Netflix Navel Gaze

Via a link in this Slate article, I came across a Netflix history analyzer. I was a little afraid to try it out, afraid of finding out that it would have been cheaper to have patronized a good local video store all these years. I've always had a sense that I wasn't watching enough movies from Netflix to "get my money's worth".

So, the results were somewhat heartening, especially considering that I got a bunch of things from Netflix that I would've been unlikely to find at a video store. Here are the highlights of the analysis that was generated from my rental history:

• You've rented 334 DVDs over 72 months from April 25, 2003 to March 31, 2009.
• Your average price per rental was approximately $3.88 each. [My local vid store charges $4]
  
• You kept each rental for around 18 days on average.
• The longest you kept a single DVD was 306 days.
• You rented about 5 DVDs each month.

The movie I kept for 306 days? David Lynch's Lost Highway. I watched and returned 31 other discs before getting around to it. I guess it took me a while to get in the mood.

List Making #1 - Movies from the Criterion Collection

Inspired by this, I decided to go through the Criterion Collection's online DVD catalog and come up with my own top ten. I got carried away and came up with a top thirty, arranged into three tiers. Maybe I'll add a little commentary at some point, but for now, here's the list:

(Notes: The format is title/Criterion catalog #/director. Within each tier, titles are arranged by catalog number, in true geek fashion.)


group one - 1-7
grand illusion (#1) - renoir
beauty and the beast (#6) - cocteau
this is spinal tap (#12) - reiner
the passion of joan of arc (#62) - dreyer
rushmore (#65) - w. anderson
burden of dreams (#287) - blank
kind hearts and coronets (#325) - hamer

group two - 8-20
the third man (#64) - carol reed
the orphic triology (#66) - cocteau
gimme shelter (#99) - maysles
the lady eve (#103) - sturges
contempt (#171) - godard
the rules of the game (#216) - renoir
le cercle rouge (#218) - melville
night and the city (#274) - dassin
f for fake (#288) - welles
au hasard balthazar (#297) - besson
mr arkadin (#322) - welles
days of heaven (#409) - sayles
pierrot le fou (#421) - godard

group three - 21-30
fishing with john (#42) - lurie
rififi (#115) - dassin
withnail and i (#119) - bruce robinson
in the mood for love (#147) - wong kar-wai
down by law (#166) - jarmusch
the flowers of saint francis (#293) - rossellini
naked city (#380) - dassin
house of games (#399) - mamet
cleo from 5 to 7 (part of #418) - varda
bottle rocket (#450) - w. anderson

Update: Since making this list, I've seen The Man Who Fell to Earth (#304), which probably fits somewhere into Group Three. Not sure what to bump to make room for it, though.