The most basic Dell notebook is only $489 (shipping is free), and that is more than enough for what you want to do. I'm not sure if this link will work for you, but if not just goto their website at Dell.com and click on the notebooks, and the cheapest one is on the right:
http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs.
Since all you want to do is watch movies and surf the Internet you don't need any heavy or powerful processors or graphic cards. Watching movies and surfing the net aren't really memory intensive either. You could even get by with an old dinosaur of a computer (like those less than 1 GHz and even 256MB RAM), I'd say.
Jam it back in, in the dark.