As all you parents out there know, young children have a way of placing certain restrictions upon one’s social life. Dinner and a movie. What’s that? Pam and I can easily count on one hand the number of times we’ve been to the theater since L was born. I’m sure that won’t change much after the arrival of #2 in October.
We’ve learned to make do with Blockbuster. We tell Blockbuster which movies we want to see and they send them to us in the mail. Sometimes, we take the mailed movies to the store where we can exchange them for an in-store rental. It’s actually a pretty good deal. The average cost for renting a movie this way is about half of what I remember paying for a rental 10 years ago. Anyway, we end up watching about 1 to 2 movies a week. Last weekend, Blockbuster informed us that it was shutting down its website for a day to do maintenance. They compensated their mailout customers by giving each of them a coupon for a free “Favorites” rental in store. (“Favorites” is actually code for “movies that nobody ever wanted to watch or wants to watch anymore.”) So we decided to take advantage of the free rental.
The movie we chose was a genuine, made-in-Canada film called ‘Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner‘. It’s “Canada’s first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit.” It’s one of the most unique movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a movie that feels like a documentary of Inuit life and culture. I highly recommend it.
Warning: If you aren’t comfortable watching a nude Inuit man run for his life across the partially melted ice of the arctic–yes, you get to/have to watch his “manhood” wave in the chilly breeze for the whole scene–then this movie is not for you.