Superfluous, but free

Some interest was shown in which free HD-DVD's I ordered as a prize for buying into a format that died exactly one day after I bought the hardware. Choice of movies and music tends to show something about your personality, so I guess I'm saying something about myself by disclosing my choices. That being said, the selection was pretty limited and most of the movies were pretty crappy. Feel free to post your own theoretical choices in the comments. It's like voting; most of the time you don't actually like the available candidates, but you don't have any other options.

For those who aren't familiar with the scheme, the offer allowed me to choose five movies but limited the choices to one title from five categories of three movies each. The selection was as follows:

• Category A: Aeon Flux; Babel; The Italian Job
• Category B: The Hulk; Pitch Black; The Thing
• Category C: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Swordfish; Full Metal Jacket.
• Category D: Firewall; The Frighteners; U2: Rattle and Hum
• Category E: Black Rain; Darkman; Troy

(Curious side note- With the exception of Category A, every category contains one film with a Danny Elfman score. Being a big Danny Elfman fan, you'd think that might guide my choices, but not so.)

I filled out the form and dropped it in the mailbox this weekend. Here's what I chose, and why:

• Category A: Babel. I have no interest in Aeon Flux. The wife pushed hard for The Italian Job, which is the recent remake and not the Michael Caine original, and it supposedly pales in comparison. So I settled for the well-reveiwed Babel.
• Category B: Pitch Black. The Hulk was the appealing choice to a geek-boy like me, but I read a comment about it recently that went something like "as long as I never have to watch that goddamn movie again". And I have to agree. It was pretty bad. So I asked the wife to choose between the other two films that I have nearly no opinion on, and she voted for Pitch Black.
• Category C: Full Metal Jacket. People who think they know me are incredulous that I didn't choose Charlie. People who actually know me understand that while I think that Burton's adaptation of one of my favorite books has everything that the first film version didn't, I consider watching it to be equivalent to having the top of my skull removed and Burton sexually violating my delicate brain tissue. His inexcuasable and unnecessary changes to the story make me feel... impure. So I chose Kubrick's FMJ, though I hear the HD transfer is very poor.
• Category D: The Frighteners. I actually like this film fairly well. It has flaws, but I like both MJF and Jackson. This is one of the Elfman films, too, which puts him on the scoreboard at 1 for 4.
• Category E: Black Rain. This was the toughest choice. I've never seen more than 20-30 minutes of the movie, but it's got a rockin' Hans Zimmer score and I hear it's otherwise decent. Darkman was a viable choice, but despite a great Elfman score I remember being creeped out by it a little when I was younger. I had no particular desire to see Troy, so Eric Bana goes 0-2 in the ledger today.

Ultimately, I'll probably watch each of these discs once. Which is the problem with owning physical media, I've found. It's just not worth the money to build a huge library that just sits there. Pride of ownership gets you nowhere unless you're the type of person who is going to parade your DVD collection before the world. That being said, you'll rip my Hitchcock DVD's out of my cold dead hands.

To help solve this problem, the wife and I have at long last joined Netflix. I'm not really pleased at the extra expense because we don't rent a lot of movies these days. Between the DVR and our backlog of purchased titles (there's that problem again), we're never short on content. But there are a few things that we wanted to start exploring, like the new Doctor Who series, that are harder to get ahold of. And maybe it will give us some opportunites to explore new titles that we never would have gotten around to otherwise.