Sunday, August 22, 2021
The Future is 1995
One of my very favorite things about Ian is that he, for a very long time, had a VHS copy of the Sandra Bullock thriller The Net that he had taped off television and moved with him multiple times. That VHS tape met a terrifying end last year when we used it as a guinea pig for our attempt to get our VHS player to work; there were bits of tape everywhere. Although we did ultimately get the player to work, we still ask to this day if it was really worth that very high cost.
And now I have to say that the answer is yes, because I have finally seen The Net, as we watched it on demand earlier this week. (Yes, we had a slow week, to the point that we also watched the 2005 Ryan Reynolds remake of The Amityville Horror. Horror, indeed.) I know a lot of people who remember it very fondly, but it doesn't really hold up in my view. The internet is presented as being a very powerful and very scary thing, and that's not wrong, but they keep it really vague about how exactly "hacking" works. Mainly people seem to just be selecting commands off of pop up windows. There are multiple diskettes involved, and the climax of the movie involves use of the "escape" key. Also, Dennis Miller as the love interest? Did Sandra cross the casting director somehow?
All in all, it made for a long evening. Not as long as the evening spent watching Ryan Reynolds somehow seem sarcastic while attempting to murder his family, but still.
