Pants in Motion

It’s still early days, but I think Quickflix is going to be a keeper. It’s (as far as I can see) a complete clone of the US Netflix company – you pay a fixed monthly amount and create a queue of films on their website. They send you the first disc from the queue, you watch it, return it in the supplied envelope when you’re done, and they send you another. No late fees, no hassle, but the real win for me is the selection.

I have a list of shame – the films I’ve never seen, whether it was because I grew up in the country, or never had a decent video store close by, or just blanked out when I walked into a good one.

Anyhow, some of my most shameful omissions are: Godfather II, The French Connection, The Conversation, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Repo Man, The Vanishing, Paris, Texas, Klute, Blood Simple… the list goes on. Do you think you’d find all of those titles in the average video store? I never did.

You could find them in a great store like Video Dogs in Carlton, but it’s really too long a trip for me just to rent a disc, plus they tend to be $7 a night, whereas the Quickflix plan I am on (2 discs at a time, max 5 discs a month – $19.95) works out to $4 a disc if I watch and return the discs fairly swiftly. There’s no pressing hurry to return them immediately, you can hang onto them for a couple of days – or even lend them to a friend and ask them to pop them in the post when they’re done. You can tell the site that you’ve posted a disc and they’ll send another before they receive it, which is very cool.

Another good thing – they rent Blu-ray, which was the final impetus to push me to try the service out. The only downside that I have found is that certain long films that stretch over two discs (e.g. Godfather II, Lawrence of Arabia) are classified as two discs by their system, so you are essentially paying the cost of two films to rent the one.