July 7, 2008

Your Netflix queue: the window to your soul

Forget the eyes...it's a person's Netflix queue that is truly the window to their soul.
My Netflix queue, for instance, currently harbors Disney's "Alice in Wonderland", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "The Panic in Needle Park".
Verdict: This queue belongs to an infantile escapist fascinated with life's seedy underbelly.
Like rings around an ancient oak, the Netflix Queue documents your cultural growth patterns, providing evidence of your secret obsessions (nothing but Nietzsche documentaries and "The Anarchist's Cookbook" for a month, eh?), your ambitions (25 films on how to break in to film), and the pinings of your inner child ("The Black Cauldron").
Unlike TiVo, which feeds only your most immediate, day-to-day entertainment preferences, Netflix allows you to curate in the long term, and stock your right brain's pantry with fruit picked from deep within the vaults of film history.
Naturally, all theories deserve testing—so I called 'round a few Hollywood folks to find out what's coming up, or has recently come up, in their red letter day.

"Netflix..the red envelopes, right?", said film director Larry Clark (pictured), shortly before checking to see what his latest delivery was: "La Vie En Rose."
Verdict: Time-strapped romantic who is too much of a workaholic to actually get to a movie theatre—but who heard that Marion Cotillard is a babe.
Power publicist Kelly Cutrone has "National Velvet" ("to watch with my daughter Ava"), "The Idol Maker" and "Best in Show".
Verdict: Super high-achiever with a bitchin' sense of humor, who may position her daughter to become a champion show jumper. Or a rock star.
Producer Brian Grazer (pictured), according to Michael Rosenberg (president of Imagine Entertainment), does not have a Netflix account because "he likes to go to see movies in movie theatres, with people, and popcorn."
Verdict: No Netflix, no soul.
Writer/director Sacha Gervasi, ("The Terminal", "Anvil! The Story of Anvil") has ordered "La Balance" (a 1982 French thriller directed by Bob Swaim), "Betty Blue: The Director's Cut" and "Riff Raff" by Ken Loach. With a Netflix queue like this, you don't need tea leaves or palmistry to know what's on Gervasi's mind.
Verdict: Likes French babes, would like to direct French babes.
Actress Daniela Sea of "The L Word" (pictured) said that while she doesn't have Netflix ("I move around too much"), she does regularly rent movies from the

local

video store, the most recent being the 1962 film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night", and "Morvern Callar", about a girl who wakes up to find her writer boyfriend with his throat cut beneath the Christmas Tree.
Verdict: Introspective, individual, a seeker of meaning with a dark side. Especially morbid around the holidays.
Music photographer Piper Ferguson is has Netflix'd "Tempest", "Wanderlust" and "The Chocolate War" (Verdict: Pop culture junkie and total escapist with teenage rebellion bubbling in her veins), and Laura Whitcombe of the fashion line Label recently ordered Lars Von Triers' "Europa Europa" (Verdict: A lady of impeccable taste).

What's on your list?

July 7, 2008 in MEN | Permalink