Divorce from Pay TV
I love TV. Now I don't know about you feel about it, but if you at least like TV, then take a minute and consider all the channels acquired since the time when HBO was Home Box Office, signed off to end its day and showed R-rated movies only at night and way before that when pay TV was a thing of the future or something you had to be rich to get. I'm not talking to you grown folks in the age group where all you remember is cable. I want those old I don't remember quite when it happened, but one day TV was no longer the noise with the pictures inside the plug-in box that you got for free. TV became a bill, a utility on the level of lights and heat.
When it was bad, it was really bad, and the pay-for-it TV programming was on its way out the door, I had a momentary reprieve when given the option of dropping premiums yet retaining access to content a-plenty, it was determined not so bad. However, when the bill for channels and DVR service was no longer manageable and there was nothing but nothing that happened when the little red button on the remote was engaged, I lost my mind a little bit. Luckily for me, I still had VCRs -- two of them in fact, one for each
TV in the place. It stands to reason then that where there are videocassette recorders, there are also videocassette tapes. My inner collector which made me hold onto things, had collected a lot of VHS tapes, so many in fact, I could go days and days and days watching different stuff every day, both prerecorded and home recordings of movies and shows. Some were on shelves like books, yet most were boxed, labeled and shelved. Others were procured at the time from a variety of sources, including the Salvation Army and the few remaining video stores going out of business as a silent, but deafening boom made by digital media that sounded a death knell to the industry.
After a couple of decades being accustomed to the TV being on all the time with scads of channels from which to choose, making the adjustment to few and limited options was no easy task. My then-new reality was one sans sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, news or my favorite Jeopardy, and it was not at all easy for me at all, even though my plight was laughable to those who needed me to know that it wasn't the end of the world and surely, it could have been worse -- much worse. Creating my own watch playlist was fine, but my pay TV divorce was still quite painful even with the stacks of tapes and a moderate-sized DVD collection to fall back on. After a few weeks of watching films I'd seen multiple times and then watching a couple or few I'd never seen before, I got bored and scrambled to figure out how to make lemonade. I began to watch movies by theme.
One more reason to cryI started with tearjerkers I'd seen a bunch, Terms of Endearment (1983), Beaches (1988), and a DVD of the 1959 version of Imitation of Life in which the foolish and very confused Sarah Jane rejects her own mother to pass for white only to end up throwing herself on her dead mother's casket. If you are like me who sometimes looks forward to getting rid of some extra tears, and you've pulled up this particular selection because someone told you that you should, here's what to do: Pause the flick and get yourself a damp washcloth so when the great Mahalia Jackson begins Trouble of the World and sings it unlike anyone else could never, and you end up in a sobbing mess, you can clean up quickly while remembering that a benefit of tearjerker flicks is that they help to cleanse the emotional palate as well as provide a maintenance check for one's empathy quotient. The challenging aspect of tearjerker films is that they can be emotionally exhausting and if the person watching is already a little bit down, perhaps due to a separation and subsequent divorce from pay TV like that suffered by yours truly once upon a time, the tearjerker experience isn't what you'd call a value-added proposition. Afraid I would blow something out of my nose that I would later need on that day in the late 2000's when my separation hurt the worst, I was reminded that it was the noise of the TV that mattered, so I reversed direction and adopted another theme of movies to have playing in the background and while I was asleep.
Unlike a lot of folks I know who enjoy gangster movies and crime films in general Scarface (1983) and Pulp Fiction (1994) are closer to the bottom of my favorites list. These are films that I like well enough and about which I don't disagree with the high-ranking position they are assigned in the genre. Whenever either or both films occur naturally in the schedule and I'm able to, I'll watch them more likely than not. But for an itch that only a good gangster flick can scratch, I had my own list which changes sometimes yet invariably features Goodfellas (1990) about real life wiseguy Henry Hill and his compatriots in the gangster game. Along with star Ray Liotta, this movie features a scary hilarious Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, a combo with which you can not go wrong. Goodfellas and anything Godfather are among those I can watch a bunch of times without hitting a wall and avoiding it thereafter. Not so much with New Jack City (1991), the film which brought Wesley Snipes into consciousness, King of New York (1990) or Set it Off (1996), all fine crime movies, but better for watching every few years so as to overthink the films's entertainment purpose.
Pay TV and I have reunited, but just so that I can stop shopping my antenna around to first one place and then another in order to get a decent, minimally-pixelated OTA (over-the-air) broadcast.
Streaming and I are now a smokin' hot item, as that other utility called Wi-Fi has become as important to my livelihood as visual entertainment is to my frequent need for a reality respite. Hulu and Netflix have replaced HBO and other premium fare -- at least until the next new thing that enters the scene that seems almost impossible and potentially quite painful to do without.
