Mistaken Movie Identity

As misanthropes, my husband and I will usually choose a quiet night in any day over "going out" and risking interaction with other people.

However, as a thrifty couple, we're always trying to find ways to entertain ourselves at home the cheapest way possible. Short of restricting ourselves to empty cardboard boxes and twine, we get a lot of books and movies out of the library. A bonus is when one of the big movie channels has a free preview weekend. Keith checks every once in a while and, if he finds a preview weekend, we record any and all titles that interest us.

Strangely enough, we've found one problem with this technique. Several times, it's resulted in a case of mistaken movie identity, where we see the movie title, record it, and then found out that it was NOT the movie we were picturing at all.

I first remember this happening in early 2005. We often try (with varying rates of success) to see all the Oscar-contenders for best movie before the awards are announced. For 2004, Crash was one of the movies we hadn't managed to see yet, but recorded it off a movie channel. Crash (2004) is about how everyone's lives/choices affect everyone else. The movie we accidentally watched, however, was Crash (1996), which focused on characters to whom car crashes and resulting injury is a sexual fetish. NOT the same movie. NOT AT ALL. Actually, it was quite alarming.

This past weekend, we accidentally watched The Zodiac (2005), not to be confused with Zodiac (2007) sans "The." This time, they were both about the same topic—the Zodiac Killer who killed several people in Northern California in the late 1960s, and has never been caught. Because it dealt with the same topic, we were probably halfway through the movie before we realized it wasn't the one we thought.

"Where's Jake Gyllenhaal?" I finally asked. I mean, not that it was the only reason I was watching the movie. But it was a bonus.

Once we realized he would not be putting in an appearance, I accepted it and enjoyed the rest of the movie. I'm pretty sure it had the same ending.