We’ve been subscribing to KenFlix for 23 days and loving it! Here’s what we watched:

• Juno - better than I expected.
• Saawariya - the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
• Once - we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
• Sopranos - Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
• No Country For Old Men - Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
• Someone to Eat Cheese With - Much better than I was expecting.
• Planet Earth on Bluray - We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
• Be Kind Rewind - Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
• Congorama - Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
• War - dunno. Only Bob watched it.
• Wave Twisters - Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
• Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs - Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
• Eastern Promises - Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
• Stray Dog - Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.
  

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Filed under: video, why are we here? | 2 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

We are on the second day of our KenFlix subscription, and loving it! I was wondering if KenFlix was limited to just one movie per day, or if you could get a movie, watch it, and then immediately walk back to Four Star Video and get a new one. I told the folks at 4star we were going to have a KenFlix weekend where we would see how many movies we could watch in two days, and all three people working behind the counter said that was a perfectly great idea. Ridiculous!

So anyway:
(11 hours open per day) * (30 days per month) / (2 hours per movie) = 165 movies a month!

Filed under: all talk, san francisco, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

Four Star Video has launched a subscription plan called KenFlix, and it appears NetFlix is about to lose the important Bernal Heights demographic.

The deal: $20/month for unlimited rentals, one out at a time.
Advantages of KenFlix: No waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail. Video nerds can get 30 rentals a month if they go to 4star every day..
Disadvantages of KenFlix: 4star DVDs usually play in my player, unlike Netflix discs, which usually start to skip about half way through. This means whenever we pick a bad movie, we’ll actually have to watch the whole thing.

Filed under: san francisco, video | 5 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix