BEFORE: It's with great sadness that I come before you today to report on the demise of my constant companion on this crazy journey that I've been on for the last nine and a half years. Not my wife, who rarely joins me in my movie-watching, or any of my friends that I may go to the theater with, and not my cats, who start nearly every movie with me on the recliner, but fall asleep halfway through. No, I'm talking about my DVR, the one I've kept in service since we moved into the house in 2004. A cable tech came today to check it out, since it's no longer showing me the majority of the premium movie channels, except for two of the lamest ones.
The diagnosis is not good, although the signal coming in to the house is fine, the DVR has stopped sending signals back to the cable company, and this somehow marks the movie channels as "unavailable". I've noticed in the last few months that I've needed to reboot the box every two or three weeks, and if I forget then the OnDemand and search functions become unavailable until I reboot. The DVR's whole operation has slowed considerably, if I push any button there's such a long delay that I'll start to question whether the box received that signal, so I'll push the button a second time, and that produces a result I don't want, once the box finally gets around to completing the operation I asked it to do in the first place. Once the premium channels became unavailable, I rebooted the box so many times I started to feel like a doctor in the O.R. using a defibrillator on a patient that just wasn't going to come back, no matter how many times he charged those paddles.
So on Monday morning I need to take it to the cable company's Manhattan office and exchange it, and it feels very similar to taking a beloved pet in to the vet's office to be put down. There's still life in the animal, but it's not a viable one, so the only conclusion to come to is to put it out of its own misery sooner so we can all get on with things and stop taking care of it. Who knows, maybe I recorded one bad movie too many, and the poor thing committed suicide. (This does not bode well for the last movie I taped from OnDemand, which is "Ghost in the Shell".) While I might look forward to a newer DVR model with much more storage space and the ability to tape SIX channels at once (like my bedroom DVR, which I use for TV shows) the older model had one thing going for it that the younger ones don't - I could record a movie on VHS and then burn that to DVD.
So, really, this is the death of physical media. The cable company broadcasts some kind of signal through the newer DVRs that prevents me from making a DVD copy - if I try to catch a movie on my upstairs DVR and dub it, I get an error message that says I don't have the rights to copy that film, even though I'm paying my cable bill for the rights to watch that film. This annoys me to no end, because there's no movie that's ALWAYS being broadcast on cable, everything has an expiration date, and I need to watch films on my schedule, not corporate America's. A new film airs, and I can't watch it today, but I might have a slot open for it three months from next Tuesday - so I need to make a DVD copy so it will be viewable when I'm ready to view it. And now I won't be able to do that, not without buying the mass-produced DVD for $15 or whatever.
Now I have to change my whole approach to movies, and everything becomes streamed or disposable, and will have to be deleted after I watch it. Unless the cable company happens to have an older DVR that they're willing to let me use, I can ask this on Monday but I very much doubt this will be possible. But I'll be the crazy guy at the counter who asks for the older-model DVR that can still output to a VCR, even though that means less storage space overall and the ability to only record two channels at a time instead of six. It's a little like going to the car dealer and asking for a used car that can't get above 55 and doesn't have a ton of miles on it.
Anyway, I've got enough movies already dubbed to DVD to get me through the next few months, and then more than half of the Summer Rock Concert Series will be on Netflix and iTunes anyway, so that gives me until mid-August to work something else out or find another way to keep physical media alive, and if I can't, then maybe streaming is the real future - all the kids seem to be doing it - and I just have to adjust. But I don't change my patterns easily, I don't go gently into that disposable lifestyle. I like having a collection of things that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, call me crazy.
Speaking of premium cable, it would have been very nice if they had run "Daddy's Home 2" to fit in with my Will Ferrell week and serve as another pre-Father's Day film, but I guess it wasn't meant to be. It's on PPV for $5.99 and I'm just not paying that. If they don't premiere it on Father's Day in a couple weeks, they might be saving it for Christmas season. Anyway, Ferrell carries over from "Casa de mi Padre" and brings the week to a close.
THE PLOT: After their town takes away their daughter's college scholarship, a couple start an illegal casino in their friend's house to make back the money.
AFTER: The whole set-up here is just lazy screenwriting - because there's no town that pays for a girl to go to college, not in this case anyway, because the town shown here seems very upper middle-class, and it would obviously be expected that each set of parents in such a town would pay for their own kid to go to college, and this just wouldn't be the town's responsibility. Usually such things, if they existed, would be based on need, like maybe some town might raise funds so an inner-city teen could attend college, but this isn't that, so it just wouldn't exist. And even if it did, which it wouldn't, the town wouldn't grant scholarship money so far in advance that the parents would be able to factor that money in to their kid's college fund, and therefore fail to save the appropriate amount of money themselves.
And even if all that could happen, which it couldn't, that town would then have promised a certain amount of money for that scholarship, and it would be obligated to deliver, not divert these funds into a community project or into the town councilman's pocket. There would be some kind of paperwork that the parents could fall back on to prove the town's obligation. And then there would be several reasonable steps taken before one would get to "Hey, let's open a casino in our friend's house." Like, how about hiring a lawyer? How about bringing the matter to small claims court, forcing the town to then defend this action in front of a judge?
And in general, before resorting to this line of raising money, since the parents had YEARS to improperly prepare for this, what about bake sales, Go Fund Me campaigns, getting social media on their side, and that web-site that lets you raise money for your kid's college by getting your friends to shop in certain stores? Nope, those aren't even considered options here, because the film is SO bent on getting this couple to run a casino. There's an obligatory, "Hey, boss, can I have a raise?" and when that answer is "No", it's straight on to "Well, I guess we have to open an illegal casino, because there just aren't any other ways to raise money". What about student loans? Financial Aid? State grants, Pell Grants, the G.I. Bill?
There's barely even any consideration made toward whether what they're doing is, you know, legal. Forget the city, what about the state gaming laws, is there even legalized gambling in their state? Of course this is all played for comedy, but even comedy has to come from someplace real, at least as a starting point, and this one just doesn't. So where it goes from there, with this suburban couple acting like characters from the movie "Casino" becomes even more ridiculous because it didn't lay down a proper foundation first. He develops another persona named "The Butcher" after an incident with a guy who was counting cards, and she takes to threatening people with the type of blowtorch that a home cook might use to make creme brulée, and it's an awful long time before any authorities in town figure out what's going on behind closed doors.
And I have to call another NITPICK POINT here. Wouldn't a casino-like party, with 50 or 60 people gambling in a residential house, produce a large amount of noise? Like, wouldn't there be complaints from the neighbors on the first or second night? The first night the neighbors might forgive, like someone might be having a loud birthday party, but by night two, someone's calling the cops, I guarantee it. Then there are daytime pool parties, massage rooms and even lounge acts at all hours of the day, and it seems like hundreds of people are in this house at one time - and all THAT doesn't produce enough noise to alert the authorities? Yes, I understand this is for comic effect, but COME ON!
And the parents never have the realization that "We're doing this for our daughter, but it's taking up so much of our time that we never even get to SEE her." They must be profoundly stupid, they don't even realize that their daughter is smoking pot and going down a dark road while they're spending so much time running a gambling operation for her benefit. This still constitutes some form of neglect, and they're both so stupid that this never dawns on them. Plus, he's bad with numbers? Like, in a grossly overstated and improbable way? This is another NITPICK POINT, because how does he get through the damn day, how does he find an address or calculate how much to pay at the grocery store?
But maybe the biggest NITPICK POINT of all is - if they didn't have the money to send their daughter to college, how did they have the money to buy roulette tables, massage tables, surveillance cameras, soundproofing equipment, and additional funds to re-decorate their friend's house? Why didn't they just send their kid to college using the money that was spent on all of THAT?
Also starring Amy Poehler (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Jason Mantzoukas (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Ryan Simpkins (last seen in "Revolutionary Road"), Nick Kroll (last seen in "Loving"), Allison Tolman (last seen in "The Gift"), Rob Huebel (last seen in "Keanu"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "They Came Together"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "North Country"), Cedric Yarbrough, Rory Scovel, Lennon Parham (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Andrea Savage (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Andy Buckley, Kyle Kinane, Jessie Ennis, Randall Park (last seen in "The Hollars"), Christina Andrea Offley, Steve Zissis, Sam Richardson, Alexandra Daddario, Wayne Federman, Ian Roberts, Jessica St. Clair, Sebastian Maniscalco, Sean Patrick Murphy.
RATING: 4 out of 10 underground boxing matches
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