Lovin' the Redbox

These cute little Redbox DVD rental kiosks are everywhere nowadays. In my city, they're outside every McDonald's location and inside every Kroger. They offer a plentiful array of new release movies for only a dollar, which is a pretty darn good deal.

This city has a number of chain movie rental stores, but we were dealt a truly crushing blow when the Blockbuster CLOSEST TO MY HOUSE closed down a few months ago, a fatality of the stinky economy. I say "crushing blow," not only because that Blockbuster was close to my house because this is not all about me, even though my brother rolls his eyes and claims I think it is; no, I'm assuming that that Blockbuster was also close to a lot of other people's houses and now if they want to rent at DVD from Blockbuster, they not only have to drive about three miles further, they also have to drive BACK TO RETURN IT, which we all know is the hard part.

It would be so helpful if movie rental stores would employ people to drive around to everyone's house and pick up the DVDs they watched over the weekend, and if the public library would also do that instead of having their usual attitude of "You checked it out and we expect you to bring it back," this would be a perfect world, would it not?

Anyway, this is our spring break and while the first half of the week was warmed with the golden sunshine that poured down on us like honey, the latter half of the week has been cold and rainy. Thus, Meelyn, Aisling and I have been interested in watching a few movies and those chipper red kiosks started looking interesting to me.

The Redbox movie kiosks seem to hold about forty-eight new release movies, most of which I seem to have never heard of. When Meelyn and I went to rent "The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" two days ago, it was one of the three movies in that whole giant (red) box we wanted to see, but that's okay, because apparently the Redbox fairies bring new DVDs fairly frequently: there was a list of new releases and when they'd be added to the (red) box posted on the machine.

The nice thing about this new movie rental system is that there are about four of them within a five minute drive of our house and you just can't beat that. The not nice thing is that they do offer only new releases, so if you have a hankering to watch, say, "Weekend at Bernie's" or "Viva Las Vegas," you're out of luck. And if you want to watch "Julie & Julia," you have to get there while it is still considered to be a new release, or it sucks to be you.

But these things are a lot of fun, they're not hard to figure out, they're cheap and they've made the past couple of days of our spring break very pleasant indeed.