I noticed on my last visit to Blockbuster that sufficient desperation has set in that they’ve decided to offer a NetFlix-style “unlimited rentals” plan… for $24.95 per month (limit 2 rentals at once), which strikes me as rather noncompetitive if you ask me, although I seem to remember NetFlix being significantly cheaper than it is now in the past.

Of course, the fact Blockbuster decided to raise the DVD rental fee to $4.19 hasn’t exactly ensured my continued patronage after I use up my $20 gift card.

My most recent rentals are Love Actually (some of the humor in which, I suspect, is lost on people on this side of the pond—most notably, the plight of the has-been singer trying to get the Christmas #1 is something of a riff on a British tradition of has-beens and never-wases trying to gain glory with a hit Christmas single) and Lost in Translation, the latter of which doesn’t seem to be very cooperative with my laptop for some reason (I couldn’t get Totem to play it at all under Linux, and Windows Media Player won’t let me skip past any of the promo crap on the DVD). So we’ll see if the real DVD player can cope with Lost, and then I’ll run to Blockbuster to return the DVDs.

As mentioned earlier, I rented Love Actually and Lost in Translation last week. Not surprisingly, the combined effect of the films was to make me want to visit both London and Tokyo.

I think Lost in Translation was the weaker of the two films, although I did enjoy it nonetheless. Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanssen both gave excellent performances, the film deftly avoids a cliché resolution, and the cinematography was outstanding, but the whole is ultimately unsatisfactory—although I can’t really put my finger on why. Perhaps the weakness is simply relative to the amount of hype the film received.

On the other hand, Love Actually was a supremely enjoyable film, with excellent acting, an engaging plot, and (also) outstanding cinematography. In terms of story construction, the obvious referent is Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, but Newell uses that framework in service to a more comedic story. A minor demerit for the use of Rowan Atkinson in a throw-away role; if you’re going to use him, put him in a real role (a sin also committed less egregiously by Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral).

The only other problem with Love Actually is that the widescreen cinematography used—on the order of 2.8:1 2.35:1—would make the film virtually unwatchable on a standard 4:3 television set (and thus seems inappropriate for a comedy). Luckily, as I mentioned before, it did play on my laptop’s 1.6:1 display, though even there was ample unused screen real estate at the top and bottom of the screen.