After dinner I decided to watch one of the 100 or so movies I own while waiting on the dishwasher to finish. I opened up Plex and went to the movie page. As I looked at the first couple of rows of movie posters, I tried to decide what kind of movie I was in for. Really couldn’t. I’ve said this before in that I’ll see the title or the poster and I’ll be able to sort of speed watch the whole movie. And once I’ve done that, I literally don’t need to watch it … I’ve just seen it.
One nice thing about Plex is that there is a shuffle button at the top and if you click it a random movie will start. I’ve used it a few times with limited success, maybe twice out of the five I got something that I would be in the mood to see. Attempt number six was a win, Plex had selected This Is Spinal Tap. I hadn’t seen it in ages and just running the movie through in my head made me want to watch it again. I didn’t recognize the background image at start up, but there were our 3 main guys looking like they’d been dipped in gold, so the movie was right (the image was for the movie’s 41st golden anniversary.)
The movie was not right. First clue was the first image you see, the logo of the production company A24, that studio was way too new to be from the 1980s. Wait a minute, Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans getting married, I watched the trailer for this movie a way back and put the movie in my Apple TV+ queue. I did start to watch it back then too, but gave up about 20 minutes in.
Weird. I exited Plex, got back in, drilled down through the movie posters, found and clicked on This Is Spinal Tap again. It started up right where I just left off, 3 minutes into On The Rocks. What the heck, I’ll watch it again and see if I can at least get to the part where National Treasure Bill Murray shows up. I ended up watching the whole thing. It had very strong Lost in Translation vibes and with good reason, it too was directed by Sofia Coppola.
After watching the movie, I went over to the PC where the Plex sever runs on, found the .MKV file, opened it in a media player and it was the real “This Is Spinal Tap.” What the heck was going on. I scrolled back up in the directory and there was an .MKV video file for “On The Rocks” too. The file was dated in November of 2023. Did I download a copy of the movie less than 2 years ago and forget about it? I stopped pirating stuff way back in the twenty teens. Plus, I wouldn’t think so based on earlier this year’s starting and stopping watching it part way. Has someone hacked into Plex somehow on stored a copy of there? I mean I have it set up to allow me access to my movies while traveling…
I’ve deleted all the “On The Rocks” files and rescanned the library, but now when I got try and play “This Is Spinal Tap” Plex can’t seem to find it. I guess tomorrow I’ll try and uninstall Plex, clean up the registry, reboot and reinstall. Now, I really want to watch Spinal Tap.
Addendum (8/15/25): Nothing I did would let me play “This is Spinal Tap” on the PC using Plex. It wouldn’t play on on the laptop either, but it will play on either TV running Plex via the Roku box. “?” Side note, I just now stumbled on that there is a sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, coming out next month. This is where that gold image came from and since the movie came out in 1984 it also explains the 41st anniversary thing.