Following last month's mass
movie-title massacre, it would be easy to join the chorus of Netflix naysayers and cancel the streaming service in a noisy, indignant huff (see also: Netflix Huff). But a funny thing happened on January 1: a lot of great new and returning titles appeared, going a long way toward filling the gap left only hours earlier. Sure, it's going to be tough to make up for losing the Charlie Kaufman films or the incomparable
Miller's Crossing, but this month's additions arguably go toe to toe with last month's departures.
Classic sci-fi fans may have cried foul at the loss of Robert Wise's
The Andromeda Strain, but in its place we got not only the director's even more classic
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), but the first of the Star Trek films,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Sure, it's not the franchise's best, but it's far from the worst, and it has the distinction of being much closer in spirit to the exploratory/philosophical nature of the original series than the flat-out action-oriented installments to come. And to those of us who saw this on its first release and thought: "Wow, look how old those guys are!" it's refreshing (and a bit painful) to now think: "Wow, look how young those guys were."
Robert Wise fans (and I know you're out there) may also get some satisfaction from the availability of
West Side Story (1961), a multi-Oscar-winning musical about star-crossed lovers from the opposite side of the tracks. This should ease the loss of not only Franco Zefirelli's
Romeo and Juliet, but another award-winning epic about equally mismatched lovers,
Titanic. Richard Beymer is no Leo, of course, but then Billy Zane's no Rita Moreno, either (thank goodness).
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