Programming Note: Movie Night Next Week!

Greetings everyone! You know, ever since we started this here little website of ours, our goal has been to get people to sit down and watch and discuss all sorts of different movies together. Between our various video features and forum discussions, I think we've built ourselves a nice little community of film fiends of all shapes, sizes, and tastes. Now I think it's time we take things a step further.

Starting next Wednesday, we will be introducing a new weekly feature here on Screened called The Screening Room. The idea behind this feature is simple: We want you, the user, to watch one movie a week with the rest of the Screened community. Think of it sort of like a book club, except with awesome movies that we the editorial staff deem worthy of group consumption. Today, we will announce the movie of the week, giving you a full seven days to acquire a copy of said movie (through legal means, of course), and watch it. Then next Wednesday, we'll be starting up a news/forum thread for all manner of discussion pertaining to that movie. It's a chance to come together with your fellow Screened users and get some good conversation going about the movies near and dear to our hearts.

Aha! But that's not all. Truth be told, what I REALLY want to do is give you guys the opportunity to watch the movie right along with us. Of course, various legal ramifications prevent us from just straight up broadcasting a major motion picture over the Internet, so we won't be doing that. Instead, we're going to let you watch us watch the movie of the week, LIVE, via our Justin.tv stream next Wednesday at 4pm Pacific time. I know, that sounds super goofy, but think of us as sort of a running commentary track over the course of the film. We'll have a chat room open so people can ask questions and make comments about the film as we watch, and listen to Rorie and myself engage in the always witty, ever-informative banter that you've come to know and love from us. We'll even make it extra easy for you to sync up your movie watching with our own, for some parallel synergies, or something.

Basically, this is going to be a big social experiment that may end up being kind of hectic and harrowing, or it might be the best thing we've ever done on this site...or both. Regardless, I think it's going to be a ton of fun.

So what shall our inaugural movie be? Rorie and I discussed this long and hard, went through several severe arguments, used a bunch of random number generators, and ultimately, we came up with...
 
 
  
That's right! Cobra! The 1986 Sylvester Stallone cop movie classic. Don't own Cobra? Once again, you've got a full week to grab yourself a copy from the local rental shop, but just in case you're feeling lucky, it just so happens that we'll be giving away five copies of Cobra on region 1 DVD for this week's edition of Free Fridays. However, we're changing the rules up just a tad. In order to possibly be one of the lucky random five, you've got to be following us on Twitter, and at some point between now and Friday afternoon, retweet a minimum of one of our stories to all your friends. Of course, nobody wants to just do the minimum, right? The more you retweet us (without being too spammy about it), the better your chances of winning. And for those who plan to rent, we'll be giving away five MORE copies during the broadcast! How awesome is that?

So what say you, folks? Want to watch some Cobra with us? Then join us in this grand effort and let's have ourselves a blast!