Watching...

Netflix has a new feature that lets subscribers watch movies instantly over the Internet. To test it out, last weekend I watched Chinatown, which I've seen many times before. It worked great. As usual, it took me two or three nights to get through a single movie. Each time I paused or shut down the movie and started it up again, it started in exactly the right place. The connection was perfect, even over our spotty DSL line, through the upstairs router, and downstairs to my wireless desktop card via a range extender on the other side of the room. The picture looked pretty good. Chinatown is a challenge for a little LCD computer screen, because it has a lot of lowlit scenes and closeup details. If I had never seen it before it might have been tough, but it looked OK.

In between watching that, I was also watching Rushmore. That took a couple of days, too.

I never noticed it before, but the two movies share one very similar bit of dialogue:

Chinatown:

Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?
Noah Cross: I have no idea.
Jake Gittes: Over ten million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes.

Rushmore:

Max Fischer: How much are you worth, by the way?
Herman Blume: I don't know.
Max Fischer: Over ten million?
Herman Blume: Yeah, I guess so.

Both of these conversations come pretty deep into the movie, at a key point in the plot.

Coincidence? I don't know. But the main female character in Rushmore has the same last name as the villain in Chinatown: Cross.