This afternoon Michele and I watched “Bruce Almighty” on a rented DVD. While DVDs maybe better than VHS tapes in many regards there is one area of the DVD viewing experience that I could live without.
Forced watching of previews.
This particular DVD forced us to watch previews for not one, not two, but three movies. Repeated attempts to break out of the previews using the “menu” button only generated the “This function prohibited” message. Turning the DVD player off, and restarting the disk, thinking there may have been a tiny window of opportunity to access the menu before the previews started allowed us to watch the same damn previews all over again.
Even if “Bruce Almighty” was on my list of movies to purchase, in all likelihood I would not buy a DVD copy of it, since any time I wanted to watch it I’d be forced to sit through several minutes of trailers for movies long since forgotten.
Come on Hollywood, let us watch the intellectual property we’ve PURCHASED the we choose to and not according to some pea-brained marketing putz’s idea of how to make more money. (The irony here is that in the movie, you can’t mess with free will, whereas in reality you pays your money and lose your freedom.)
