A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

“Myself. I ride for myself”. Some of you may remember the BMX themed movie from 1986 called Rad. It was one of my favourite movies as a child, and was one of the main reasons why I got into BMX at the time. For those of you who have never seen this movie (or heard of it, for that matter), I’ve provided a brief synopsis that appeared on the back cover of the VHS release.

Cru Jones is the best BMX biker in Cochrane. He’s got the talent to become the best BMX daredevil in the world. As the local paperboy, he jumps, spins, twists, and flips his bike with amazing ability. Bart Conner is the best BMX biker in the world, and he’s in town to race for the $100,000 HELLTRACK competition, the most grueling BMX race in history. Cru wants a hot at winning the title, but his mom, Talia Shire, insists he take his college entrance exams which fall on the same day. For the first time in his life, Cru has to make his own decisions. He decides to go for Helltrack, but Jack Weston the race promoter, has a dirty scheme for keeping the local whiz kid out of the race and away from his prized champion. Only the gorgeous Lori Loughlin, a member of the opposite team, can get Allen on track for Helltrack! And teach him a few other things while she’s at it!

I used to have a copy of this movie (actually a copy of a copy of a copy) on VHS that I probably watched well over a hundred times. Many of the hot BMX pros of the time were in the movie as stunt doubles, and many also had bit parts. I spent many hours trying to mimic the tricks that they performed in the movie. Over the past five years or so I have been trying to buy this movie on DVD (or even VHS) just so I could experience its magic again. It seems you can’t even find it to rent anywhere.

As it turns out, the movie has been out of print for sometime, and is no longer available from Embassy Home Entertainment. With such news there wasn’t much I could do – I had hit a wall. Then out of nowhere, my buddy Kipp instant messages me with a trivia question asking me what movie this quote was from.

“Myself. I ride for myself”

Since I was able to recite this movie line-by-line at one point in my life, it was an easy question for me to answer. I replied, “Rad”. Then after complaining that he too can not find the movie anywhere, Kipp informed me that there was an online petition to get the movie released on DVD. I immediately signed it even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to have any real effect.

But just in case, I urge you all to sign the petition here. You never know. And if the petition does actually work, all I can say is, “Hulk Hogan, eat your heart out!”

A few months ago I blogged about my early experiences with Zip.ca, an online movie rental company. I talked about the great money savings and convenience the service offered, but did outline a few problems that I hoped to evaluate as I continued my membership. Being a member for about three months, I felt that this was a sufficient period to honestly evaluate the service.

In short, I give Zip.ca an ‘F’ (where ‘F’ stand for ‘fail’, not ‘fantastic’ or ‘fabulous’). My main issue after three months was the same issue I exposed after only a couple of weeks – the movies I would get in the mail were old. So old in fact, that they were usually showing on the movie channels I subscribe to through my cable service. For instance, one of the last movies I received before canceling my membership was Walk the Line, which had been showing on Movie Central for about a month.

So I essentially felt as though I was being double-charged. I was paying $24.95 a month to receive movies I was already paying for through my cable subscription. Since I’m a logical kind of guy, this just didn’t seem like a good deal to me anymore.

In my opinion, I believe that Zip.ca is a victim of its own design. The convenience and money-saving positives that the service offers gives rise to the stale products they provide. Since members can keep their selections for as long as they want, those waiting for those titles suffer. I think you can see similar trends with Blockbuster’s ‘No Late Fees’ drive. Sure, this was great if you didn’t get a chance to watch your rentals in the rental time constraints and needed an extra day or two. But people took advantage of this offer and more-or-less killed it. People ended up keeping movies for weeks on end – probably not because they needed a couple extra days to watch them – but just because they were lazy and didn’t want to bother returning them. So Blockbuster’s ‘No Late Fees’ pretty much made it impossible for you to rent ‘new releases’ because they were all gathering dust in members’ houses. Due to this, Blockbuster has slowly phased their ‘No Late Fees’ out.

Another Zip feature that I feel contributes to the problem is their ZipList. Since Zip ‘suggests’ that you keep a ‘ZipList’ of at least twenty titles, you usually end up having to select movies that you really don’t want to see. And as it turned out, these were the movies I would usually end up receiving.

I haven’t really spoke to any other Zip.ca members to see if they have had similar experiences, so I really can’t make a blanket statement that Zip.ca sucks. Maybe others are receiving new releases in a timely fashion (I mean, someone out there has to be getting the new movies), or are willing to put up with not getting the most recent movies, and are fine with the trade-off for getting great savings. I personally cannot. I was seeing the commercials for so many great movies being released on DVD, but I was not getting a chance to see them. Now that I’ve put Zip.ca behind me, I feel free again, having the opportunity to see films as soon as they are released on DVD.

Anyone who knows me would probably tell you that I am a pretty big movie buff. I generally like all types of movies – action, horror, sci-fi, documentary, foreign, and yes, even romantic comedies. I prefer to see films at the theatre, but since Saskatoon has pretty lame ones, I’ve been missing out on that experience a bit since I moved back. Thankfully I also have a fairly decent home theatre setup that let’s me enjoy films in the comfort of my home.

Despite my love for seeing movies on the big screen, I rent a LOT of movies. I’ve tried to rent movies with my friends, and we literally cannot find ones worth renting that I haven’t already seen. While living in Guelph, I was probably Blockbuster’s best customer – seriously. The entire staff knew me by name – which I guess could be a little emabarassing, since they probably figured I didn’t have much of a life. When I got back to Saskatoon, my movie renting habit continued – and my movie spending continued to sky-rocket. I figured there had to be something better out there (that is, beyond pirating movies off of the internet).

The United States has had a service for some time called NetFlix, which essentially lets you rent movies over the internet, and have them delivered in the mail. Recently, Canada had such a service introduced called Zip.ca (on a sidenote, my cousin actually developed Zip, and my mother helped ‘beta test’ the mailing service since she worked for Canada Post at the time). I had known about this service since it was introduced, but I never took the plunge into signing up until last month. Zip defines themselves as follows:

Zip.ca is Canada’s largest online video service. We offer members access to an ever-growing DVD library of over 51,000 titles. Our convenient membership service combines a simple title-selection process, no due dates or late fees, and quick home-delivery.

There is a number of different packages you can choose from. The one I chose is $24.95 per month and I can have four rentals out at a time. After eleven rentals in a month, I get charged $2.95 per rental for shipping. I can’t see myself exceeding this limit, even though I will probably use the full eleven rentals. So, from a monetary standpoint, I’m saving a lot of money.

It’s pretty simple how it works. You have a ZipList where you add titles you’d like to rent. You simply browse through the inventory, and click the ‘rent’ button to add them to your ZipList. It’s pretty straight forward. You can also prioritize the order that you would prefer movies to be sent to you, but I’m not sure how much weight this actually has. As movies are shipped to you, your ZipList shows the date they were shipped, and the estimated arrival date. When you receive the movies, they include a postage paid envelope you use to mail back to Zip. It’s all quite slick.

After being a Zip member for about a month now, here’s my feelings.

• It’s difficult to receive new releases. I’m tending to get a lot of the older releases sent to me. Some of them are actually showing on my movie cable channels.
• I’m a little worried if I’ll receive new releases in a reasonable amount of time. I generally can go to Rogers or Blockbuster and rent a brand new release, when I want. Do I really want to wait a month? Two months? – to receive a new release? I don’t know if that will be the case since I’ve only been on board for a month. I’ll have to evaluate this as time goes on.
• It’s good that all movies on Zip are in widescreen format.
• Some movies are available in Blu-ray format, which is cool (but I don’t have a player to view them).
• A great money-saver.

Something else I’d like to mention, that I’m really unhappy with, happened recently. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was supposedly shipped to me on July 27, and had an estimated arrival date of July 31st. I never received it. I reported this via the Zip site – which they classified as a stolen DVD. Despite the fact that I didn’t recieve the movie, it still is showing as being in my possesion, thus limiting me to three rented DVDs, rather than four. I opened a ticket with Zip about this, and they informed me that stolen DVD investigations can take up to 21 days, and that rental slot will only become available when it is resolved. Weak.

All-in-all, I really like the convenience of renting movies from my computer, whenever I want, and the money-saving possibilities are incredible. It may be too early however, to fully evaluate if this service is for me. The downfalls I have identified will probably be a deal-breaker if they tend to be the norm. I really hope that members are given priority, based on their standing, such as frequency of rentals and speed of returns. If that’s the case, I think I may rank quite high, since I see myself using this service exclusively, and tend to watch the movies as soon as I receive them, mailing them back the next day. Hopefully they don’t assume I’m just copying and returning them.

Note: Saskatoon’s theatre problems are coming to an end as a new Galaxy Cinema is nearing completion.

As I sit here watching the Toronto Raptors get completely demolished by the Detroit Pistons, I’m tempted to get back to what I have spent the entire day doing. I bit the bullet last night and decided to watch ‘Revenge of the Sith’. There was a couple reasons really; first, neither my parents had seen it and I thought it would be nice to experience it with them; second, I haven’t seen it since at least June, and quite frankly was having withdrawal. Seeing it six times in the theatre clearly can be classified as an addiction.

I woke up this morning excited to get to the bonus features of the ‘Sith’ DVD. The disk is packed full of documentaries, deleted scenes, and other great stuff. I thought I would watch a couple features today and slowly work through the disk during the coming week. Well, lets just say that isn’t going to happen. As I watched the deleted scenes I found myself completely hooked. As I finished of the cut scenes, I moved onto the first documentary, then the next, then the next, and so on. Everything on this disk is completely fabulous.

The deleted scenes have been completed just for the DVD as if they were left in the movie. The side story that was cut of Padme, Bail Organa, and Mon Mothma conspiring to start the Rebel Alliance would have been cool to see in the final film, but I do understand Lucas’s reasons to leaving them out.

The highlight of the disc is the full-length documentary ‘Within a Minute’ that follows the complete production of 49 seconds of the final battle between Vader and Obi-Wan including everything from the catering team providing food to the crew to the guys at ILM putting together the digital shots. Something like 70,000 man-hours was put into this 49 second clip and you really get a sense of the scale of this movie.

Once I made my way through the rest of the bonus features, I decided I couldn’t stop there. I threw the first disk back in and watched the movie again with the audio commentary by George Lucas, Rick McCallum, Rob Coleman, John Knoll, and Roger Guyett. I love the audio commentaries on DVDs that are done properly. Sometimes you get a bunch of fluff and nonsense, not getting any real information or insight into the movie. ‘Sith’ definitely delivers giving you some great information including everything from backstory to pointing out a kitchen sink flying into a space cruiser.

Now that I have completely exhausted everything on this fine DVD I am now left feeling anxious to view everything on my home theatre system. Seeing the movie again definitely was sweet, but it just doesn’t do it justice when watching it on such a small screen with weak sound. This movie is big and is meant to be experienced in a big way. Since my abode isn’t going to be set up for another three weeks I guess I can look forward to watching my Raptors this NBA season. And as they are currently down by 31 points with just a few seconds left, I can definitely say that watching the Raps is not going to be as enjoyable as watching ‘Star Wars’. Hey, what can I say? Sith happens.

I missed Blogging for the last couple days due to my current dilemma of not really having an address. On Tuesday I felt a great disturbance in the force and decided I better stay in Saskatoon. I managed to get a hold of Jason and Cheryl and they were generous enough to take me in for the night. Right out of the office I headed for Futureshop since the greatest movie in the history of movies was released on DVD that day – ‘Star Wars : Revenge of the Sith’. I had been waiting for that day for quite some time, and now the complete saga is in my possession – furthering my journey to unstoppability.

Once again my Jedi senses paid off – Wednesday morning was brutal due to snow and freezing rain. That could have made for treacherous drive. As the day neared a finish fatigue had set in, killing my desire to drive back to Wilkie, plus the Toronto Raptors season opener was only an hour away (Wilkie was at least 90 minutes away – you see the problem). Once again I placed a call to my billets and they graciously obliged to take me in. The Raps game was good, even though they picked up a loss.

Thursday at the office was good as I continue to settle into my new job. Day’s end arrived and I found myself back in Wilkie. As I was unloading my car the last thing I grabbed was the unopened ‘Episode III’ DVD I had bought only two days ago. At this moment I found myself in a serious predicament – do I watch this fine piece of cinema on my father’s 27 inch bargain television with stereo sound, or do I wait another month to watch it in proper fashion on my 50 inch LCD rear project Grand Wega television in glorious 6.1 digital surround sound? What would the Jedi Council suggest?