That's because despite starting it two nights ago, I still haven't finished watching it.
I guess as you age a little bit, you lose a step on some of the things you used to do well. As a prime example, as I type this, I am wearing reading glasses, which I've had for maybe a year now, despite always seeing perfectly for my first half-century on the planet.
More pertinent to today's post, I appear to be losing my stamina for watching a movie at night -- and also, sometimes, my ability to pause it.
It's not that I never fall asleep during movies. I do frequently have a nap during a movie, which probably plays havoc with my actual sleep later on, but what are you going to do. However, in those situations, I have always, invariably, almost without fail, paused the movie for the entirety of my nap. Which I could often keep to a reasonable length of 15 to 20 minutes, leaving me slightly more refreshed for the home stretch.
I have, in fact, paused during the "nap" -- more like a prelude to my full night's rest -- that has gotten me each of the last two attempts on Bumblebee. It's just that after starting around 11:30 last night, it didn't end until 1:50 -- at which point I just decided to save the remaining 25 minutes of the movie for today.
However, there are some examples recently of movies I've finished the same night I watched them, with some pretty sketchy details of what happened in the second half of the movie.
On Tuesday night, for example, I watched and loved Paper Moon. However, there's a lot I don't remember about how the father and the daughter he refuses to acknowledge is his own -- played by real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal -- went from scamming people on bible sales to the moonshine business. There's some stuff related to an exotic dancer played by the incomparable Madeleine Kahn that is also pretty fuzzy.
Across Sunday and Monday, I feel like I saw all of Abigail, but it did take me two nights to do it.
Then last week it was Another Simple Favor, which I wasn't really liking anyway, so I didn't consider this such a loss. And though I was there for the very end, I couldn't remember what had happened with the movie's main villain, played by Alison Janney. I had to look it up online later on, and it wasn't that I couldn't remember what happened with her -- I'd never seen it. And I couldn't be sure if it was just a crucial 30 seconds of sleep or if there's a whole ten- to 15-minute chunk of that movie I didn't properly experience.
I suppose this is not going to get better anytime soon. My younger son, who says the internet doesn't work properly in his room, doesn't clear out of the living room until 10 o'clock most nights, and even if he did, my wife would still be doing household chores until at least that time, and I feel like a heel if I don't try to keep pace with her. Plus, I'm getting older and probably sleepier, though life is making my pretty damn sleepy these days due to my busiest period ever at work.
So if I'm not going to start watching movies earlier, and if I'm already trying to watch shorter movies to compensate for my likely failure to finish them in one evening, then not only am I missing out on the longer movies that might be an organic part of my viewing schedule, we might start seeing a lot of weeks where I watch three movies rather than six movies.
Which most people would consider fine. I'm not most people. And especially in the short run, I am trying to watch as many movies as I can. For reasons I won't tell you now because they will become clear in another six weeks, I am trying to watch another 40 movies before the end of June in order to accomplish something, viewing-wise, that I "need" to accomplish by the end of that month. So yeah, I'll be trying to squeeze in as many cheeky afternoon movies as I can until then.
As for Bumblebee ... although it's unfair to make a final pronouncement on it, since I haven't finished watching it, I'll say I was hoping it would be a lot more different from a standard Transformers movie than it has been. I mean, it is different for sure ... but it still has Transformers in it, which is pretty damning to the prospects of any movie.
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