Well, despite the initial difficulties getting the free movies from Best Buy’s CinemaNow promotion, I have to say that in the end I’m pretty pleased by how it turned out. This was helped by Best Buy paying attention to the problems of having everybody slam the server at once, and the limited availability; after a few days they switched to having people send in their email addresses, and then a staggered send-out of emailed codes. Further, they increased the number of codes given out as time went on; from 5000 originally, to 10,000, to 20K, and 30K on the last day. As a result, although I missed Day 7 (the window of opportunity changed on each day, and day 7’s came at 6:00 AM my time), I still wound up with 7 free movies out of the possible 8. I have no room for complaint, especially as most of the movies I got are ones I’d been wanting to see for some time. If Best Buy chooses to do a promotion like this again, I think people will be reasonably happy if it’s handled the same way as the last few days.
Below are the movies I got out of this promotion. I will be reviewing all of them on the site eventually; a few I already have. Most of them will have to wait until January, however; between seasonal offerings and a number of films on my Hulu queue expiring at the end of the year, I have a lot to get to in the current month. Since these can wait, they will.
- Sherlock Holmes
- Blood Diamond
- Elf
- The Goonies
- Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
- Cool Hand Luke
- The Fugitive
Blood Diamond and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang are the only ones I’m unsure on; every other day there was something to pick out that was already on my “to see” list. But both seem to have been well-received, so I’m feeling optimistic.
Morgan on Media 
They had a bonus day yesterday, so I wound up with one more: Christmas Vacation, which is one of my favorites. I still plan on having it on DVD one of these days — a little more portable than a 1.6 GB computer file — but this will do for now.