Do You... LOVE FILM?

Hello readers,

Apologies for the lack of an update recently, but I was away tearing up the slopes of Whistler Mountain in Canada, breaking out all kinds of fresh and buttery moves and generally being awesome. After that I was hit with some kind of mutant bastard flu and have been staggering about all zombie like for the past week or so - bogus!

So anyway, here's what I want to talk about - LoveFilm!!

It came to my attention recently that I probably buy a few too many DVD's, with a figure nearing the 300 mark now. So when someone offered me a code for a 30 day LoveFilm trial I thought it might be an idea to finally check it out.

(To get a 30 day trial yourself - click here.)

I finally signed up last week (Thursday in fact) and I chose the option that gave me four discs a month, two at a time. I thought this was a pretty reasonable way to start, and it was only £7.99 a month.

One of the first things I was encouraged to do after signing up was to populate my rental wishlist, so that LoveFilm can pick available titles for me. Within about ten minutes I had 13 unique titles, a mixture of films I wanted to see, and old classics that I just hadn't got round to seeing before. LoveFilm seems quite sophisticated in the way in which it recommends films. I started off by typing in some of my favourite films, and then looking at other titles that LoveFilm reocmmended from those. Often the related films that it recommended were other top favourites of mine, so I knew it was doing something right. It didn't take long at all to build up a fairly large rental list. Here's what I chose initially:

Death Proof
Planet Terror
The Maltese Falcon
Two Days in Paris
Raising Arizona
Shoot 'Em Up
Tape
The Newton Boys
Alexander
Brighton Rock
Control
The Darjeeling Limited
Nashville

A good feature is that you can mark each title with a priority, so if I reeeally wanted to see Planet Terror, but not so much Death Proof - I can set Planet Terror to high and Death Proof to low. Others are defaulted to medium. You can also make custom lists, say if you're sharing the membership with someone, or if you want to break them down further.

So I signed up to this on Thursday, and by Saturday morning they had arrived! They send out the discs in tiny envelopes, big enough just to cover the discs. This was quite reassuring, as it means that sending them back is absolutely zero hassle at all, and it's all freepost so you just slip them in the postbox. Over the weekend I watched both discs (2 Days in Paris & Death Proof) and added reviews to the LoveFilm site to help bulk up my profile a bit.

I posted them back just today, so I should see a response from the website by Tuesday, and have the next two by Thursday at the latest. One thing I do know is that I won't be keeping this monthly plan - I'm going to get through them way too quick. I think the 2 at a time, unlimited option could be the better bet, I'll have to see how it goes..

But for now, less than a week into my trial period I can say that the service looks very very good indeed. I'm going to use it as much as I possibly can and catch up on some old classics that I really should have seen by now, then I can think about chucking some game rentals in there as well!

Anyway, until next time guys, stay cool!

(Previous LoveFilm posts are here and here).

- Jimmy