Do not expect too much from the start of jet lag

The day we get home from America, usually disembarking the plane well before noon (it was 9:30 this time), is typically a free day in which barely anything is required of you, either physically or intellectually. You are allowed even not to unpack your bag if you don't want to, and as proof of that, at just after 6 a.m. the next morning, my bag is still sitting on our upstairs landing where I reluctantly dragged all 50 pounds of it yesterday. I mean, you at least have to get it out of the front entryway. 

My wife rarely opts for this approach. Her own method of fighting off the effects of jet lag is to do a million little jobs that seem to me like Day 3 or Day 4 jobs, but to each their own. The goal is really not to nap too much (an hour or two at the most) and then go to bed at a normal time (or as close to it as you can manage).

I decided the best way to kill some of that afternoon time was to watch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Which was clearly expecting too much from myself. 

As you may recall if you read this post, I secured myself a copy of this movie via iTunes in the hopes of watching it on the plane from Boston to San Francisco on December 28th. Because buying it was cheaper than renting it, I now own the movie. 

I had hoped to charge my laptop during the flight in order to sustain enough battery life to watch the 163-minute movie, only maybe 37 minutes of which I could watch without the battery going dead on that four-year-old device. And there was indeed an outlet at my seat, it just didn't bring the charge symbol up on my laptop when I plugged it in. I shut the laptop off right quick, wanting to make sure that if the issue were related to the laptop itself, I'd have enough battery left to give the thing its last rites when I arrived. But of course it charged fine again in California, meaning plane charging was probably only up to snuff for smaller items like phones and tablets.

I made no other attempt to watch DNETMFTEOTW (still love this abbreviation) while in California, and now returning to Australia, suddenly I am down to my final 11 days before my rankings close. That means if I want a window of time to watch the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to start early one weekday night, carve out some time on a weekend afternoon, or -- lightbulb going off -- watch it right now on the rule-free Return to Australia Day.

The good news was that from starting it at around 5 p.m., in the hope of finishing it before dinner, I was really giving myself the entire rest of the day before I went to bed to watch the whole thing. The bad news was that I required that entire time, meaning a hypothetical viewing of the new Wallace & Gromit movie at night would need to wait for another day. The worse news was that this is not the sort of action-packed, plot-driven movie that provides an effective defense against the body's desire to succumb to sleep, and the even worse news is that it is in Romanian. 

So without doing an in-depth analysis of this film and its merits, let's just say it was probably an even poorer decision to try to watch this while staving off delirium than it was to try to watch RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys starting at nearly 11 p.m. the other night after margaritas. And the outcome was significantly worse. 

From that 5 p.m. start time to when I picked myself up off my garage couch at about 7:30 to start making dinner for my kids, I watched about an hour and 40 minutes of the movie, and very little of it at a high quality of absorption. The first 45 minutes were probably the best, as I also ate a bag of Gardetto's Snack Mix that was intended for the plane but never got eaten. Can't return to my diet on Return to Australia Day. That's definitely a Day 2 job.

Once that snack was gone, I started taking the little ten-minute naps I take when I start watching a movie too late at night. I set a ten-minute timer on my phone and then fall deeply to sleep for a very short amount of time. Each time the timer goes off, I decide whether I can return to the movie or if I need another ten minutes. And of course every time yesterday I needed another ten minutes, though I knew what the goal was so I mostly returned to watching the movie, with the sort of poor quality absorption I mentioned earlier. 

I had indeed already had the nap you are allowed to take, and thank goodness for my job-doing wife, who capped it at two hours for me. I was very disoriented and thought it had only been one hour. But that meant that every little sleep I did now was, in theory, the sort of thing that might wreck my full night's sleep. So I had to fight it even if watching DNETMFTEOTW were not the goal. 

After our dinner and an episode of Futurama, in which my focus shifted to trying to keep my older son from ruining his night's sleep, I returned to the same comfortable couch in the garage to watch the final hour of the movie. A significantly large chunk of this hour is a single shot of a family being interviewed for a workplace safety video. Although I may have taken some of the ten-minute naps in which I pause the movie -- I can't really remember at this point -- I was more likely to just be nodding off, and each time I awoke, being surprised to see that the same shot was still going on. 

At this point, this was just a confirmation that the whole thrust of the movie was not really working for me. The reason I'd tried to find a good window of time to watch this movie, ultimately failing utterly in that regard, is that it shared things in common with two previous #1 movies for me. In length and in featuring a single working woman as its protagonist, the movie reminded me of 2016 #1 Toni Erdmann. In country of origin (and I guess also in length), the film reminded me of 2013 #1 Beyond the Hills. 

DNETMFTEOTW did not, unfortunately, work for me the way those movies did. In an excerpt from his review included in the film's Wikipedia entry, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes it as a "freewheeling essay-movie-slash-black-comedy," and indeed that's a good encapsulation. Sometimes a movie with that description would work for me, but in this case it did not.

In the same Wikipedia entry, I noted that the acclaim for the movie is nearly universal, meaning I'm the idiot who didn't love it the way everyone else did. However, I think I would have been that idiot even if I'd watched it wide awake in one uninterrupted sitting, so I'm not beating myself up too much for the jet lag viewing. 

We finish with two more bits of good news. One is that my long nap and my shorter naps did not impact my sleep in the slightest. I slept straight through from 10:30 until I had to relieve myself at about 3 a.m., and then slept through again until I had to relieve myself again at about 5:30. I almost never get up to go to the bathroom once during the night, let alone twice, but the sleep around that was pure and sound.

I guess the second bit of good news is sort of related to the first, which is that the "start" of jet lag referenced in the subject of this post may also be its end. Although it's too early to tell how my body will react to an first entire day back in Australia, and I do still feel the remaining vestiges of yesterday's delirium, the first hurdle of the first night's sleep has been cleared with flying colors, and that's what always worries me the most. Being awake at 2 a.m. with no feelings of realistic hope about getting back to sleep is what I fear the most from jet lag, and if it didn't happen on the first night, it doesn't seem particularly likely that it will start on the second. And hopefully that means that whatever I watch tonight will be watched with greater focus and a greater potential to be satisfying. (Will probably be my first trip to the theater to see one of the new releases I need to fit in before my deadline. Maybe Nosferatu.) 

There's also a piece of good news related to the movie itself. Since I own DNETMFTEOTW, there is every easy opportunity for me to go back and try to watch it again in the future, to see if it works better for me, to see if its long-term reputation can improve for me despite a 2024 ranking that will not be particularly elevated. In the movie, the main character played by Ilina Manolache is herself suffering from sleep deprivation as she works 16-hour days for her job collecting interview subjects for the safety video. Although that should have totally put me on her wavelength yesterday, maybe I'll be more on it when I can see things more clearly.

When buying is cheaper than renting

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is one of a handful of really long movies I am still trying to watch by January 17th. 

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.