Ever since instant streaming became matter of fact in the last couple of years, it has become a familiar pastime to browse through the thousands of titles available at my fingertips, find nothing I want to watch and play with my phone apps. Actually, what happens more often is after 45 minutes of mindless browsing I finally think of a movie I really want to see and when I search for it, sure enough, it's not on instant. Then, desperate, I go to Amazon or i-tunes thinking, "Fuck it, I'll pay the rental fee," and find, alas, it's not available there either.Yeah, yeah, I know, same old story. 57 channels and nothing on.
The requisite follow-up to such failures in the online cinematic hunting game is to have the very movie I was looking for become available two weeks later at which point I no longer want to see it. The inverse of this is when I pass over the same movie available on Netflix Instant a hundred times, never wanting to see it, then, one day, it's the must-see movie of the moment and, of course, it's been removed from instant.
But all of this is nothing compared with the legion of disappointing "mistaken identity" moments I've had. I don't wear glasses but I think, perhaps, I need to start because I have these mistaken identity moments more than I should. I see a cover similar to another, more famous movie, get excited and then discover it's not only not the movie I was thinking of but the real movie isn't even available. Sometimes, the movie I was thinking of doesn't even exist. Case in point: Earlier this evening I was browsing through the documentary section of Netflix Instant when my eye caught a glimpse of something that sent a jolt of excitement shooting through my brain: Someone at National Geographic, somehow, had greenlighted a documentary on the world's most dangerous pig! I mean, that was the title and everything, "The World's Most Dangerous Pig!" Wow! Within a few milliseconds it morphed into "hog" and then, with a final, closer look, "drug." It said, "The World's Most Dangerous Drug."Crushing. Disappointment.
