Watching Tuesday to mourn Tuesday

Every loss is like a little death.

The most despair I've felt recently, outside of Tuesday's loss, was when the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, the ultimate proof that the experience of loss is utterly subjective. It was a luxury to feel sad over that outcome, as it really had no bearing on, was no commentary on, the world we live in. It was just a guy bummed out that the team he loved could not get over that last hump. (A hump they did make it over two years later.) Nevertheless, I remember telling my family, even a few days later, that I knew it would be okay eventually.

Ha.

The results of the presidential election should have thrown me into much deeper despair than that, and my intellectual mind knows that it's in there, somewhere. It may come out in some strange way later that I'm not expecting. I think of 2016, when I broke down sobbing while watching the very thematically appropriate The Purge: Election Year, an outpouring of emotion so profound that I ended up ranking the film in my top ten for the year just for touching me so deeply, something it likely never would have done in more even times. 

But I've continued to do well with the "putting one foot in front of the other" pragmatic approach that I espoused in my last post. Mind over matter. Mind over matter. It's working, and my mind has been plagued by nothing worse than a distant sense of disappointment as I have been able to get joy out of the small things in life.

As you recall, I returned on Friday night to watching movies, and selected something that I thought didn't have much chance to be a great love or a great disappointment. On Saturday, I dared to go for a choice that had the potential to reach the same rarefied air as The Purge: Election Year, my year-end top ten.

But it couldn't be just any acclaimed 2024 film. I wanted it to be on-the-nose in terms of dealing with despair, for better or worse.

So I went with Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, a film that deals exclusively with actual death. It also deals with Death with a capital D, as a character in the film in the form of a talking macaw parrot. 

I'd wanted to see this for many months now, as at least one of the Filmspotting hosts listed in his top five films of the year as of the midpoint of the year, in a tradition they've been doing for several years. Actually it was their guest who for sure listed it, but at least one of the hosts may have as well as they all admired it greatly. It was also one of my potential viewings at MIFF this year, only the timing didn't work out.

But choosing this movie had other reasoning. For one, it seemed like an intentional echo to the movie I watched a few days after the 2016 election, Arrival, which also deals with the death of a child. And though that movie has never quite impacted me the way it has impacted other people, I recognized that watching it during a time of mourning was probably the best way of getting something out of it, not the worst way, as it might be with other films. 

Then there was the fact that Tuesday stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a huge champion of progressive causes. I got a number of emails from Louis-Dreyfus during campaign season -- maybe even before campaign season -- and I know she's hurting right now, just like the rest of us.

Well, my reaction to Tuesday was similar to my reaction to Arrival. I was very impressed by its craft. I understood it to be touching without actually feeling my own emotions well up to the same degree. And I ended up on a mere 3.5 star rating on Letterboxd.

Movies that take big swings like Tuesday can impress you with their big swings even while failing to penetrate through in that way you are hoping. I find that a person's feelings about a movie can be boiled down most succinctly to "when you know, you know." In other words, you shouldn't have to convince yourself that a movie worked like gangbusters for you. Gangbusters is a state of affairs that cannot be faked.

And so although I toyed with the four-star rating for Tuesday, I decided this was a conflict between "should" and "did." I thought I should love Tuesday, but in actual reality, I did not. 

Some of you would, and therefore, now is probably a good time to watch it. There's some really big ideas in here, and they are all in concert with how progressives are feeling right now. There's very direct textual material about coming to grips with an impending loss, and then when the loss actually occurs, figuring out how to soldier on rather than letting it consume you. In fact, the film's very final shot is probably the kick in the pants all liberals need right now. 

The period of immediate mourning is not over for most of us. We probably need that kick in the pants a week from now, rather than right now.

But when you're ready for it, Tuesday is ready to give it to you.

Why I prefer Antebellum to get Get Out

Note: I wrote this a few days ago when I was still in the immediate aftermath of watching and loving Antebellum. My initial enthusiasm has cooled just a little bit, but I still feel it is a very strong piece of work that people should see. I considered not posting this but I will just go ahead. I've been on the record in the past as not loving Get Out as much as some people did, so this doesn't really change that, though I recognize it seems a bit of an inflammatory position, especially when some people have serious concerns with Antebellum. Anyway, I'll just go with it and let you tell me why I'm off base.

Besides, I like the side by side photo of Janelle Monae and Daniel Kaluuya I made for the post. 

It looks like Antebellum is a hill I'm going to be dying on, so I might as well go down in a bloody blaze of glory.

SPOILERS to follow for Antebellum. Really, don't read this unless you've seen the movie. 

I suppose there are also spoilers for Get Out, but you've already seen that. 

Antebellum clearly has a lot in common with Get Out, a reality made all the more clear by the fact that the two films have some of the same producers. (I thought Jordan Peele might actually be a producer on Antebellum, but he is not.) 

Thematically, the similiarity is quite striking. Both movies deal with Black people being kidnapped by crazy white people who intend to do something truly demented and violent with them, while bombarding them with microaggressions on the way down. They are both called horror movies, though I think that's a little more the case with Get Out than with Antebellum. I guess it just depends how wide a net you are willing to cast when discussing the expansive genre of horror. And anyway, there is plenty of horrifying stuff that happens in Antebellum.

The key difference for me, in terms of the films' relative effectiveness, is the nature of that horrifying stuff.

In Antebellum, a group of men (primarily men) in Louisiana have gotten together, under the direction of a local senator, to kidnap Black people and enslave them in a fastidiously recreated 1860s plantation, which is the secret back portion of a Civil War reenactment park. They make their slaves pick cotton in the fields, prepare meals, hang laundry, and submit to whatever sexual perversions they want to heap on them, with the threat of branding or even death as punishment for failing to comply. Equally chillingly, they silence their slaves -- they are not allowed to speak to one another, with the same punishments as a consequence, which is designed to prevent them from organizing and rising up.

In Get Out, a group of people (equal mix of genders) in New England have gotten together, under the direction of a mad scientist and a hypnotist, to kidnap Black people so the consciousnesses of elderly white people can be permanently inserted into their brains, meaning that these elderly white people will live on in their bodies. 

The difference is that the first is a thing that I believe could actually happen, and the second is not.

The reveal of what was actually going on in Get Out was the part where the film lost me the first time. Not only was it far-fetched and implausible as a scientific procedure, I also had a hard time figuring out the film's commentary on racism. The characters in that film are simultaneously disdainful of the people they kidnap while also, on some level, wanting to be them. I could never quite make sense of that message. If the main goal is to be youthful again, and if you are perniciously racist and divorced from an ordinary sense of morality anyway, why not just kidnap young white people?

I did like Get Out better on the second time, and I do think it's a very good film. But I still have not been able to fully reconcile some of its core elements. 

Antebellum is almost certainly the less subtle work, but it has the greater pull on me right now due its sheer plausibility. If there are not already deranged people who kidnap Black people south of the Mason-Dixon line to make them slaves, then this movie could give them the idea to start doing it. (Which is not, in itself, a reason not to make a movie -- otherwise we'd have no movies about terrorist plots.)

I think back to another unsubtle work that really shattered me emotionally when it came out, which was The Purge: Election Year in 2016. I reacted so strongly not only because it was two weeks after Trump was elected, but because I did believe that there could be a future branching off from our current timeline -- one we'll hopefully avoid now that these films have been made -- where a fascist government could design an annual night of lawless violence with the design of exterminating minorities. 

None of the things in these three movies are actually something that could happen, I hope, and my hope is inspired by a basic faith in humanity that is an outgrowth of my fundamental optimism. 

But I think the two that are slightly more likely to happen have a more profound effect on me because, you know, they could happen. 

I guess someone could invent the brain-swapping technology too, but for now that is total science fiction. 

What I haven't been able to wrap my head around, now that I have been reading more reactions and hearing from some friends about their thoughts, is why Get Out is so clearly the superior examination of the subject matter of outrageous scenarios that make real commentary on racism. I have learned that some people find Antebellum ignorant and racist itself. And though I know this type of thing is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to examining the intentions behind a film, I will stop to remind everyone that one of the two directors of Antebellum is Black. That does not mean he still cannot make a racist film, but it does mean he almost certainly did not set out to.

So yes, I may be dying on this hill, but at least I have eight other positive reviews on Metacritic, and hopefully a sizeable portion of other positive reviews out there in the wilderness, implicitly testifying that I am not crazy.

A friend who really hates this movie suggested that I not write this post, because when you misunderstand a movie that he believes is racist, it's even worse when you are white. As I am.

So with the caveat that there may be something fundamentally racist about this movie that I am not understanding, I put it out there: I do find this to be the more compelling exploration of its theme than Get Out.  

If you are one of those who hates Antebellum, I hope at least you know my appreciation for it has the same good intentions I believe its directors had when they made it. 

Roundabout Purge completism on Halloween

I have an interesting history with the Purge series.

I loathed the first. The first movie, mind you, not The First Purge. That was the fourth movie.

I gave The Purge only 1.5 stars on Letterboxd, and ranked it #122 out of 128 films I saw in 2013. It might have been worse had I not given the film points for introducing a really fertile concept into the cinematic landscape. I don't remember a huge number of the details. But I do remember I couldn't get past the idea that a young man would use the excuse of the purge to try to kill his girlfriend's father (Ethan Hawke). That helps ingratiate you to your girlfriend how, exactly?

It was three years until I saw my next Purge movie, which was not the next Purge movie. I skipped over The Purge: Anarchy in 2014 as the bad taste of The Purge was still in my mouth. But by 2016 I had heard some encouraging things about The Purge: Election Year, though I still would have preferred to see the movies in sequence. What caused me to break the sequence was standing at a video kiosk I had walked 15 minutes to reach during my lunch hour, but not finding the movie I had expected to find. I was unwilling to come away empty-handed so Election Year it was.

You may remember how this one turned out for me. The movie ended up in my top ten for the year as it prompted an emotional breakdown during one scene, seeing as how I watched it about two weeks after the actual election. 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

It was another 3+ years until my next Purge movie, which was the next Purge movie this time. Though I guess my newfound Purge love had died down enough that I failed to see The First Purge during the year of its release (2019) in order to rank it with that year's movies. I did watch it earlier this year, and was again captivated by the left wing vs. right wing politics that have increasingly been central to the series as it has gone along. I've actually written about The First Purge twice (here and here). Four stars on Letterboxd.

As I now liked -- strongly liked -- 67% of the Purge movies I'd seen, it was about time to finally get to The Purge: Anarchy. You know, that oh-so-common 1-3-4-2 sequence to watching the movies in a (so far) four-movie franchise. But it took a suggestion from my wife to actually get it on the docket.

We were scrolling through the stunningly large collection of horror movies on Amazon when my wife said "Oooh!" upon seeing The Purge: Anarchy. All four of the movies are available for streaming on Amazon, so I think it was just a coincidence that she happened to stumble upon the one that would correctly be the next in the sequence for her. The titles don't give away their sequence, and my wife does not keep track of things like the order of movies in series she doesn't pay attention to.

She immediately got the idea to watch it on Halloween, which I thought was sort of funny as I don't really think of these as straight horror movies. They are more like social commentaries that use some of the iconography of horror. But as she has become increasingly interested in TV rather than my beloved movies, I'm not one to shut down any suggestion she makes, especially since I hadn't yet seen this. (But likely would have acquiesed to watching either of the later two movies as well, given how much I like them, and may on some future date, Halloween or otherwise.)

Given my injection of new enthusiasm for this series, I had hoped to like The Purge: Anarchy more. However, it ended up with only two stars on Letterboxd.

It starts out auspiciously enough, introducing the characters as they prepare for where they're supposed to be before the annual 12-hour window of lawlessness begins. During this time we are also introduced to a chilling gang of masked vigilantes, one of whom wears a white mask with the word GOD scrawled on the forehead. These appeared to be people of color, which worried me a little bit, but I wanted to see where it went.

Well, where it went with these characters kind of symbolizes the disappointing downturn of the movie on the whole. Yes, there are people of color under these masks -- and the one wearing the GOD mask was, surprise surprise, Lakeith Stanfield, before most of us would have known who he was. The good news? They are not the murderous psychopaths that the opening of the movie makes them seem. The bad news? They are trying to gather innocent citizens caught out on the streets and deliver them to the right-wing rich leaders of the NFFA (New Founding Fathers of America), for a hunt. Yes, Stanfield's character says they are really in it just for the money.

So yeah, I see why a friend of mine thinks the Purge series is racist -- even if the later movies work to correct that impression.

This movie also has an equivalent to the bizarre attempt by Ethan Hawke's potential future son-in-law to kill him. In this movie a woman chooses the occasion of the purge to kill her own sister for sleeping with her husband. What's weirder, she does it at 2:30 in the morning, after the purge has already been going for more than seven hours. First of all, she wouldn't kill her own sister. Disown her and never speak to her again, maybe, but kill her? Secondly, if she was really that upset, you'd figure it would be a crime of passion that would occur during normal times, not some kind of premeditated attempt to get away with it on purge day -- and in front of the rest of her family members as well. 

I could go through more details, but you get the idea. There's some cool stuff -- like, I liked the idea of an 18-wheeler driving around with a gatling gun opening fire on people -- but overall, the series still had not found its eventual sense of purpose by this second entry.

I also quibble with that title. What does it even mean? The subtitle Anarchy suggests that something outside the bounds of a normal purge occurs here, but really, that doesn't seem to be the case. Isn't every purge rather anarchic in nature? At one point there's a warning that someone is using a weapon that's at a higher grade than approved for the purge, and that this person will be prosecuted, but wouldn't that happen every purge? The title for this movie could have just as easily been Purge: Another Purge or Purge: Quite Purge-like, All Told. 

The interesting thing about the variable quality of this series -- earning from me 1.5 stars, 4.5 stars, 4 stars and 2 stars -- is that the first three films all have the same director, and all four have the same writer. That man is James DeMonaco, and at least you can say he's getting better at it as he goes along. Gerard McMurry -- a person of color, you will note -- directed The First Purge, which may be the best of the four in objective terms. It's hard for me to say because I don't expect Election Year would have had the same impression on me had I not been an emotional mess over the election of Donald Trump.  

I do think that it would be worth going back to watch the original Purge. Some series do take time to find their footing, but I think you are more likely to find that in a TV series than a movie franchise. Usually you only get to make the franchise because the first is good, or at least, the best of the bunch. It could be that my new perspective on the series will help with my feelings about The Purge ... if I ever want to give it that chance. 

In the meantime, The Forever Purge is scheduled to come out in 2021, making this series an even five. (IMDB says it's the "fifth and final installment," but I'll believe that when I see it.)

Hope whatever you're watching on Halloween does the trick for you. Happy Halloween! 

The exploitation horror that made me cry

They say timing is everything.

Those who watched The Purge: Election Year before November 8th, including everyone who saw it in the theater, would have seen quite a different movie from those of us who watched it since then.

Like me.

And I am still trying to grapple with the experience I had on Friday night, but mostly Saturday morning, watching this movie.

It was mostly Saturday morning because I had indeed been too ambitious trying to rent this to watch it on Friday night. As you may remember from yestereday's post, I picked up this movie as a substitute for Nerve, which had not been successfully reserved for me, in order to watch after I got home from drinks with work friends. I for some reason anticipated getting home by 10 and having plenty of time to watch it, expecting not to fall asleep even though I'd be tipsy if not out-and-out drunk. Instead, I walked in the door at 12:30 and still started watching the movie, as it would be due back at 9 p.m. the next night, and a dad with two kids doesn't have a lot of time to be watching Purge movies on a Saturday afternoon in early December.

Predictably, I made it through only 20 minutes, leaving another 70-some for the next morning. Which I managed to carve out, as I do usually have some time to myself after the kids wake up but before our day really gets going.

A more fortuitous turn of events could not have happened.

Simply put, I needed my mind engaged to have the profound experience with The Purge: Election Year that I ended up having, which is unlike any I can remember.

(And I just crossed 4,700 movies, so that's really saying something.)

Simply put, I cried.

Not once, but twice.

If you're wondering why the hell this movie would make me cry, I'll try to give you a little bit of an idea what it's about.

The original Purge, as you would likely know, is about a version of American society in the not-too-distant future in which there's a single night each year where all bets are off. Any crime is legal that night, including (and especially) murder. Me, I might try to steal a bunch of money instead, but most people are out to sink an axe into somebody's head.

The original Purge was shit, I thought. I gave it a star-and-a-half and did not come back for The Purge: Anarchy. I thought it was a dumb way to explore a smart concept.

The smart way to explore this concept apparently came in the third movie, according to me. In this third installment, it's an election year (duh), and the candidates for president are a demagogue minister representing the right (played by Homicide's Kyle Secor), whose party is responsible for the existence of Purge Night and has been in control for 25 years, and the liberal senator who wants to abolish it, who also happens to be a woman (Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell). Usually certain political officials and others are exempt from the lawlessness of Purge Night, but in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the NFFA (New Founding Fathers of America) do away with this exemption pretty much expressly so they can make a play at the upstart liberal senator and try to end her presidental bid via assassination.

It's hard to say for sure whether the makers of The Purge: Election Year knew who exactly would be running for president in our real election year, but the similarities between Mitchell's Charlotte Roan and Hillary Clinton are not likely to be coincidental. Although Clinton has been referred to as Secretary Clinton because she held that office more recently, she too served as a senator, and shares a hair color with Mitchell. Secor's minister is different from Donald Trump in many ways, as even Trump would not stoop to the blatant falsehoods necessary to convince us he's been a saint. But something about the minister's dismissive manner is very Trumpian.

What struck me so much about the movie was not simply that it represented something like a real look at the combatants in the 2016 election, but it made them into almost literal combatants. There were times in the race when we imagined what Trump and Clinton might do to each other if they were trapped in a Thunderdome together, and Election Year almost literally gives us that scenario. There was an undercurrent of violence in this election like none I can remember, and it was carried out between supporters of the candidates if not the candidates themselves.

But what brought me to tears was a moment that showed us what Senator Roan was fighting for, and a knowledge that the real world "Senator Roan" had already lost that fight.

Midway through the movie, Roan and her fiercely loyal bodyguard (Frank Grillo's Leo Barnes) make their way down to an underground bunker where a contingent of the opposition are caring for Purge victims and providing a safehouse for those dregs of society considered most likely to be targets. Around this room are a selection of tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free -- the kind America once welcomed with open arms, but now seems to want to shut out.

Someone observes, and I'm paraphrasing, "These are the people the NFFA want to purge because they don't want to have to care for them any longer."

Up to this point, I'd felt emotions welling up in me on a couple occasions, prompted by the visceral sense of outrage and the intensity of the violence. But something about this moment opened the floodgates.

And I wept.

I'm not just talking about a tear trickling down my cheek. I'm talking about heaving, convulsing tears, for somewhere on the order of 30 to 45 seconds. I wept openly, and possibly only silently because my kids were watching cartoons in the other room and I didn't want to give them anything to worry about. (Having already cried in front of them once on election night.)

I sunk my face into my palm and released a torrent of tears for more than a half a minute.

I purged myself of some rotten emotions that had been stuck inside me, I guess you could say.

This movie is called American Nightmare 3: Elections in some foreign countries, I just discovered today, and indeed, this election was a nightmare. Somehow, in some way, the wrong candidate, the candidate who should have been disqualified from contention dozens of times, won. Somehow, a happy ending that seemed like it was beyond question was lost into the void.

And in that moment, the moment when my tear ducts were overcome, I realized that we had voted in a man who wants to eliminate his enemies, not by actually killing them perhaps, but by depriving themselves of the services they need to live, which is effectively the same thing. All because he thinks he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and believes others should do the same.

And because those people most in need might vote for his enemy.

I don't know if I really believe a person has been elected who will bring about a new dark age of fascism in America. In fact, I think it's pretty unlikely. But I do know that the bad guy won, and that was something I had mourned in tears only once before.

Suddenly, surprisingly, I was compelled to do it again. In part because I knew this movie was going to give us the happy ending that real life had not given us, and what a goddamn shame that was.

And that's why I hold this movie in what seems like a ridiculous level of regard right now. I can't remember the last time a movie made me sob. I mean, movies force a trickling tear down my cheek with some regularity, probably more so now that I'm a parent. But this movie wracked me with sobs, sobs I could not recover from for what seemed like an eternity.

The second time I cried was over the death of one of the characters we'd come to know and love in this movie. Know, yes, and love, yes. It's not easy for movies to do that, since they have so little time at their disposal. TV shows have a much easier task in that regard.

But what this movie also did was to give us a cross-section of heroes, representing multiple races and genders, all banding together to fight an oppressive right-wing force that believes in purging its enemies out of existence. This resistance felt like a metaphor for the coalition that voted for Hillary Clinton, unifying despite or perhaps because of their differences, ready to win this fight. It's a fight they should have won. It's a fight they must win, one day.

But I don't know if the obvious logic that Donald Trump will lose his 2020 reelection bid is something we can bank on. We've witnessed corruption in this election, from voter intimidation at home to the interference of foreign hackers abroad, which may yet entail the hacking of voting machines. The leader of the NFFA in this movie, played by Raymond J. Barry, snaps an order at an underling to do "whatever it fucking takes" to remain in power. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a real person with that real attitude in the American right, be it Steve Bannon or the Koch brothers or someone else.

And with that kind of murderously intense dedication, maybe the multi-racial coalition really does never have a shot.

The Purge: Election Year was undoubtedly made to earn a tidy profit on a small budget and give genre fans sleazy thrills. It does do that, too. In fact, some of the most gonzo shit plays a major contributing factor in why I liked the movie as much as I did.

But what's also there, whether it needed to be or not, is a real look at our real America, exaggerating real feelings and emotions only slightly for the purposes of satire. It's incredibly smart in some of the ways it captures the anger, the determination, and the naked corruption of both the politicians (of both parties) and the people they represent. And lest you think this movie is just a liberal polemic, think again. Groups traditionally protected by a purely liberal Hollywood are portrayed negatively (a group of young black girls, for example, are some of this movie's most despicable characters), and tellingly, the same "whatever it takes" slogan is also repeated by the left. When Senator Roan hears of a plot to kill her rival, she doesn't offer any hippie dippy "all human life is precious" argument as a reason to abort the assassination. She says, simply, "If you kill him, he becomes a martyr. I lose."

This movie, with apparent ambitions so modest, reminded me that both political parties take shady paths to get where they want to go, and do tend to believe that the ends justify those icky means.

Only one party, though, wants to save those same people the NFFA seeks to eliminate on Purge night.

And that party will not be in office for at least the next four years, maybe longer.

That's what made me cry.

The Nerve of them

Might as well go for a second straight day of rental-dispensing mechanisms not working properly.

I was planning to go out drinking with three work friends on Friday night, only one of whom still works with me. I'm 43, so nowadays that's more likely to mean getting home around 10, rather than after midnight as it might once have meant. After 10 with anywhere from a few to a half-dozen drinks in me ... that might leave me in shape to watch a movie when I get home, but it couldn't be anything too demanding. And as the year is drawing to its close, I probably need to be filling these available time slots with movies whether I'm in shape for them or not.

Nerve has recently arrived on video here, and that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Under 100 minutes, probably best viewed late at night, and kinetic enough that I won't fall asleep.

So I planned it out on Friday morning. I was going to go out on my bike at lunch to run a couple errands, once of which would be stopping by the IGA in East Melbourne to pick up the movie. In order to give myself the greatest chance of my errands being completed successfully, I went on the Hoyts Kiosk website and reserved Nerve. A few minutes later I got the email confirming that they had checked the inventory of the machine in question and confirmed that the title would be waiting for me for the next six hours.

Well, it wasn't. However many copies they had of that movie, they were checked out when I got there.

This might not have been quite as annoying except that the first errand I had attempted, buying new sunglasses at a nearby 7-11, was also a failure, due to their total lack of sunglasses.

Refusing to come home empty-handed, I did my best to find a suitable substitute and ended up with The Purge: Election Year. I hated the original Purge and did not even see the second one, so I was never planning to see this for a number of reasons. You might say there's an additional reason not to watch it in that our real election year has gone so badly. But it did fit the bill for the type of content I could handle at that hour and in that state, and the minutes in my allotted lunch hour were rapidly ticking away, so I snatched it up and went on my way.

Back in the office and checking out my emailed receipt, I've discovered another annoying surprise: They've increased the rental price. Whereas rentals have previously been $3.50, now they are up to $3.99. Still a savings from an iTunes new release, I suppose, but creeping further and further away from the dollar and change I used to enjoy spending at Redbox kiosks in the U.S. Then again, with the rate set at $3.50 for the entire time I've been in Australia, they were due for a price hike.

Trying to figure out why they told me I had a movie reserved and then didn't have it for me is probably not worth the effort, though it does inspire me to quote Jerry Seinfeld: "You know how to take the reservation. You just don't know how to hold the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding."

What very likely happened was that someone was standing in front of that kiosk, renting the final Nerve, at the exact moment the system was trying to confirm that a copy was available. Due to a lag in updating cached information, I imagine, the system was not aware of the movie's sudden lack of availability, nor could a prior claim by me deny an ongoing transaction in which someone already had the movie in their shopping cart but had not officially rented it yet. Anyway, doesn't matter.

I do have a joke explanation. The last time I used the Hoyts Kiosk website was to reserve a copy of Bad Moms last Saturday night. We were over at a friend's house for dinner, and stayed a lot later than we expected to. Having a car full of kids who were a good 90 minutes past their bedtimes, we skipped renting Bad Moms, so the reservation went unclaimed. Which also meant that it could not be rented to anyone else during those six hours I had it reserved -- a possible loss in revenue of $3.99. I figure this is Hoyts' way of giving me a dose of my own medicine.

By the time I post this, I will already know whether I liked The Purge: Election Year or not. But since I'm writing this a day ahead of time, I'll save any thoughts I may have on it for a subsequent post.