Flicks

David and I recently joined Netflicks, the online DVD rental service. We went for the plan that costs in the mid-teens, dollarwise, per month and we get two films at a time with an unlimited number of films within a month. In addition to the DVDs that we have sent, we can also watch 14 hours of online movies and tv shows per month. So far, we've been pretty happy with the service.

Tonight, we watched Spellbound, the 2002 movie about the National Spelling Bee, online. We've seen the New Zealand and Death Valley parts of the Rough Science, PBS's science slash adventure series. (And where are the black and brown scientists? Thanks, PBS.) We also rented a Japanese movie called Dare mo shiranai (Nobody Knows, in English), which is based on a true story in which a woman abandoned her four children to live alone in a small apartment in Tokyo.

On the way are two more films, a Kurasawa film for me called The Bad Sleep Well in English, and a documentary for Dave called Helvetica. I've also got a film cued up called something like "Densha Otaku." (That translates into something like "Train Nerd." It's a Japanese movie based on a true story about a nerd who falls in love with some woman on a Tokyo train. It was a huge deal when I lived in Japan, had been turned into a television series that everone was talking about.) David's recently into documentaries and has