About a year ago Red Box put one of its kiosks in the Safeway I regularly visit, so I started renting movies there. At the time the fee was $1.00 overnight.

About six months ago the Red Box kiosk was replaced by a Blockbuster kiosk, no reason given by Safeway. It didn’t much matter to me since I hadn’t paid much attention to the breadth of selection as long as the fee remained $1.00 for an overnight rental, which it did except for really recent releases. Those were often $2.99.

Yesterday I was at Longs Drugs and noticed it had a Red Box, so I thought I’d see if there was anything we hadn’t already rented from the blue box at Safeway (Blockbuster seems to have a million Jud Apatow movies or the like, along with a lot of animated films; neither Mom nor I care a lick for either). Red Box’s price has gone up to $1.25 for an overnight rental.

It’s a pretty good deal, I think, because most of these films wouldn’t make it to television anytime soon. But it’s surely hit-or-miss as to whether you’ll find anything you like. We’ve seen The Town, Jane Eyre, Salt, Up in the Air, and maybe a dozen others, most of which we knew nothing about when I rented them (that’s the advantage of the low rental price; if you don’t like it you feel like you only blew a buck or so, which is better than $8.00 at the theater).

This week I rented The Tree of Life, and I’m not going to review it. It’s a film which has to be seen to be described, and I don’t want to sway anyone’s idea of it in advance.