Dear Netflix - 10 Things You Could Do To Make Me Like You Again

Dear Netflix:

You were my favorite company.

You blew it twelve ways to Sunday and now, well,  now, I'm kinda sad about you.  Each month, I forget when you robo-charge me and therefore forget to put my service on hold.  So you get another month to get better.  But you don't.

Since I roam, I only have streaming now.  (Also, since you messed up being able to send stuff to the right address.)

I was pretty happy you've changed your hold policies - as I've been charged for months when my hold ended before I could revise it and the charge went through and then I put a new hold on it.  So, I was excited about that, until I put my account on hold, you didn't pre-notify me, so I didn't change the restart date....and you billed me anyway.  Way to go and thank for the fake heads up.

Here are my ten things you could do to make us all feel better:

1. Unhide the movies that are streaming.  You have to be a detective to find out what's available.  The browsing interface is far inferior to the same but different Netflix site devoted to DVD's.  I have to overload my queue with stuff when I come across it, cause I'm afraid I'll never find it again.
2. Stop recommending things I've already rated.
3. Stop recommending things in only a few weird sub-genres based on some movie I watched like 17 months ago, which was probably a work-related thing anyway.  Example:  "Emotional Dramas based on contemporary literature," and "Quirky movies featuring a strong female lead," and "Classic Crime Movies from the 1960's."
4. You and I both know I have a (real) Netflix account.  I know this because I see that things I've rated on (real) Netflix show up with my ratings on (steaming) Netflix with their ratings.  How bout you automatically put things from my (real) Netflix queue onto my (streaming) Netflix queue when they become available?
5. Make my streaming queue sortable.  How hard is this, really?  Like, can I search it by type or rating or year or ANYTHING?????  This would be a tremendously positive change.
6. Remove things from my (streaming) queue when I've watched them!  Please!  And please make the removing from queue function actually work - things just keep popping back up again and again.
7. When you take things from my queue away from streaming, and then put them back on streaming later, add them back to my queue.  (Can't be that hard, come on.)
8. Stream more better content.  I use your service for research -- there's stuff I have to watch and stuff I need to re-watch.  The paucity of A-movies on here is appalling and embarrassing.  You - Netflix - king of the hill - are now competing for my $7.99 a month with Hulu Plus.  Is this what you want?
9. Stop pretending the movies I search for don't exist if they are not on streaming.  We all know there's a movie called The King's Speech.  In fact, it's available on the same/different Netflix where you send plastic through the mail in red wrappers.  So, really, am I searching for Stephen King's Children of the Corn?  I think not.
10. Allow me to have a streaming wish list queue - a list of things that are not streaming currently that I want to see - and let me know when they start streaming.
11. Think about where you are going.  What happened to the Netflix that offered a million dollars to the person or team who could improve its recommendations algorithm by 10%?  That Netflix was ahead of the curve, thought about its end user and was reliably outstanding.  That Netflix was the Apple to Blockbuster's Microsoft.  That Netflix created and dominated a market.  This Netflix is talking about becoming more like a cable station.  Why would your customers need another cable network?

Okay.  Eleven things.

You were the best of what internet commerce could be.  I still hope for you to become best again.

Buy Your Life Back

Cat on  Hot Tin Roof is streaming on Netflix.  If you haven't canceled your account yet, you should run to see it.  I don't know how I missed seeing this movie - I love Tennessee Williams.  I've seen the play, but this movie is so fully realized as both a piece of writing and as a film, it's astonishing.

The opening scene with Brick and Maggie (the scary gorgeous pairing of Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor) is textbook theatre, yet so riveting that after watching for a bit, I was tempted to se how long it had been running.  When I checked it was 12 minutes in -- 12 minutes in to 2 actors in one room talking to each other, and still I was fascinated.

The scenes are long, but the transitions are smooth, and the acting is stunning.  There's no question that Burl Ives has lived a life as Big Daddy beyond the confines of the film's script, or that Judith Anderson's Ida's been keeping quiet for 40 years and is going to have her say.

Paul Newman holds a close-up with a death grip, unafraid of the camera climbing into the soul of his character.  Elizabeth Taylor manages to avoid the shrewishness inherent in Maggie completely by making every deep emotional choice about subtext from a place of absolute love and longing.  Their last scene is a lesson in eyelines and why some actors are stars - the look the give each other across the room - skillfully played in separate long shots first by director Richard Brooks - connects them inextricably in the edit, in the frame and in the scene.

The script is full of memorable lines, but here's one from Brick and Big Daddy's scene together:

Big Daddy:
There's one thing you can't buy at any European fire sale, or any other market on Earth. That's your life. You can't buy back your life when it's finished.

Maybe what we've so clearly lost since this script was written is the inextricable intimacy of certain relationships.  All the drama here comes out of this, but in our fluid society - you could say we've got too much chi - way too much chi flowing too fast - it's so easy to cast off people and place that sometimes we miss getting called out on the big questions.

Still, I think you can buy your life back, you just have to do it now - make sure you're actually living your life while it's happening.