heatherbeck
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Danny's Not Here Right Now, Mrs. Torrentz.
🕑 Added 2019-03-31 01:30:29 +0000 UTCIn the spirit of sharing my life with you, I realize that there are some mundane elements. I haven't talked about this at any great length, but your girl Heather is a pretty big cinephile.
Here's the deal. I live in the middle of Spain. And when I say middle, I mean in the middle of nowhere. This village is tiny, and dying since the highway was installed, and the possibility of any fiberoptic cable being laid here is slim to none. My Internet, therefore, is dependent upon a small collection of SIM cards and a little box and plug them into. Each of these cards allow me 10.5 GB of 4G per month for €20 a pop. Extra data can be purchased at a generous rate of €4 per 500 MB if ya need it.
Needless to say, there was a bit of an adjustment period involved. Like many of us the world over, I had grown used to unlimited high-speed Internet at bargain basement prices (fuck you, Comcast). But here, I have just enough to help me get by. Phone calls with clients, WhatsApp with family, web browsing, email, social media (to the minimum extent I do it), downloading a book onto my Kindle, the basic stuff. All totally doable, and often times, with room to spare.
This month, I've been doing a lot of reading. And a lot of writing. And one of my SIM cards is about to change over for next month. Spare megabytes don't get rolled over, so you've got to use them while you have them.
Which is why I have a trusty list of movies that I would like to see at some point in the future, ready to download on Utorrent.
I'm not without entertainment altogether. I can access Netflix here but it is a data hog, so I don't use it very often. Before I left the States however, I did take the time to get drunk and high, and I think of all of my favorite forms of entertainment. Music, and more lately, TV shows and old movies. I downloaded the shit out of them, and put them onto a 1 TB external hard drive. That's what I usually have on in the background. A form of company while I cook in a plastic case the size of a deck of cards.
There's something kind of fun about having limited means of entertainment. If I want to watch a movie and I don't have it, I can't watch it. So, instead, I watch a movie I've seen before. Often for the third, fourth, 10th, or 20th time. It wasn't too far in the distant past, as some of you remember... if we wanted to see a movie, we went to Blockbuster. If they didn't have it, we didn't watch it. We rented something else instead. Or we resorted to our personal collection of DVDs or (Heavens to Betsy) our VHS's (if you still own a shit load of DVDs, and you were to arrange them chronologically, when would the last one have been pressed? 2009? 2013? When did you become an adopter of the new zeitgeist?)
We've gotten used to the idea of Netflix binging. Watching new entertainment for the sake of it being new entertainment, and seldom for anything more. There's nothing wrong with Netflix. I love "Making a Murderer," daylong marathons of "British Bakeoff," and believe me – I would cut off my left tit for a reality show about a bunch of Flat Earther's competing in a race to find the world's edge. We do live in the streaming age, and it is a miracle.
But. I think it would be a terrible shame if we were to lose the Subtle Greatness of watching a movie for the 17th time, simply by virtue of the fact that it was there. We need to keep our attention spans. We need re-viewings, not so we can figure out the twist to a story with the advantage of foresight, but so we can, simply, experience the story again and let it settle into us. We need to not get bored so damn easy.
I love my old movies, and I love what they've done to me. Through lack of nothing else that struck me at the time, I recently discovered that I love the shit out of every frame Stanley Kubrick ever captured. I re-discovered that an obscure little slapstick called "Clue" has aged well and is probably one of my very favorite comedies (it's #NotTooCommonInTheMeTooAgeToThatFindAComedyFromtheEightiesHasAgedWell). I went absolutely ape shit in lusting over the anachronimity (there's that word again) of a fabulous little detective show called "Columbo," that I hit the download button on one night before I went to sleep, at the suggestion of a friend 30 years my senior. Some nights, you'll find me here in this house, eating popcorn, and 'Awhh!-ing' to "Twilight Zone" episodes that were deemed not good enough for the Memorial Day marathons on the old-school Sci-Fi Channel. I've realized, as much as my cynicism would repeatedly like to deny it, that "Casablanca" is literally a perfect movie. "Battlestar Galactica" will long remain a poignant source of social commentary (early 2000-oughts). "The Room" is so horrible that it is truly transcendant. I always cried at the first five minutes of "Up." But since my grandfather died last year, the whole thing just means something different now, every time. (Glad I'm finally gonna get it back, #2.) "Monthy Python and the Holy Grail" is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It doesn't even need AP quotes.
Movies, therefore, are a meditation as much as they're entertainment. Creativity, as someone great once said, lives in the limits. And sometimes, when you limit yourself to the forms of entertainment you take in, it helps you grow. It forces you to isolate your attention on certain parts of yourself that you otherwise may not pay any attention to. We are attracted to these things, and when we are, our responsibility is diligence and awareness.
Stories... make us better. It is, as I've said a lot lately, a Human Kind of Thing.
My monthly pack of Internet expires in about 21 hours before it's renewed, and as it happens, I have 3.74 GB left on this card. Enough for almost a whole season of a TV show (I know, I know… But I still want to see how "The Walking Dead" ends). And maybe four, or if I get lucky, five movies. Smoke them, as our boys in Europe used to say, if you've got them.
What I'm downloading next? #Heathers21stCenturyVHSCollection
Oh, and I'm hoarding these motherfuckers. If the apocalypse comes along in 10 years, and the Internet goes away, I at least want to have something to watch while the world burns.
Comments
martin allen
IT FOLLOWS--one I missed while looking after my father. Got it on spec, based on a friend's review. A definite treat, and a real spin on the doomed teenager scenario.
David Markowitz
Used to love watching Columbo at the odd hour of the night or day. Peter Falk is just awesome. And The Search for the Holy Grail! One of the best movies ever! Ha, and I saw Brazil! in that list - such an odd number. But then so is Terry Gilliam 😊. So why did you move to the middle of nowhere Spain? Because of your growth?
