A lot of my regular movie-watching scenarios do not afford a good chance to watch long movies. I either have to start really early in the evening, thereby reducing my role in winding down our children and our house for the night, or I have to block out a window of time on a weekend afternoon, which has some of the same complications. Simply put, I will not have many more opportunities to do this for the 2 hour and 43-minute Radu Jude movie before my deadline for releasing my 2024 rankings from first to worst.
Fortunately, my time before then involves several irregular movie-watching scenarios, including two plane trips that perfectly accommodate that length of movie.
The trouble is, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not the sort of movie that is usually available on a commercial flight.
Of course, nowadays it doesn't need to be. We can watch whatever we want on our own devices, assuming it's not, like, porn or something.
The trouble then is my own device.
I'm typing this post on a laptop that is now more than four years old, and though it's doing okay for being that age, it's not strong in a couple of key areas -- including its battery life. But I vastly prefer this as an option for watching a movie on my own device, in part because I don't even have a tablet with me, in part because my phone is too small, and in part because this is where I have iTunes set up, and iTunes remains one of my primary sources for renting movies. I'm not talking about the streaming version, I'm talking about opening the iTunes software on my computer, going into the Apple store, and renting a movie. And because I need to watch it without internet, downloading it is also part of that process.
But my laptop will run out of battery way before 2 hours and 43 minutes have elapsed.
So the likely scenario for me actually watching DNETMFTEOTW on our flight to San Francisco Saturday morning is if the plane has a way for me to charge my laptop in flight. I'm pretty sure I saw the familiar three prongs of a charger symbol on one of the flights we took last week, I just don't know if it was the international one or the domestic one.
But if I've got that charge, I'm watching that movie. If I don't, I'll watch it when I get back to Melbourne. After all, I've got 30 days from the date of rental.
Then again, this is not a rental, and that leads to the thing I actually want to talk about today.
So as it turned out, I had just been discussing with my sister how I have a funny attitude toward renting movies vs. buying movies. Because I have a collector's mentality and don't want to buy something unless it is a purposeful addition to my collection -- in other words, a movie I have vetted and know I love -- I would much rather rent something than buy something, even if they are the same price. The logic is a bit fuzzy, especially when you have an unlimited amount of cloud storage for these purchases. (It may not actually be unlimited, but it seems that way, at least when you haven't bought a lot of movies this way.) But I think about having had to buy Black Adam for my kids to have something exciting to watch on New Year's Eve a few years ago, because it was only available for purchase at the time. It still pops up in the collection of movies I own on iTunes, and I still have not watched it.
When I was looking at movies I needed to watch, especially those I might be able to review before I can get back to Australia to watch them, I looked at the critically acclaimed Anora from Sean Baker. I might have been willing to rent it for the premium $19.99 rental price, but when I saw it was only available for purchase at that price, I balked. Silly logic, maybe -- but fortunately, logic that only holds up to that certain somewhat arbitrary point of being the same price.
Because what do I do if the purchase price is less than the rental price?
Well then I buy the movie.
That's what happened with DNETMFTEOTW. When it came to the option of watching the movie one time for $5.99 or unlimited times for $4.99 -- but in all likelihood, still only one time -- I had to buy it. I may have funny rules, but I'm not the kind of guy who will throw away a dollar for no reason.
I do wonder how that particular set of circumstances arises, and the only thing I can think is that the two prices are governed by two sets of considerations and do not check each other for internal consistency. A rental price for a movie is likely established as a result of some certain amount of time since it has played in movie theaters, whereas a sale price is likely looking at how many units are moving -- in terms of actual purchases -- and a desire to get more of them moving to turn more of a profit on that side of the docket. There is probably no one who checks that these two prices are in logical conversation with one another.
And so it is that Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now the fifth in a very slowly growing gallery of movies I own on iTunes, which also include the following:
Black Adam (as discussed)
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (believe this was only available for purchase the year I needed to rank it; still have only watched that one time)
Duane Hopwood (only available for purchase when I watched it for a movie challenge some five years ago; I liked it a fair amount and could potentially watch it again)
Major League (an all-time favorite, though I still think it only joined my collection because there was no way to watch it for free at the time I wanted to watch it, sometime within the last decade. It has subsequently become available on streaming)
What will be the long-term fate of DNETMFTEOTW in terms of potential rewatches vs. just taking up (cloud) space? I hope to find this out in about 24 hours, and you'll know more when I release my rankings.
For what it's worth, in the same purchase session I was willing to spend $9.99 on a rental of We Live in Time, which will arrive in Australian cinemas only just before my deadline, so getting to it now was important. Or would have been, if I had ended up liking it as much as I usually like movies featuring Florence Pugh.
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