Thursday, June 27, 2013

Free Redbox movies...well, not really

I rented the movie Jack Reacher the other day from Redbox, our favorite summer place to hit.  I had been refusing to see it because the books featuring Jack Reacher are in my top five best mystery series books, and I do not believe Hollywood knows how to take plots, characters, etc. from books and put into movies.  Despite my admiration for Tom Cruise and his acting abilities, did you people see Rock of Ages, OMG loved it, he was not Jack Reacher who is taller and older.  So I did not spend the big money to see the movie at the box office, but I was willing to spend the $1.50 for the Blue Ray disc at Redbox.  Which did not work. 

Something was wrong with the disc, but I spent fifteen minutes cleaning it and trying it again.  Then Madison spent fifteen minutes working with it.  Then Tom came home and spent a an hour making us all work and work and work on it.  I saw the beginning of Jack Reacher so many times that I knew the script and could play all of the characters up to the point when the disc stopped working.  By this point it was midnight and I was annoyed.  I got on the Internet and found out that to report this to Redbox I had to either call them or speak with them live over the Internet, neither of which I wanted to do because I was tired and pissed off.  I went to bed and took the movie back to Redbox the next day and left it for the next unsuspecting person.

This did not sit well with hubby.  When he found out that I had not requested a refund he did.  He chatted live with a Redbox employee who scolded him for returning the bad disc, but also gave him two free rentals.  Which he promptly used renting Jack Reacher (non Blue Ray) and Skyfall.
 
(This entry was suppose to be about something else entirely, but somehow has rambled on about movies and Redbox...hey, maybe I'll just get two entries from it)

The girls were both out with friends at different activities when we sat down to watch Jack Reacher, which by this time I was sure was a crappy movie.  Tom insisted on starting from the beginning of the movie because he had missed it, although how he had missed it after all of our attempted repairs was beyond me.  I entertained myself by saying the lines before the actors which I'm sure annoyed Tom, but he was kind enough not to mention it.  The disc worked.  We saw the entire movie and I was not wrong.  It was a terrible movie.  

I was willing to overlook Tom Cruise as the casting for the Jack Reacher character, but even that couldn't make me like the movie.  Yes, there was humor like in the book, but it was a typical Hollywood movie of car chases and fight scenes and a convoluted storyline that confused me at times and ended up just being juvenile.  Why can't people get books into movies correctly?  Why do they even try?  Are there not scriptwriters out there writing original stuff?  I ended up forgoing the next movie since I'm not a James Bond fan and went into the other room where I quite happily tuned in to Netflix streaming and watched Arrested Development.  (OMG, have you seen these series?  Hilarious and well written, but that too I'll make another entry for later.)

When Tom finished the movies he took Skyfall and put it on his desk.  He left Jack Reacher above the DVD player.  I suppose he did this because in his mind Skyfall was his movie and the other was mine.  He should have put both discs back in the Redbox on his way to work, or at the very least, on the kitchen counter by my purse and keys to remind me to take back.  I didn't see either disc and didn't take them back.  Tom didn't see them either until after the 9:00 deadline.  Oops. 

This is where the entry I started to write comes in, but now I'll write that for tomorrow.

Needless to say we didn't learn from our mistakes.  Tom took his movie and put it with my movie above the DVD player instead of in the kitchen.  I didn't move them into the kitchen either.  The next day the movies did not make it to Redbox until 9:05 (tomorrow the reason) and so our two free movies cost us $4.80.  It made me think of the time my friend got into legal trouble for never returning a movie to a rental company.  It was a huge hassle and cause quite the uproar in her family, and by the time everything was straightened out, she said, "Trust me, if I had wanted to steal the movie I would have picked a movie better than 9 1/2 weeks."  That is exactly the way I felt about Jack Reacher.  Which is also why I don't go to movies and wait for Redbox.  Just didn't work for me this time.  Oops.

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