Web Site of the Week
A place to rent DVDs while you wait for Armageddon
What, you thought we'd have something about the election? Who cares. America's toast, and you might as well enjoy your time left. Which for us means popcorn, M&Ms, Notoriously Cheesy Cheetos, a 4-pack of ginger beer, and a plain brown envelope from Green Cine (www.greencine.com), the cinephile's answer to Netflix. This mail-order rental site is where high-brow and low-brow collide—just like Ed "Speedo" Jaeger, the subject of the demolition-derby doc Speedo, one of this week's new releases. Where else can you rent the latest Abbas Kiarostami joint and the 1970 Something Weird love-in oddity Ghetto Freaks, along with a collection of absurdist shorts by Chattanooga-based filmmaker Jarrod Whaley?
For $21.95 per month, you can keep three discs out at a time, which makes it slightly more expensive than Netflix. But the selection is astounding: most any hard-to-find arthouse, foreign or documentary title you could want is available, sometimes in all-region overseas editions loaded with more extras than the U.S. release. The site's also paired with Green Cine Daily (http://daily.greencine.com), an excellent film news-slash-blog site with review recaps and links to articles and sites of interest. Anyone who wants a film education without the expense of film school (or the proximity to clove cigarettes) is directed to these two sites, which prove that the Internet is the new grass-roots nexus of cinephilia.
OK, we lied. Here's our one post-election link: www.sorryeverybody.com.
