Tuesday, June 22, 2010
ENTONCES ESO SUCEDIÓ
One of the problems with Netflix — and as a dedicated subscriber, I should assert here that they are few and far between — is of course that, by the time you’re sent a DVD from your queue, perhaps a hundred or more other subscribers have watched that disc, which has also passed through the hands of innumerable distribution and postal employees, transported in plastic bins and canvas sacks thrown from loading docks onto the payloads of trucks and back again, protected by nothing stronger than a paper envelope and a Tyvek sleeve, the latter of which is often grubby and worn from multiple reuses.
I have a disc or three in my own delicately handled library that have already been corrupted after scarcely a dozen or more viewings and have entire chapters that must be skipped altogether in order to continue viewing the film. So I can’t imagine what the average rate of turnover is for a Netflix disc or how many times a subscriber will report a scratched, corrupted or otherwise damaged disc before it’s finally pulled, discarded, and replaced in the distribution stream.
In any event, Monday night marked a first in my storied movie-rental history.
Adriane and I watched Meet the Robinsons in the wake of having seen Toy Story 3 at the theater and watched Wall-E at home over the weekend.
Robinsons, a Walt Disney Animation Studios release, is sort of the perfect movie to illustrate the chasm that separates the story geniuses at Pixar from everybody else in the film industry. While the movie has a certain charm and warmth, occasionally funny jokes and occasionally excellent sight gags, the plot is a train wreck whose course was mapped out by seven credited screenwriters who half-assedly employ a dodgy time-travel device to make the story go where they want it go.1
For the purposes of our story today, though, all you really need to know is this: At one point in the movie, the mustachioed villain (known only as “the man in the bowler hat” or “bowler hat guy”) opens a notebook in which he has composed a checklist detailing the steps of his dastardly plan for revenge. With his pencil, he checks a box next to the third step in his plan, draws a fourth box below it and writes out a fourth step.
At this precise moment, the DVD froze.
Ordinarily one would end up having to arrow forward to the next chapter and let one’s imagination fill in the missing five or seven minutes of story. For some reason, though, I was able to fast-forward past the glitch, after which it seemed reasonable that I could rewind to a spot just before the glitch and try again. And while that trick actually worked, it somehow disrupted the interface between the disc and my DVD player so that the frozen moment, when arrived at again, got caught in a loop and kept repeating itself. But with a twist.
Each time the shot looped back to the beginning, the disc somehow signaled the DVD player to change the language track from English to French and then to Spanish. Because Meet the Robinsons is an animated film, the shot onscreen also changed: Each time the villain put pencil to paper, he was writing in a different language, and the text above, of course, had also changed.
Not only did the movie’s plot zigzag from the present to the future to the past and back again, but we got our passports stamped twice along the way, too.
There were other technical glitches to contend with — including menu screens that disappeared, leaving one to guess what selection the cursor had alighted beside — and probably I should report them to Netflix as a dutiful subscriber would. But that might spoil the multilingual fun for the next family who meets the Robinsons.
1 I should note, however, the most pleasant surprise of the evening: happening to catch the names of a few of my friends and former co-workers — Ed, Tenny, Walt, Marie-Claude and Bob — listed in the end credits.
