Angry at Netflix (AGAIN)

I take back the small praise I gave Netflix for starting to caption a few of their Instant View titles.  Now I’m back to being angry at them and seriously debating whether I should cancel my subscription and switch over to using the Red Box $1/day/DVD system at our local Kroger.

When I got up today, I saw a red Netflix envelope sitting in front of the door to our garage, ready to go out with the mail.  I was glad that Brandt had finally gotten a chance to watch his movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which he’s had for over a month.  We have a ‘family plan’ on Netflix, where I get 2 movies at a time and Brandt gets one.  Since he isn’t usually a fan of blockbuster, Hollywood films, he almost always gets documentaries.

I asked him how he liked it (I’d seen it with my mom when it first came out, and thought it was wonderful).  He said,

“I watched the first 10 minutes and gave up.  It only has subtitles in Spanish.” 

This made me SO MAD, because this is the FOURTH time in just three months that he’s gotten a documentary that wasn’t subtitled. 

So I went to the Netflix website to look up whether they actually say that there are no English subtitles on the Enron movie.  Under “DVD Details,” it doesn’t even mention subtitles.  However, for details of the Blu-Ray version, it lists “Subtitles: Spanish and English SDH” (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing).  This made me even angrier. 

And to make matters worse, the movie is available on Instant View for free, but since there are only 4 seasons of Lost currently captioned on Instant View and nothing else, Brandt had to order the DVD to get captioning.  Which it didn’t have! 

I went back to some of the other documentaries that weren’t subtitled, to see whether Netflix listed the lack of them.  For The Right Stuff, it claims that there are subtitles in English, French, and Spanish, although there actually weren’t any.  Brandt was able to watch it by listening through wireless earphones plugged into the speakers, and “could understand most of it.”  And for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, he could understand it pretty well through the earphones as well.  At least for that movie, Netflix listed “Subtitles: None.”

Brandt tried watching the Enron movie with his earphones, but couldn’t understand any of it.  I tried to report a problem with it through my account, but it only gave me 7 options and of course “lack of English subtitles” was not one of them, and they don’t have an “Other” where you can write in your specific problem.  So I selected “DVD is damaged, scratched or unplayable,” then opened up the envelope and stuck a very angry Post-It note in with the DVD, demanding a refund for the movie.

Since Netflix no longer allows any sort of Customer Service contact over e-mail, my choices are to either call (which I HATE because I have trouble understanding a lot of people over the phone these days), or writing a letter which may or may not ever reach its intended target.  I think I’ll try writing a letter first.  I’m also going to write to Magnolia Home Entertainment, which produced the DVD, and ask them why on earth they didn’t include English SDH subtitles.