainer. The 2002 rendition of the story tries to be the former and could have achieved greater heights with a better cast. Long prison terms are commonplace in Dumas stories – think The Man In The Iron Mask. Here, the prison period forms the divider between the two worlds of one man- one where he was wronged, and another where he gets his vengeance and gets almost everything back from the men who wronged him. This is a faithful retelling of the original story. Jim Caviezel is monotonous for the best part of the movie and that could be its undoing.

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