Old Movies

On Sunday it rained all day here, the remnants of a tropical storm/hurricane. It was the perfect day for staying inside and watching a movie.

Then came the difficult decision. What movie would we watch? We don’t have live television, but we have a plethora of streaming channels to choose from. If you also have multiple streaming channels, then you know that they don’t make it easy to find new movies. Each one has their own bewildering organization system, and they’re all terrible.

We long for the old days of the video store’s “new releases” section. We started out on Amazon Prime’s newly added section. Very few of the newly added movies were actually new releases, and so many of them seemed like horror movies. I don’t do scary. We wondered why there were so many horror flicks, then remembered it was October.

So, we jumped over to HBO (or whatever it’s called this week) and found that they were chock full of horror movies as well. Then it was off to Hulu/Disney where we thought we might have some luck with their categories. The problem was the screen displayed only little thumbnails of each movie, the other problem is a lot of these thumbnails featured graphics that had been designed for video store browsers and not people squinting at a tiny image on their TV. “What’s that one?” Ron asked of a movie whose title appeared to be written in invisible ink with tiny difficult to see image of three people. I squinted at the people and thought the way that one of them was standing made it look like it might have been Molly Ringwald, and from that I guessed that the movie might have been Sixteen Candles. We clicked on it, and learned that I had guessed correct, but that wasn’t what we were in the mood for.

By now some fifteen minutes had gone by since we sat down on the couch with the intention of watching something. Maybe we should watch an old classic that neither of us had seen. We both liked this idea, but now the dilemma was what old classic. We threw out a few ideas, but then Ron said something like, “What about that movie with that guy, what’s-his-name, we saw a clip of it in that documentary.?”Amazingly I knew the movie he was talking about. I mean I couldn’t think of the actor’s name or the movie’s title, but I knew the movie. We spent a few minutes trying to come up with the actor’s name, but struck out. We knew the title of the movie was a first name. In my head all I could think of was it was something like Barry, but knew that wasn’t it. Then Ron remembered that it was Marty. We looked it up so that we could stop wracking our brains for Ernest Borgnine’s name and also to saw that it was available to stream on Amazon.

Still image in black and white from the movie Marty showing Ernest Borgnine portraying the title character. He's leaning against a pillar with a cigarette in his mouth.

So we spent our Sunday afternoon watching Marty, and were not disappointed. The movie’s from 1955, but has a timeless quality to it. If you’ve never seen it (or even if you have) and you have Amazon Prime you should watch it.

One thing that struck me about the movie is how quickly time goes. 1955 seems like such a long time ago, a distant era, and yeah 71 years is a long time, but also I was thinking about how if I had watched the movie when I was younger, say around 20 or so it still would have seemed ancient to me, but then I realized that would be like someone around 20 today watching Sixteen Candles. To me that 1980s classic doesn’t feel like ancient history, but do I only think that because I’ve lived through the intervening decades?

I saw a video on Instagram by someone who buys and sells vintage items. Apparently she made a previous video showing off a recent vintage treasure she had purchased and had someone correcting her in the comments to let her know that the item wasn’t actually vintage because their parents had purchased one just like it new at Macy’s in the late 1990s. Which was when she had to break the news to them in her followup video that since “vintage” technically applies to anything 20 years old or older that late ‘90s item was vintage as was anything from (and this is going to be painful for some of us to hear) anything from 2006.

So, I’m grateful for modern technology that allows me to stream just about every movie I can think of at the push of a button, even if I can’t remember the name of the movie or the actor. I’m also grateful for finding a few minutes to relax and unwind in what has been another hectic week.

Stay timeless, friends!

—Alissa