The frustration that is Bel Ami

Bel Ami has always been a frustrating roller-coaster ride of a film. Trying to watch it Friday night was just more of that same exercise.

I happened to wake up at 3 a.m. Friday morning and suddenly remembered that Bel Ami should have been available at midnight on Fios. Nope, not there. When I got up again later that morning, there it was. Yippity, dippity, do. Plan was to rush home after work to watch it. Calling in sick was, unfortunately, not an option.

But plans change. I didn't want to deprive Mr. Bitch of watching his team on the large TV that night, and he said he wanted to watch Bel Ami with me - so the plan was to watch it after the game. Hey, I figured, I've waited 2 years, what's 2 more hours? HA! The game went into extra innings, and innings, and innings. Great. Fuck.

FINALLY, the game was over and although half asleep, I went to the VOD page to order it. Saw there was a choice for HD - hooray. Ordered it and the screen says LOADING. And then up pops "VOD ERROR - we cannot process your request at this time."

Are you fucking kidding me?

So I tried again and this time it only had the Standard Def (SD) option. So I chose that.

Same.fucking.error.message.

Suddenly I was wide awake, with FURY, determined now to see the film.

So I hit the Interwebs to find out what the hell that error message meant and followed all the instructions I found - unplugging the DVR, rebooting, waiting, waiting. No change.

So I call Verizon at 11 p.m. and the first thing I hear is the recording "We are experiencing a VOD issue". Again I thought, "seriously, is this really happening?" I got an agent on the phone (which I admit was surprising at that hour) and he confirmed that it was a system-wide issue that wouldn't be resolved until SATURDAY AFTERNOON.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I said to him "So what you are saying is that Robert Pattinson crashed your system." That got a laugh, but I was still without Bel Ami.

So I hit the Interwebs again to see where else I could watch it on my laptop. Now mind you, 2 days ago my laptop died. So it was a good damn thing I replaced it right away, or this wouldn't have been an option on Mr. Bitch's 10-year-old Dell. But, I didn't have the iTunes software installed on this laptop yet, so I had to do that first. I installed the software and then went to buy the film, and got all the way to "Put in password for billing" and it wouldn't take the password. It didn't say it was the wrong password, but it wouldn't leave that screen and let me make the purchase. So I reset my Apple password. Nothing. Reset it again. Still nothing.

Are you fucking kidding me?

So I went to the Interwebs again to find another option and saw Amazon. It wasn't the greatest connection quality (and I'm not sure why that was), but alas, I was able to watch Bel Ami at 1 a.m.

After 2 years, 1 day and 6 hours of frustration, I finally got to meet DuRob.

When I woke up late Saturday, there it was on Fios - they had corrected the problem. But it was in SD, not HD. And according to Verizon, there was no way to switch it.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I've spent much of the day watching Bel Ami, not in HD, over and over. Frustrated, as usual, when it comes to this film.

So, was it all worth it? The constant release date rumors, threats of never seeing it, the hurdles to watch it?

I'll tell you in my next post...