Sunday, April 24, 2016

Well That Was Distateful....And Disappointing

Well, that was distasteful. The beauty of Netflix is that you can watch all sorts of things that you haven't seen in a long time and that you remember with amazing fondness. Things that you can't get on streaming but that are available on DVD.

We use Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime to it's fullest extent, but there are things that aren't available to stream or are $6 to watch once on Prime so we went back to Netflix DVD service as well. We ran the numbers on how much it would cost to have monthly DVD service in opposition to what we were paying when we rented new movies on Amazon Prime and it was a better deal to use Netflix.

OK, let's be honest, HHBL ran the numbers on that. We all know how I feel about math. It a necessary evil and something I do every day but it is stil a tool of Satan right along with liver and onions.

But I digress, sort of.

My DVD queue isn't all that long at the moment but it is growing. Movies that I remember with fondness will come to mind and if they aren't available on streaming then I put them on my DVD queue. I tend to run towards classics, things like Notorious, which I just watched last week. Most classic movies aren't available for streaming because, evidently, Ted Turner owns them all. Thanks Ted. At any rate I recently had the mini-series The Thorne Birds pop into my mind. Oh how I loved that 8 hour long star-crossed love story.

Or at least I thought I did.

A masterful 8 hours of mini-series melodrama straight out of the early 1980's. Family drama! Sexual tension! The wilds of Australia. Unrequited love! Or not so unrequited love it turns out. The Vatican. Brian Brown!! We all sighed when Richard Chamberlain was on the screen. So, I put it on my queue and watchhed as it slowly made it's way to the top. The first of the two DVDs arrived in the mail this week and I finally had time to watch the first DVD this afternoon.

I didn't even make it through the first two hours and it was for one particular reason. Between 1983 when the mini-series debuted and now, there has been the revelation of the Catholic priest sexual scandal. The minute Richard Chamberlain stairs lovingly into the eyes of 7 year old Meggie, it just felt really, REALLY off. So, so wrong and so, so creepy. And when he moves her into his house as a school girl, because the nuns are being mean to her. Just no, no, no, no, no. Heck, even the evil Barbara Stanwyk character sees what is going on.

I tried, I really tried. I just couldn't do it. It was distasteful. It wasn't so when I watched it on TV. It didn't seem so in my memory.

But it was.