Movies for the Impatient

I was watching a movie last night, which in itself was uncharacteristic. Exams have started here at the university, so the club is pretty quiet, and my latest book order from Amazon didn't show up yesterday as I had hoped (I need a breathalyzer on my laptop that prevents me from ordering books on Amazon when I'm intoxicated, because it tends to be a recurring "problem"). Anyway, because of all this, I decided that I'd pass the time before I could morally go to bed by watching "The Guns of Navarone," an old 1961 movie set in World War Two.

The movie was about two and a half hours long, and I decided that I was too impatient to watch the whole thing. I figured it would be nice to watch it in "fast forward." I figured that if it is possible to speed up the pitch control on a turntable, a person should be able to play a movie at 120% of normal speed to make it go by more quickly. Programmers should even be able to build in a special "pitch override" function which would prevent the speech and music from going up in pitch at the higher speed, by sampling the music repeatedly and just dropping the appropriate number of samples, so the audio portion sounds "normal" (albeit somewhat fast).

I was quite surprised that none of my video players on the laptop could do this. What if you were getting on a plane that was going to be making a 98 minute flight, and your video Ipod had a movie that was 117 minutes long? You should be able to watch it in "fast mode" so that you can take in the entire movie during the flight. Am I the only person in the world who has ever wanted to watch a movie in slightly compressed time, maybe to save half an hour or so?