A thing I never do

Last night I was trying to watch this week's episode of Survivor, a task that requires me to switch to our HDMI 2 input and our Fetch box, which is what gives us access to a variety of free-to-air stations, their on-demand content that can be accessed for free any time, and any number of streaming apps, the only one of which we need to get through here is Stan. (We access Disney+, Kanopy and Amazon through AppleTV, and Netflix has its own button on our remote control.)

In order to get to these options, you first must get into a random free-to-air channel -- I say "random" though we probably chose it at some point in the past. We never change it because we basically never watch anything as it is actually happening. 

Well it turns out, the Fetch was having some kind of issue and couldn't load Survivor, or anything other than this free-to-air channel. Which was playing the last 20 minutes of A Few Good Men.

It reminded me of the olden times, when you might come in on a movie already in progress and just watch it to the end, just because you like it. My go-to option of a movie where I would do this is always Dumb and Dumber, even though that actual thing probably only happened once or twice if at all.

I usually don't like to do this, though, because ever since I've started keeping track of when I rewatch movies -- in other words, keeping track of every viewing I ever have, since it goes without saying I keep track of new viewings -- I've become anal about what constitutes a rewatch. In order to record it on my list, I want to watch most or all of it. And if I'm not going to record it, maybe just don't confuse matters by watching only some of it.

The other thing is that I don't want a random partial viewing to delay a proper full viewing of a movie I've been wanting to rewatch. Might as well just wait until I actually have the time to sit down with it from start to finish.

But as I saw A Few Good Men -- a film I liked, but never held in any special regard -- approaching its climax, I thought, "Might as well loosen my rules a bit."

My reasoning was simple and twofold:

1) A Few Good Men is a movie I had no immediate plans to rewatch, and it is conceivable I will never rewatch it.

2) It's so close to the end that it cannot be possibly be confused for a complete viewing.

Plus there's the fact that the most iconic, most repeatedly quoted part of the movie was still ahead of me:

"I want the truth!"

"You can't handle the truth!"

Those lines have been so often heard out of context that I thought it would be sort of instructive to actually remind myself what led up to them.

Little did I remember that there was some other good stuff here in terms of dialogue, like the extended rant from Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) that follows "You can't handle the truth," and then later on being badgered into spitting out "You're goddamn right I did!", thereby confessing to culpability in the death of one of the soldiers under his command.

It was fun and more than a little nostalgia-inducing to watch all this, to see these actors so young, especially Tom Cruise and Nicholson. But then of course there's also Demi Moore, whom I recently saw and loved in one of my favorite movies of the year so far, The Substance.

The experience was a reminder of another part of watching movies on free-to-air television: ads. Although there was really quite little left of A Few Good Men, they had to interrupt the final courtroom scenes, at a point that I don't even think made particular sense, to give us what seemed like five minutes of ads. If I hadn't been so close to the end, I might have just flipped away and found something on a service that was actually functioning properly. Given that I knew the credits were about to roll, I endured them.