The Inconvenience of (movie) Commitment

I'm going to pretend everyone in the world is Alex from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and you're tied to a chair, straightjacketed, wired to a data-gathering electro-computing-board-thingamajig with your eyes grossly clamped open and you cannot, under any circumstances, look away from my words.

My completely outrageous words...

May I say something completely outrageous?

I miss going to the video store.

"WHAT? But you have Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Hulu, VHX, all the content in the world just a click of the finger away...you don't even have to get off your fat, lazy tocks!"

Yes, and it's great -- but still, I miss going to the video store.

I think we have one left in my town, but I don't go there, because it's not really a video store. It's a discount kiosk for well-known titles. It's a walk-in Redbox. The rest of that story will have to wait for another post.

I miss inching down aisles of rentable DVDs for the better part of an hour, discovering titles I've never heard of and taking a chance on what might be the worst picture ever made. Taking a chance and sticking with it. From start to finish. Because that was all I had until the next trip to the video store.

But also because I think I had more patience to see something bad all the way through to the end. Sometimes, the end of a bad movie is a treasure that makes it all worth it.

Then came the Age of Instant Content! Like the way of the iPod, I was resistant at first, then the convenience of it all sucked me in. I'm weak.

Having the convenience of instant content has warped and wrinkled me into a grotesque beast that treats home entertainment like it's The Gong Show - stopping more & more pictures partway through and moving on to the next title in my queue, often while diverting my attention to check e-mail.

Cringy shivers!

I have a feeling this is a growing trend even amongst those who hold motion pictures as sacred. What do you think? Has instant content changed you? Or do you have a Zen-like focus when it comes to movie home etiquette?

I hope to slowly discipline myself back to the movie-viewer I was in the ancient olden days of 2008. Ahhhh, the memories.