Kara felt crook all day so we stayed home and watched a few movies. The first was Fantastic Four, and man was that movie terrible. I remember hearing it was "just all right" but it was much worse than that. The second movie was A History of Violence, which was an interesting movie. Nice and suspenseful, it keeps you guessing, though there were some pretty gruesome scenes...
The more interesting thing about the movie day was how I got the movies. There is a futuristic movie rental store one block down from our place, so I checked it out today. Here's how it works: There are no rows of movie cases in the store, only viewing/ordering 'pods.' You go in and sit down in one of the pods, and swipe your membership card, and then use the touch screen to pick which movie you want. If you are browsing, you can watch movie trailers on the screen to help you decide. When you pick what you want, you leave the pod and go to the retrieval area. Swipe your card again and, assuming that you have enough credit on your account, the machine retrieves your disc and spits it out.
There's a single employee there during the day which can help new members or whatever, but the system practically runs itself. That means that rentals are much cheaper: weekly titles are $2.20 and one night new releases are $5, but if you return them within 6 hours, you get $2.50 back. It is also open 24 hours a day. To get in at night, you swipe your card to unlock the front door. And to streamline it even further, you can actually pick out your movie online from home, and then go straight to the retrieval machine for a very quick pick up!
It's a pretty neat setup and I look forward to using it more in the future. It makes a lot more sense than trying to decipher Blockbuster's sorting algorithm and then paying $7 if you succeed!
