Rather, I had planned to watch three different movies and a fourth that I did ultimately watch, but in a different format than I had planned to watch it.
I was all set to start with the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which would seem like a totally random selection for this mini Father's Day marathon except that I'd finished reading the book just the day before. In fact, I had planned to write here about my expected Benedict Cumberbatch double feature, as I was also going to watch this year's The Courier. No, Cumberbatch is not in Mansfield Park, though at 23 years old in 1999 he would have been the appropriate age to play one of the Bertram children. Actually, what happened was that when I was reading Mansfield Park, I pictured Cumberbatch in my mind for the character of Edmund Bertram. (The character is actually played by Johnny Lee Miller.)
I was also going to do this month's edition of my blog series I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, that being Synecdoche, New York.
The fourth movie was always going to be WarGames, and it still was -- actually the second movie, chronologically. This gets me into aforementioned format in which I had planned to watch it, which is really what I want to talk about today.
It turns out you can't watch iTunes movies through your projector. Not my projector, anyway.
I'm sure you are as surprised as I was.
I kind of figured that as long as you had the projector hooked up to your computer, the projector would display whatever was on the computer screen. This is not the case.
When I started Mansfield Park and could not see anything on screen, at first I attributed this to a very dim opening credits sequence. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon and the light was only imperfectly being blocked from getting in to our garage. Once the credits were over and the movie got into its unending succession of daytime scenes, I'd be fine. Or so I figured.
But I thought it was really curious that I could see absolutely nothing on screen, and when there was some daylight a minute later, the condition persisted.
Befuddled and more than a little bit annoyed, I googled it, and it appears that iTunes movies will not play on certain digital projectors. This flummoxed me. Certain older digital projectors, the article said. Mine is less than a year old but it is also not the most expensive version on the market (not by a long shot). Neither is it it the cheapest (not by a long shot). As hard as it was to believe that I had spent as much money on this projector as I had, in order for this to be one of its practical limitations, this was the only explanation that made any sense about why I couldn't see what I was expecting to see.
I can't even remember what the technical explanation for this was, and can't be bothered to google it again.
There was some lingering uncertainty about whether it might be just this one particular file having the issue, so just to be sure, I risked starting another. I say "risked" because once you start your rental, you are committing yourself to watching it within the next 48 hours if you don't want to let it expire. And since you paid for it, usually you don't. Through the Mansfield misstep, I'd already added a Monday night movie to my viewing schedule and I didn't want to add a second.
WarGames made the perfect sacrificial lamb.
My iTunes rental of WarGames represented what I believe is a personal first: Paying money to rent a movie that I already owned. Why would I do such a thing? Well I'll explain.
I had planned to have only my computer hooked up to the projector throughout the day, which also included five hours of baseball in the morning. Just seemed easier. I own WarGames on DVD, but it's an American DVD, meaning it requires a multi-regional DVD/BluRay player. Which we have, but it's the kind that's part of your home entertainment setup, not the kind that connects to a laptop. I do have such a USB DVD/BluRay player, but of course it is not region free.
So even though we own WarGames, which I had already decided was my choice for a Father's Day family movie, I paid the $3.99 rental for the convenience of having it on iTunes.
This of course also made it a good tester movie. Even if I started the 48-hour rental window, it didn't matter, because we own the movie anyway.
Well, it didn't make a difference. The problem still existed.
Okay, time to call an audible. I did what I had previously considered such an inconvenience to do: brought my multi-regional DVD player out to the garage. Really, it was quite easy. Should have done it in the first place.
So three movies from my collection -- Wanderlust, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and This is Spinal Tap -- took the place of Mansfield Park, The Courier and Synecdoche, New York. It's just as well, as I had a half viewing of Star Trek IV about six years ago and it's nice to have made it all the way through this one. Plus I was surprised to note it had been more than eight years since my last Tap viewing -- quite a long time for a film in my top ten on Flickchart. Back then I watched it twice in two years, so I guess I still had a lingering impression that I'd seen it recently. (It had been only five years since my second viewing of Wanderlust. This was my third.)
Mansfield Park? It did get watched on Monday night.
Disappointing. The book was much better. (Gee, what a surprise.) Having finished reading so recently, I was in a unique position to assess the changes they'd made in this adaptation, many of which had to do with tightening up a 470-page book. I get that you need to do that, but some of the choices really sacrificed the character depth, while certain characters that I thought were important had been excised entirely. Plus there were too many instances of taking something that might have been deep, deep subtext in Austen's book and turning it into text. I'd go into detail if I thought there were any chance you had read Mansfield Park, recently or ever.
Regarding the projector, it's really annoying to learn of these limitations, but I guess it's better to find out now than in a situation where it really matters: one of my Friday-to-Sunday marathons at a hotel, where I can't just pop over and get substitute DVDs from my collection. Last time I streamed most of the movies I watched, but what if the hotel WiFi is in the crapper? iTunes would have been my backup, and in that case, it would have been a poor backup indeed.
My last one of those was last November, and I usually do about one per year. I'd be due for another but the current lockdown is making that considerably less likely.
So movies in my garage on Father's Day will have to do ... for now.
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