I've got a little thing for Sydney Sweeney. I don't mind admitting it to you, dear reader. I might not like to admit it to my wife, but she is not one of my readers so we can just discuss it among ourselves.
It's nothing to be ashamed about, really. To consume popular entertainment is to come into regular contact with people you find attractive, none of whom are realistic romantic partners for you because a) you will never meet them, and you are probably 20 years older than they are and far less attractive than they are, so they would never go for you anyway; b) they may not even be compatible with your sexual identification. I identify as heterosexual but that doesn't mean I dont also have a thing for Ryan Gosling.
So yeah, Sydney Sweeney has turned my head the past few years. I can't deny it.
The thing is, I don't really want it to be obvious to the people who share the same streaming accounts. And that's just what feels like has been happening by the refusal of Sweeney's movie Reality to leave the front page of our Amazon Prime account.
Now, when I saw Reality in December in order to rank it for 2023, I had to rent it from Amazon, because it never popped up on iTunes. I don't have a preference for one place to spend $4.99 over another place to spend $4.99, but I do generally consider iTunes to be my first port of call. Perhaps HBO, which produced Reality, has a friendship with Amazon that it does not have with Apple, because I checked just now and it is still not on iTunes.
I can assure you that I watched the whole movie. It's only 82 minutes long. I don't specifically remember how it ends, but that was a busy time of my viewing calendar. I wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of even movies I liked more than Reality -- which ended up ranked 34th out of the 168 movies I ranked in 2023 -- because some of that late-game viewing period is always a blur.
Amazon, however, does not think I finished watching. And therefore, Reality has stayed in my Continue Watching queue ever since, the big accusing eyes of Sydney Sweeney staring out at me every time I come on the service.
I may have switched devices halfway through the movie, which is the only explanation I can think of for this state of permanent paralysis that resulted. I've definitely started watching a movie on, let's say, Netflix on one device, and finished it on another. When I return to the first device, Netflix will still think I should resume the movie from where I stopped on that device -- even though it already resumed it from the correct spot on the other device. This usually clears itself up over time, but with Reality on Amazon, it was not doing so.
This would be an annoyance with any movie. With Reality, it was an actual problem -- or so my guilty conscience told me.
And the problem is this: There was no way to clear the movie from Continue Watching.
You can't click in to it try to play out whatever part of the movie it thinks you haven't watched. This was a rental, so if I wanted to try to do that, I'd have to pay the rental price again. And though Reality was my 34th favorite movie of 2023, I'm not in a hurry to see it again, especially not this soon. My conscience isn't guilty enough to pay the rental price just to clear it.
After a couple months it became clear that this movie was going to still be on my Continue Watching on into the next decade, so I looked up online how you can clear something from this queue. And there is a way that's easy enough, so the next time I logged into Amazon on our TV, I did as instructed: I did a long-press on the play button on our AppleTV remote, and was presented with three options of what to do with this movie, one of which was to hide it.
That worked.
But now I am "hiding" Sydney Sweeney, which is even more damning, perhaps, if it is ever discovered. Amazon tells you that the title will no longer appear in Continue Watching, but you can still find it by searching for it.
So, it'll probably never come up.
But one day, years from now, Amazon will offer an easy way to show you everything you've been hiding, and my wife will stumble into that area, only to see the single title that my secret shame forced me to consign there.
Maybe I ought to hide a Ryan Gosling movie as well, just to be on the safe side.
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