As I may have mentioned, we watch a lot of movies via the Netflix streaming on Xbox Live service.
As I may have also mentioned, the selection on this service is strangely limited--some new releases, some indie films, some classics, and a whole lot of gaps where there should be movies.
Still, we're usually able to find something to watch.
And the strangely limited selection often leads us to watch stuff we wouldn't otherwise watch. Like, for example, the other day, when the boy cued up Ping Pong Playa. All I knew about this was the title, and I figured it was some kind of goofy, over-the-top spoof like that horrible ping pong movie with Christopher Walken. Balls of Fury?
So I walked into the room with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised to find a real movie going on. Ping Pong Playa is a movie about a young Chinese man who can't quite make it as a basketball star and is a consistent disappointment to his parents. The plot winds up fairly predictable, but in the meantime, this movie creates real characters and has a lot of interesting things to say about identity and culture. And it's very funny. In short, definitely worth watching, and something I never would have discovered if Netflix Watch Instantly had a better selection.
One complaint, though--this movie as we watched it on Netflix was censored--ping pong and basketball sound effects were played in place of many of the swear words. There was no advance warning about this bizarre censorship. We had the same problem when we tried to watch Fear of a Black Hat (a wonderful and terribly underrated rap mockumentary)--all the swear words were bleeped out with funny sound effects. This was tolerable in Ping Pong Playa because there wasn't that much swearing, but in Fear of a Black Hat, in which about every third word has twelve letters and starts with "m", it made the movie completely unwatchable.
Netflix, Starz, whoever the hell is doing this: what the hell is going on? And Netflix, don't you owe your customers some kind of warning that the movie they're getting is bowlderized?
