Paying for random rewatches

I usually give my iTunes account a bit of a rest at the end of January. I've spent a fair amount on rentals in the previous four months, some at the premium rental price of $19.99 (though only one this past year), and it's time to watch movies I can see for free for a while, given that I'm suddenly without any sense of urgency in the movies I watch for another six months until I start ramping up for my next year's list.

And so it was unusual that I found myself paying for a random rewatch on Saturday night.

I'm not talking about a random rewatch in the sense of my periodic series on this blog, Random Rewatches, where I use a random number generator to find a movie anywhere in my Flickchart to watch again. Most recently I watched Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and I haven't yet gotten to the next one I drew, Time Bandits -- a favorite I watched as recently as 2020.

No, this sort of random rewatch is when a movie pops into your head that you really want to see again, and then you see it again. 

Riley Stearns' Dual would fit the description pretty well. It's not totally random in that it was a movie I really liked -- #10 of 2022 -- but it's not an established favorite, the watching of which seems logical when you are finally cut loose from your end-of-year obligations and can watch whatever you want.

I can't remember exactly what caused Dual to elbow its way into my brain in the past few weeks, but I can tell you what caused it to stick there: its availability on Netflix. As soon as my 2023 ranking ended, I was going to pop this thing on, due to the convenience of its accessibility.

Or so I thought.

When I tried to watch Dual on Friday night, it wasn't on Netflix. Which made me remember that although I watched it on Netflix in the end of my 2022 ranking year -- in fact, it was the most recent movie I'd seen that made my top ten -- it was not a Netflix production, which made its availability on the streaming service ephemeral and subject to the whims of licensing agreements.

I pivoted to Orion and the Dark on Friday night, and Saturday morning I checked my other streaming services for Dual. 

Nope. Nowhere.

It was available to rent from iTunes for $3.99, but had my desire to see the movie reached enough of an intensity to supersede the convenience of its accessibility?

I discovered that it had.

This movie weekend didn't feel like it would be complete without Dual, and so I did indeed purchase a rental, even though I was at least unofficially on an iTunes spending freeze.

This occurrence is probably not worth its own post, but then again, you could say that about a lot of the things I write. When you've published more than 3,100 posts, they can't all be winners.

But I think I did write it mostly to say two things:

1) Dual was as good as I remembered it, maybe better, so if you haven't seen it, you should;

2) Pay the money for something you want to see. Life is short. Watch what you want.