By now you’ve been unable to escape the hype, confusion and likely b.s. about the comedy, The Interview, and how it has supposedly raised the hackles of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Imagine, someone makes a movie centred on your assassination and you get upset! But I digress. Today I’m going to share the story of what I went through to see this film. It’s no wonder so many people of our generation can’t be bothered with online purchases of this nature.Â
Even if I had no personal interest in the subject matter, I’d still need to see this movie. It’s part of my job to keep up with what people are talking about. It’s the reason – and I say this without pride – I watched one episode of The Kardashians! It’s research.
First, I attempted to watch it for free. There are several places where you can view virtually any movie without paying a cent. However, none of them that I know of would allow me to download it. I attempted it several times and was quite patient, with no positive results. We are picky around here and prefer to put movies on a memory stick so we can watch them on our living room TV. Crowding around a computer monitor simply wouldn’t do. I tried and tried and gave up.
Note that I’m not a big fan of illegal downloading, however there is a website that’s wide out in the open and offers just about anything in entertainment for free. I have been burned before, though. We once tried to watch a film through a thick fog and Chinese subtitles and gave up quickly. I’ve only done this a couple of times and only when I can truly justify it in my head. This was to be one of those times.
YouTube is one of the online services we can access through what we call our Netflix box, connected to our flat-screen in the living room, so I poked around on the website while I was on a break at work and found The Interview for rent. I paid my $6.99 and relished the thought of watching it on New Year’s Eve. I made sure I wasn’t on my work YouTube account, but linked to my home YouTube account. I had already synced the YouTube app on my home TV with the one on my smartphone so I figured we were ready. Syncing involves making sure you’re signed in at both locations, and inputting a code shown on one, in this case the TV, to the other, my smartphone, to prove that you’re the same person.
On New Year’s Eve, I called up YouTube on the flat screen and scrolled down to “purchases”. There was nothing. I checked my sign-in and sync status. Both were A-okay. So I put on Christmas Vacation from Netflix and gave it some thought. Derek has never has a YouTube account so that wasn’t it. I grabbed my laptop and while Clark Griswold was falling off the roof I discovered that at some point I had created a 1039 YouTube login. (1039 is the radio station I worked for before 981) and I was still signed into it after all of these years. The TV app, in its wisdom, was pulling up the 1039 account and saying, hey dummy, you didn’t buy The Interview!
The solution was quick. I signed out of the 1039 account and into my own account. I put the special code in the special little box so it would know I was the same person on all three devices. By the time the cops showed up to the Griswolds we had The Interview in my purchase bin and ready to watch. What a pain in the schnecken!
Despite all of the hassles, I find the rental agreement quite reasonable. For $6.99 CDN you have 30 days in which to start the movie. Once it has started, you  have 48 hours to watch it and can do so as many times as you like in those two days. Not to mention, the last time we went to a theatre, just before Christmas to see Dumb and Dumber To – yes that’s how it’s spelled – snacks cost us $30. My popcorn is a lot less expensive. Tomorrow, my review of the movie.