AKA everything in my life is going horribly wrong.
It’s a miracle that this movie actually exists. It’s memorialized beautifully on the Kino Lorber 4k, there’s a mountain of bonus features all of which Ben Stiller and Co. provide intros or commentary for. It’s almost like Stiller knew that this was a monumental feat and worked hard to squeeze every drop from his ensemble. I can’t fucking believe Tom Cruise is a real. Not a perfect movie by any means, but a perfect snapshot of a time and place in movie making and an ode to words you can’t say anymore that will never not make you (or me) giggle, even when you know better.
Side note, watched this through a myriad of technical difficulties in my own home setup. It’s crazy how hard it is just to get stuff and make it work. First you don’t have a good enough TV to keep up with the technology, then you gotta get a Blu-Ray/4K player if you really wanna see the good stuff, but then the sound isn’t good enough on the fancy TV, despite it’s price tag, so you gotta get a sound bar so you can actually hear the fucking movie. And finally, after all that, you gotta plug everything together in the perfect orientation to maximize it’s collective power, but they don’t communicate well because the cables aren’t good enough. So you drive to Best Buy at 10pm and spend 200 bucks on 8K HDMI cables cuz the guy at Sony support says that’s the only way to get the sound to stop dropping out. And that works, for a bit, but every now and again you go to watch something and the same problems from before rear their ugly heads. So you call the Sony guy back and he says that the TV is the problem, then you call the TV guy and he has no fucking idea what the Sony guy is talking about, so you're stuck in the middle of these two assholes telling you it’s the other asshole’s fault, back and forth, only to eventually, by your own research, change a seemingly unrelated setting that somehow fixes the issue…… or so you think.
Months later, after you’ve relaxed just enough to forget about the constant loss of sound, you check in on your growing physical media library. It’s late, so you pick something lighthearted, nostalgic, low impact, short so you can get a good night sleep, you know? Something to just take the edge off, make you forget about the passage of time, your Kafka-esque battle with local parking enforcement or the really confusing, how bad you need to quit your job and find one that affords your addiction to plastic, your open ended, yet threatening violation ticket that sits in your glove compartment that you got for an incredibly minor traffic offense that is looming over you like the fucking reaper. And about 7 minutes into that movie, the sound starts cutting out. So you think to yourself, I probably misheard it, maybe it was just and abrupt quiet moment between words, a little audio blip to see if you are paying attention.
No.
It’s not that. It’s that same issue as before. The one that neither the fucking TV people, the soundbar assholes, the sleuths on Reddit or the piles of money you throw at it can fix. An unsolvable riddle, an unanswerable question, an unscratchable itch, it’s the pea under your mattress, the kink in your chain, the fucking knot in your technological rope. If you’ve made it this far, help me. I’ve got nowhere left to turn. There is no virtual assistant wise enough, no customer support service educated enough and apparently no luck available to fix this nagging impossibility. There is no cable left to buy, no setting left to change, no reset left to perform, factory or otherwise. I’m staring into the fucking sonic abyss man…. the cosmic void, the blackest hole. And somewhere deep in that forsaken trench, that bottomless pit, that eternal trap, that endless cavern there is some devious, imp drifting, peering back, removing the sound from my movies in no particular rhythm, and with an unnatural frequency forever and ever. I am cursed, adrift in the sea of modernity, plagued by the ambitions of my own amusement. Forsaken.
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