Some very kind friends bought our family a three-month subscription to Netflix for Christmas. I'd been curious about this service, which allows you to check out three movies at a time--through the mail--for the low (low!) monthly price of $17.99. But, being notoriously cheap, I would never have tried it out without this gift.

When we got started, Barbara was adamant that this was a three-month deal. Period. At the end of three months, no more Netflix. "We don't watch three movies a month," she said. Well, we didn't. Not together, anyway. I'd often take two or three evenings to get through one of the chestnuts in our collection (say, Caddyshack or Meatballs), but Barbara hates to watch the same movie twice. Which makes Netflix perfect for her.

And it came at a good time. The same friends who gifted us with Netflix loaned us the first season of "Alias." I found it predictable and tedious. Barbara said I was describing myself, not the show. She has now become hooked on "Alias" as a breastfeeding aid. One feeding, one episode. Sort of. How this usually works is that she cruises through one disc in a day or two and then joneses until the next one arrives in the mail. Since I insist on inserting a couple "real movies" in between each "Alias" DVD (each season has six discs), this means she generally has to wait three days for the next installment. Which isn't interminable. Not exactly.

For those of you who don't know, Netflix works on the queue system. You pick out a raft of movies and rank them in the order of preference. Then Netflix sends them out to you as you send the movies you've seen back (postage-free!). The basic plan allows you to keep three movies at a time, though you can keep five or even eight at a time for significantly more each month. There are some 30 delivery centers across the country, which means that DVDs rarely spend more than two days in transit each way. Our center is in Greensboro, and with only a couple of exceptions we've had two-day service: one day in, one day out. A very simple system that seems to work exceptionally well.

We started by putting about 20 movies in our queue. We selected movies we had wanted to see in the last couple years but hadn't: Fahrenheit 9/11, Elephant, Winged Migration, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. You know. Good stuff. Netflix says the average newbies pick six to 10, so we were a bit nutty. I thought 20 was pretty good. I asked our friends (Netflix veterans) how many they had in their queue. "Seventy-eight" was the answer.

Oh, how I howled. "It'll take you ten years to get through seventy-eight! Seventy-eight? How could you have that many waiting?"

As of this evening, we have been using Netflix for one month. We've watched 16 DVDs. Well, 15. Outfoxed was really lame, so we quit on that one. And we now have 69 DVDs in our queue.

A lot of those at the bottom are of the TV show and compendium variety, including four DVDs of highlights from the World Cup, 1966-2002. I expect to be watching those (and "The Sopranos") after Barbara goes back to work. Which means, of course, that we'll be continuing the subscription once our free days have passed.

While I haven't run this past Barbara yet, I think she might be down with that. Dealing with two kids has greatly reduced our excess energy reserves. Or, to put it another way, we'd much rather plop down, pop a couple beers and watch a movie than, say...damn, I can't even remember what we used to do. Lack of sleep does a number on your short-term memory.

The really cool thing about Netflix is that it allows you to do movie comparisons without fear of embarrassment at the video checkout. For example, we've got both versions of Freaky Friday and The Parent Trap lined up. This isn't some weird Lindsay Lohan fixation (though any Jamie Lee Curtis denials will sound forced), but more a simple curiosity at how the movies were redone. In the same way, we'll be catching up on the Coen Brothers's recent, less-than-well-received fare, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, neither of which I could justify spending three or four bucks on at the store but seem most reasonable when they're "free." And since Netflix has almost every DVD in existence (witness the World Cup sets), there's plenty of choice.

There are some drawbacks. Netflix ships out one DVD at a time, and that dictates its choices for movie versions. For example, it has the theatrical version of The Return of the King, but not the 4-DVD special edition. And Netflix seems to prefer "regular" versions of movies as opposed to special sets put out by Criterion and others. They do not have the 3-DVD Brazil set. My local video store does. But the lack of "special features" doesn't really matter a whole lot. Netflix is about quantity. If you want quality, then you can buy the damned movie. The queue keeps the movies coming.

And the queue, I think, is the secret behind Netflix. How can you unsubscribe when you've got 69 movies--oh, wait, I added two while doing "research" for this column, so now we're up to 71--in the hopper. Do I really want to quit with movies on the line? Hell, no!

Commercial exploitation of the Internet has propagated innumerable bad ideas. Hell, I worked for some of them. But Netflix seems to be the perfect marriage of remote shopping, database management and free shipping. Napster didn't kill the major record labels, but Netflix might well put an awful lot of video stores out of business. In this war, I wouldn't bet on Blockbuster. But I would bet on me watching a fair amount of Fellini by the end of the year.

Jon Worley will be viewing Before Sunset this evening.