"Very long wait" is the "I want to see other people" of being a Netflix DVD rental customer

Netflix envelope doodle by Tim Hodge (Photo source: Doodle Flix)

I've been an on-and-off-and-on-again customer of Netflix ever since it was just a small Los Gatos company on the verge of becoming a household name (here's how old the very first DVD I rented from them was: Netflix's transformation into both a producer of prestige TV for the Internet and a formidable HBO rival--which has now caused HBO to strike back with its own standalone streaming service--was 13 years away). One thing has never changed in my time as a Netflix customer, and it's still my least favorite thing about using its DVD/Blu-ray rental service: the amount of titles on your rental queue that slip into "Very long wait" status. "Very long wait" are words you always dread encountering, like "I want to see other people" or "Thanks for coming to our booth but we're not hiring."

The Man Who Would Be King, an older film on my queue that I've never seen and have wanted to see for a while, is always in the "Very long wait" category, as are a lot of other older films on my queue that I've never seen and aren't currently available on Netflix Instant, like the '70s made-for-TV western spoof Evil Roy Slade and the 2004 Johnnie To flick Throwdown. "The 'very long wait' movies are either pre-1985 American or foreign titles, the films @Netflix barely curates on streaming," noted film writer Matt Patches on Twitter.



Being told to wait for these older films is ridiculous, and I'm not alone in my frustration with "Very long wait." A KQED article last month criticized Netflix at length for appearing to neglect its DVD/Blu-ray service (I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix phases it out within the next five years) and being unreliable as a carrier of older titles, which frequently slip into "Very long wait" or become listed as unavailable for rent. In my case, I was especially sad to see The Man with Two Brains become unavailable on my queue. It's like Netflix is conspiring to prevent me from watching either movies with titles that start with The Man... or Step Brothers in its most proper form; it cropped the ultra-widescreen aspect ratio of Step Brothers when I saw it on Netflix Instant back in 2009, and now the Step Brothers Blu-ray--which contains a musical audio commentary scored by Step Brothers composer Jon Brion, an extra I've always wanted to listen to--is under "Very long wait."

The writer of the KQED piece was particularly sore about being unable to rent from Netflix Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song as research for a film essay and having to play detective to track down a copy of the Melvin Van Peebles joint (he ended up getting a copy at a local public library). A Consumerist post compiled similar complaints from Netflix customers about being forced to wait for films that, in the age of the mom-and-pop video store before Netflix helped kill it off, were far easier to access than they are today as titles in Netflix's DVD/Blu-ray library.

A screen grab of a piece of my own Netflix queue

One complainer who was quoted in the Consumerist post has found a clever way to trick Netflix into shipping him a "Very long wait" title. The same thing happened to me recently when I was trying to rent Bong Joon-ho films as research for a piece I wrote about Snowpiercer, and a delay in a Netflix distribution center's access to Memories of Murder resulted in me receiving both Bong's later film Mother, which was the second title at the top of my queue, and Memories of Murder in my mailbox at the same time, a nice break from the one-disc-at-a-time shipping plan I currently subscribe to.

"I place the 'very long wait' DVDs are [sic] at top, the 'short wait' items below that, and then all available items," wrote the shrewd Consumerist reader. "Netflix will often apologize for the delay and send a second disc from the available list to assuage what they assume is my broken heart."

There you go. That's your most effective option for triumphing over "Very long wait," aside from going to the public library to find an older film Netflix is keeping away from you--or if you're a San Franciscan, going to one of the city's few surviving video stores. Or maybe just break into a Netflix employee's house and steal one of his DVDs. They don't care about DVDs anymore anyway.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song may be hard to find, but its Van Peebles/Earth, Wind & Fire soundtrack isn't. "Sweetback's Theme" by EWF isn't currently in rotation on AFOS, but it ought to be.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/22/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Motorcity

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone and are aired on kids' networks where I have to sit through many of the most obnoxious commercials known to man because my DVR remote control is broken and will never be fixed. I think some of those kids' TV commercials have been used to extract information from Gitmo inmates.

I recently saw someone compare the sleek and nicely lit CG visuals on Bruce Timm's Green Lantern: The Animated Series to The Incredibles, so since then, I've thought, "Hal does look a little Mr. Incredible-ish when he runs," which isn't a bad thing. If you're going to crib a thing or two from an animated feature film, crib from one of the best. And like Brad Bird's movie, GL:TAS isn't afraid to make its main character lose badly once in a while.

In "Invasion," the last GL:TAS episode before the season finale, Hal (Josh Keaton), Kilowog (Kevin Michael Richardson), Razer (Jason Spisak) and Aya (Grey DeLisle), the Interceptor's AI, attempt to complete their mission to destroy the ancient Lighthouse, an automated space station that allows ships to travel through the asteroid belt separating the Forgotten Zone from the sector of space where Oa, the homeworld of the Guardians, the Green Lantern Corps' superiors, is located. If evil Red Lantern leader Atrocitus (Jonathan Adams) gets his hands on the Lighthouse before the Green Lanterns do, he'll use the station to teleport more of his Red Lantern fleet from the Forgotten Zone into Oan space to attack the Guardians.

Meanwhile, "Invasion" catches up with Saint Walker (Phil Morris, a.k.a. Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld), an idealistic hermit on the sentient planet Mogo (also Richardson) whom viewers first met in GL:TAS' "Lost Planet" episode when he declined the green power ring that Mogo accepted to become the only Green Lantern Corps member that's an actual planet. Before "Lost Planet," the Red Lanterns destroyed Walker's homeworld, and Walker found refuge on Mogo. "Invasion" gets very Ten Commandments-ish as Walker, who's turned to Mogo as if he were God and asked him for help in figuring out his destiny during the Red Lantern invasion, scales a mountain that Mogo repeatedly tells him to climb to get his answer.

After a few complications, the Interceptor crew succeeds in destroying the Lighthouse, but their triumph becomes a short-lived one when Hal, Kilowog and Razer board Atrocitus' suddenly immobile ship to arrest him and his cohorts, and the trio walks into a trap. The Red Lanterns have evacuated their ship and rigged it to self-destruct with the Green Lanterns inside. Atrocitus seizes the Interceptor, has Aya reprogrammed to do his bidding and tears open a wormhole in space that's big enough to allow more of his forces to pass through to invade Oa.

Razer, who gets the episode's best line earlier when he uses one of those fake curse words so many of these sci-fi shows are fond of ("I hate to be the glurg in the punch bowl, but it seems we weren't the only ones to make it through"), uses his red power ring to shield Hal, Kilowog and himself from the blast. Hal is up glurg's creek without a paddle and in a rare moment, is unsure what his next move should be. He doesn't know that hope lies elsewhere on a mountaintop on Mogo, where a blue lantern materializes in front of Walker and presents the alien with a blue power ring.

"Invasion" is fun if you like seeing the heroes experience one setback after another but is otherwise kind of dull, mostly due to the scenes between Walker and Mogo, which feel like they're straight out of a Christian sci-fi flick. However, that willingness to make the Green Lanterns sometimes fail at the end of an episode illuminates a major difference between this current era of DC Animation and the godawful limited-animation days of Superfriends, when the heroes triumphed over evil every single time, which is fine for kids and the conservative audience that makes all those interchangeable CBS procedurals such ratings hits and is afraid of change, but it's yawnsville for those of us viewers who prefer a tad more variety in the storytelling.

***

In spite of how much DC Animation productions have raised the bar for kids' animation, these shows are still kind of skittish in the way they handle some of their edgier storylines. Several weeks ago--or rather, late last season--the TV-PG-rated Young Justice did what was basically a drug addiction arc when Superboy got addicted to "shields," steroid-like patches that suppress his human DNA and amplify his Kryptonian powers and were supplied to him by one of his two daddies, Lex Luthor. So when the recently rebranded Young Justice: Invasion does another addiction storyline with the mental and physical decline of the clone known as Red Arrow (Crispin Freeman), whose comics counterpart was once addicted to smack, and the storyline contains all the elements of an addiction arc, from the intervention staged by the Roy Harper clone's friends to his unkempt and emaciated state (or rather, what passes for emaciated in the non-Timm DC Animated Universe), why does the show chicken out and explain that his decline isn't due to heroin addiction and is merely exhaustion from his intense search for the original Roy?

And then when it's later revealed in this week's Greg Weisman-scripted "Salvage" episode that Roy and Cheshire (Kelly Hu), the assassin sister of Artemis (Stephanie Lemelin), became a couple during the five-year interim between seasons and Cheshire had Roy's baby, why does the show chicken out again and sneak in the rather unconvincing detail that Roy and Cheshire were married before she got pregnant? Are Cartoon Network censors really that uptight about characters on their shows having kids out of wedlock?

These censors also have terrible eyesight because a couple of minutes before the revelation about Roy and Cheshire, "Salvage" shows the retired Artemis--who's still dating another fellow retired superhero, Wally "Kid Flash" West (Jason Spisak)--prancing around in just a Stanford University T-shirt, which hints that Artemis banged Wally before he went off to Roy's intervention. I like seeing how amazed and shocked some Young Justice viewers are about the sight of pantsless and post-coital Artemis on a Saturday morning cartoon. This actually isn't the first time a DC Animation project has featured a scene with pantsless female characters to hint that they just got laid.

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn--sans clown makeup and pants--in Batman: The Animated Series' classic "Harley and Ivy" episode (Photo source: World's Finest Online)

Post-coital Bruce Wayne and Andrea Beaumont in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

I love DC Animation.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"

Song: "A-Punk" by the yacht-rocker-wardrobe-loving band Vampire Weekend
Released: 2008
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: I have no idea what exactly this song's about, but it opens my second favorite Adam McKay movie after Anchorman. In addition to Step Brothers, "A-Punk" has also been featured on the Britcom The Inbetweeners.

The foul-mouthed Step Brothers premieres tonight at 8 on FX with all of its f-words gone and one of its best gags--the sight of demure Mary Steenburgen unleashing an f-bomb--ruined.