I’m a month into my Lovefilm experiment, and continue to watch as many DVDs as I can, posting the watched ones back as soon as I’ve viewed them, and waiting with eager anticipation for the email that tells me what they are sending me next.

To be truthful, the second season of ‘In Treatment’ is rather diverting me from everything else at the moment.  It’s a real exercise in deferred gratification as Lovefilm eke out the box set and send the DVDs one at a time.  I’ve watched the first one, and am trying to make the second one last until I know the third is on its way.  I should have known it was a bad idea to start – when I was watching the first season, everything else was put on hold, so gripped was I by it.

Gabriel Byrne plays a flawed man who is an excellent psychotherapist.  Told in 30 minute episodes in cycles of 5, showing sessions with five different characters, patients and his supervisor, each story strand develops in complexity across the series -at least that’s what happened in Season 1…….

But before I became so involved in ‘In Treatment’, I’d caught up on several films.  Possibly my favourite, in that it was exactly what I had expected it to be, was ‘Up in the Air’, starring George Clooney as a business executive who travelled the country making people redundant and collecting loyalty points on airlines and hotels.  It was all so clearly recognisable from my working days: travelling light with only carry on luggage, expecting to go to the front of a special queue for check in, and feeling more at home in hotels than in his own flat.  It’s not deep, but it was good fun.

While I was in Edinburgh last week, we watched a duo of movies adapted from novels, although that is probably the only thing they had in common with each other: ‘Cold Mountain’ and the Swedish version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’.  Both moderately enjoyable in a 3 out of five sort of way.

Then there was ‘Shutter Island’, a Martin Scorsese thriller, which, when I got to the end I saw was reasonably interesting, but which I did wander away from during the earlier parts a couple times.

And then most recently, ‘Inside Job’ a documentary and polemic about the history of the recent financial crisis, and which left me cross and outraged at the shameful way so many people at the top of the financial sector had behaved.  It was also fascinating to see some of the interviewees, especially the economics academics who probably thought they were being interviewed for the purity of their analysis, who were made to squirm when asked about their own conflicts of interest in the whole farrago.

So, another month to go in my trial period……