While I lay at home with an aching back, this afternoon Mandi went to her unit in Storage King to retrieve her video player, and several VHS tapes. It is nice to have a video again, rather than slumming it with a DVD player. As I have no patience with anything in the world, Mandi saw through all the various frustrating stages of tuning, black and white with sound, and colour with no sound etc.
We settled down later on to watch You’ve Got Mail. A story about two people falling in love as a result of talking to each other over the internet. What a ridiculous scenario!
Aside from the film itself, which was lovely of course, several things struck me while watching a video from 1998.
In 1998, the internet was not as mainstream as it is today; it certainly was not in every house and on your phone like it is now. Remember asking people if they had the internet? Now you just ask for their email address because they will have one! The filmmakers played on our not being entirely sure what it was. Internet use in the movies was that special Hollywood internet where the computer pings to announce an email, or in the case of this film says ‘you have mail’.
It was also quite nostalgic to hear that ‘dial up’ noise after all this time. But nostalgic in a bad way, as if you’d get nostalgic for Thatcherism, the three day week and corpse robbers during the war. As soon as I heard that old crackle of connecting sounds, I wondered how the characters could afford such a method of communication! Does anyone remember having a dial up connection in 1998? It was an expensive pay as you go operation, you wouldn’t waste time flirting in a chat room (one of those movie chat rooms with perfect text reading across the screen, I’m amazed they didn’t go for black screen with green letters).
I also concluded that the film industry has a special team of writers and directors. Their job is to make trailers for films that do not exist, apart from as pre-film trailers on shop bought videos.
There was also an advertising trailer trumpeting the arrival of DVD. The voice over gave us all the good points, picture quality, sound quality. But forgot to mention disc errors, or that sometimes your DVD player will deny having a disc in it, even though you just put one in. Or that you will get to the last five minutes of a film and the whole thing will freeze. Or that watching it on video is better, because sound and picture aside, it’s nice to be able to watch a film the whole way through. Or if you do need to stop it, you can press play and carry on where you left off, rather than having to watch the whole thing from the beginning.
The best bit though, was being able to fast-forward the piracy warnings. Because I put a DVD in the other day and had to sit through a stern lecture about it being illegal to watch pirate DVDs. Ruined my enjoyment of Treasure Island!
