Home Theater

I love movies. There have been times in my life, for several months at a time, you could find me at the movie theater every weekend. There are very few movies I regret having seen (Joe vs. The Volcano tops that very short list). I just really enjoy spending a couple of hours immersed in a world where the good guys (almost) always win, the right guy always gets the girl, and the protagonist delivers the perfect verbal riposte at the perfect moment and says something that we've always wanted to say to someone. I like television almost as much as I like movies. Like many Americans, the television is usually on whenever I am awake.

In broadcasting, there are two terms that explain how things often operate in my house, especially on the weekends. One is Least Objectionable Program. When you're channel flipping and your significant other and you find a program that neither of you is particularly enamored with but you both say, "yeah, that'll work," because there's nothing better on, that's Least Objectionable Program.

The second term is Tuning Inertia. Tuning Inertia is just what it sounds like. Whether you're watching a LOP or your favorite show, you leave it on that station to watch whatever comes on next - whatever that may be - because you have no objection to it and you don't want to make the effort to lean forward to pick up the remote.

Lately, I have seriously tired of these two concepts. I have easily over 100 DVDs and Blu-Ray discs and several of them are still in their shrink wrap. I know that if I landed on one of these movies playing on one of the OTA networks or TBS or some other cable network I would sit there and watch it... commercials and all. What's the sense in doing that? I have the movie right there and can watch it unedited, uncensored and without commercial interruption. I'm just too lazy to get up off my fat ass and slide the disc into the player.

No more! I have decided that if there is nothing I really want to watch on TV and I have the time, I am going to watch one of those movies that I own. I just pick one. Sometimes it's a specific movie, sometimes it's one of a particular genre. It doesn't matter. If I'm going to go for a personal LOP, it might as well be something I, at least once, fooled myself into believing was something I wanted to watch more than once.