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Wednesday, January 01, 2003

DVD Antics

As other people were sure to be out drinking and smoking themselves silly while attending extravagant parties involving topless tap-dancing upon parading elephants, the four of us decided to spend the Friday night after Thanksgiving at Marina’s house. Yes, it was going to be an exciting night—“A Beautiful Mind” awaited us on DVD. The excitement just doesn’t stop when you’re with the cool crowd. I got there first, to be followed shortly thereafter by Lila. We were going to start watching the movie without first waiting for Julie, because we’re just adventurous and crazy like that, but then we realized we couldn’t do that, because Julie had the DVD. Oops. Well, that wasn’t going to stop us. We were gonna have a wild night, gosh darn it. Julie finally arrived. Somebody, I forget who because by then I was already starting to get a buzz from the vodka Marina was constantly pouring into our crystal champagne glasses, ha ha yeah right, put the DVD into the DVD player and we all settled on the couch before the TV and got ready to watch the movie.

But it turned out that the movie wasn’t quite ready to be watched. You know how it is on DVD’s, where you have the little menu and you have to select “PLAY MOVIE” to get the movie to play? Well, when the DVD started, the little cursor thingie was settled on “SPECIAL FEATURES,” and no matter how hard we jammed the buttons on the remote, the cursor wouldn’t move up to “PLAY MOVIE.” There wasn’t really much we could do, so we opened up the SPECIAL FEATURES in the hope that it would start the movie, but instead the DVD cheerfully displayed for us a long list of—you won’t believe this—special features. A brief glance revealed to us that there were actually multiple pages of these, and we scrolled through them several times in the hope of finding “PLAY MOVIE” among the lengthy list of options. Our efforts were in vain, of course, because the movie is not a special feature. Special features are the cinematic things crammed into a DVD that are everything but the movie, when what people really want is to watch the goddam movie, not some interview with the stunt coordinator’s milkman.

Now things got hectic. We tried a lot of things. One time we selected “interview with the producers” or something like that from the special features screen, thinking that perhaps this would play the movie. Instead, we saw—whoa, major shocker coming up—an interview with the producers. This was really boring and we stopped it. Next we tried rolling the previews, which was, now that I look back on it, a decision made on the basis of some really astoundingly awful logic. Here was our thinking: when you go to a movie, they show you the previews, and then the movie; thus, if we watch the previews on the DVD, once they end, the movie will start. I don’t remember if we actually watched the previews all the way to the end, but I sure hope to god that we didn’t, because if we did, then we were a lot stupider than I thought. And why the hell were the previews there in the first place? I mean, previews are like the movie equivalent of commercials. How many of you ever think, “Boy, I want to turn on the TV and watch some commercials!” What’s the point of sticking commercials into a DVD? Grrr.

Frustration set in pretty fast. Here we were, four smart, intelligent people, national merit semifinalists, 4.3 students, 1500’s on our SAT’s, and we couldn’t get a DVD to run. Throughout this whole entry I’ve been saying “we,” but it was mainly Marina and Julie at first, because they really wanted to watch the movie. I had seen “A Beautiful Mind” already, many times in fact, but after a while I joined the fray anyway because, as you will note, I was the only guy present in the company of three alluring girls, and I wanted to impress them with my technical expertise (Hey! Quit laughing! Every guy has to find some way to impress the girls, okay?). I came up with the creative and ingenious albeit horribly wrong theory that if we perhaps reset the DVD and don’t touch anything on the remote, the movie will start on its own. Silly Boris. Next I decided that the manual buttons on the DVD player itself were far superior to those on the wussy remote, and could make the cursor move up to “PLAY MOVIE” when the buttons on the remote couldn’t. I don’t know where I come up with this crap. Eventually I ran out of ideas and then joined Marina and Julie in the usual fare of button-mashing and confused head-scratching. The most brilliant young minds in the country, the future of tomorrow, kids who between the four of them had sent applications to MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and others, super-dorks who preferred to spend potentially wild Friday nights watching deep and thought-provoking movies about schizophrenic math geniuses, and we couldn’t work the DVD player properly. The irony was brutal.

The only person I haven’t mentioned much yet is Lila. Though she did partake somewhat in the festivities, for the most part she sat on the couch and bemusedly watched us as we desperately tried to get the movie to work. Finally, after thinking the situation through, she loudly and forcefully broke our frantic discussions of the grave situation at hand with the question, “Did anybody look in the DVD case?” For a moment the room grew a little quieter. I prayed that Lila was wrong, still clinging to the hope that I could be the hero of the day. But when Marina examined the inside of the movie case, it soon became apparent that Lila was on to something. The case contained two DVD slots—one of them held the “MOVIE” DVD, and the other one was empty because the “SPECIAL FEATURES” DVD that formerly occupied it was currently in the DVD player, where we were stoically trying to get it to play the movie.

I bet we all felt pretty stupid at the time, except for perhaps Lila. Actually I still feel pretty stupid right now. I bring this up because last night at the euchre club party we tried to play a DVD, and though the DVD player claimed adamantly that it was indeed playing the movie, all we were seeing on the actual TV was an unwavering blue screen. Chris tried to get it to work, failed, called me away from my game of ping pong to come take a look, I don’t know WHY, I’m me and I still would be the last person I’d ever ask for technical advice on anything, and my strenuous fiddling with the back of the DVD player resulted in the astonishing accomplishment of: I accidentally unplugged the DVD player. And I didn’t know how to fix it. Chris managed to at least fix the little bit of things that I had made worse, but we never really moved on from there. Eventually we gave up on the movie. Everybody thought that the DVD player was hooked up to the TV incorrectly, but I bet if Lila had been there she would have figured it out, and it would have been something incredibly stupid. After sitting on the couch and filing her nails for a while, watching me and Chris futz with the wiring protruding from the TV, Lila would have spoken up, completely indifferently, “Did anyone check to make sure you’re trying to play the DVD in an actual DVD player and not a wall socket?” And then Chris and I would have given each other a look, and we would have been like, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” and everything would have been dandy.

What I need is to clone Lila in the form of a talking leech and carry her around with me all day. She could tell me how to avoid, or at least get out of, the problems that constantly arise before me because of my amazing lack of good common sense. In exchange for her help, I’d let her sit on my shoulder and suck my blood a lot. It’d be worth it. And the next time a DVD player gives me difficulties, so help me I’m gonna hurl the damn thing against a wall.

.: posted by Boris 8:05 PM

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