Ryan Reynolds Loses His Remote—Hollywood’s Streaming Nightmares Revealed

Max Sterling, 12/23/2025Boxing Day gadgets are out to upgrade your living room: Fire TV Sticks and Sony soundbars promise blockbuster thrills for bargain prices—quirks, lag, and lost remotes included. Home entertainment’s golden age is here, perfectly imperfect and a cozy antidote to the real world’s chaos.

In this newly evolved landscape of living room tech, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick is everywhere. Possibly too everywhere. It’s cropping up on holiday deal lists this winter with all the stealth of a bargain-hunting fox—$30, a price so reasonable it almost invites suspicion. “Turns any television into a smart TV,” claims Amazon, and honestly, with more than 5,000 folks jumping on it just last month, it might actually be true. Funny thing: in an age where basically every device acts like it has a PhD, half our TVs still need remedial lessons in streaming. The Fire TV Stick, then, becomes the great equalizer—a chance for every household to tap into a Hollywood-sized universe (or, depending on your taste, the comforting purgatory of endlessly rerunning sitcoms).

The secret sauce? Surprisingly basic: a pocket-sized dongle, a remote so compact it could double as a prop in a magic act (disappearing nightly in a sea of cushions), and access to a claimed 700,000 titles. The Alexa integration gets top marks from a certain camp—a simple shout of “play Schitt’s Creek,” and voilà, you’re off. Is it really magic? Maybe not, but it certainly feels close, especially when compared to the stone-age experience of flipping through cable channels. Although, let’s be real: that homepage lag tends to trigger a peculiar kind of frustration—not exactly existential, but definitely annoying if your popcorn is already going cold. That and the remote’s vanishing act—some say it’s just bad luck, others talk conspiracy—either way, it’s oddly comforting to know the struggle is universal.

Critics and enthusiasts alike keep circling back to one thing: it works. The “not so smart TV” becomes unreasonably clever for under the cost of a Friday-night pizza. Even the more skeptical reviews, laced with a whiff of world-weariness, stop just shy of an outright love letter. When was the last time bargain tech inspired that much un-ironic affection?

But let’s talk sound, because what’s the point of a digital feast if the audio’s as thin as last year’s wrapping paper? Enter the Sony HT-S100F soundbar, a perennial favorite among those unwilling (or unable) to remortgage the house for better bass. Now that the price is doing its annual dance—hovering near $159 after dipping to $99 not too long ago—it’s hard not to wonder what, exactly, is in the box. Turns out, quite a lot. The “Cinema” mode drops just enough bass to make Mission Impossible stunts feel liable to shudder the plaster, yet skips the usual budget soundbar pitfalls: muddy dialogue, bizarre distortions, and the mysterious art of making whispers inaudible.

Still, a small caveat—the subwoofer isn’t an optional add-on, it’s simply not on the menu. Some will grumble (those same folks who remember painstakingly wiring up 5.1 surround in 2008), but most will find the dialogue crisp, the effects competent, and the rest of the room’s peace undisturbed. Picture this: you can actually tell what’s being said, even over background static and Wilhelm screams. That sort of practical magic counts for more than a thousand “audiophile” badges ever could.

The landscape’s changing quickly—just ask LG, which is tipping the scales not with hardware, but with content itself. No big fanfare, just a nudge: webOS TV owners wake up one day to find Sky Sports and Sky News, tucked in amongst a crowd of festive and oddly niche channels, streaming for free. Ad breaks will probably invite a few complaints, as ad breaks tend to do. Yet the option to dip into “Sky Sports Stories” or vintage classics—a buffet without a monthly bill—feels like a quietly radical move in 2025’s ever-intensifying streaming skirmish.

LG’s winking promise? “Seamless access to high-quality, engaging content.” These days, it takes more than a shiny remote to serve as the living room’s command hub; curation is the new currency, and nobody wants to scroll through a wasteland of filler—though, on second thought, some of that channel-surfing nostalgia does have its charm.

So the living room morphs again—streaming gadgets all but begging resistance, compact speakers that punch above their weight, TV platforms doling out free (if ad-supported) treasures. Meanwhile, the real drama unfolds in the domestic trenches: finding that missing remote, squinting through a fractional second of lag, perhaps overhearing an oddly-named WiFi network during setup (“Virus_Lab_5G”—is that the neighbors, or should someone alert MI5?). These moments are the heartbeat of the so-called home cinema revolution. The quest for perfection—the right device, the perfect playlist, the ideal volume for late-night movies—might be eternal, but maybe that’s beside the point.

Because, after all, nothing says “modern entertainment” like chasing minor annoyances and ending up exactly where you want to be: sprawled across a familiar sofa, the screen aglow, bass humming beneath the floor, and the world safely shut out—at least until someone asks, “Has anyone seen the remote?”

Boxing Day isn’t what it used to be—once all about fixating on discounted wool and battling polite crowds, now more of a digital treasure hunt conducted from the smallest (and softest) seat in the house. The old charm of elbowing through a department store for a bargain has given way to a ritual of scrolling, clicking, and, inevitably, losing the TV remote to the same Bermuda Triangle lurking beneath the cushions every year.In this newly evolved landscape of living room tech, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick is everywhere. Possibly too everywhere. It’s cropping up on holiday deal lists this winter with all the stealth of a bargain-hunting fox—$30, a price so reasonable it almost invites suspicion. “Turns any television into a smart TV,” claims Amazon, and honestly, with more than 5,000 folks jumping on it just last month, it might actually be true. Funny thing: in an age where basically every device acts like it has a PhD, half our TVs still need remedial lessons in streaming. The Fire TV Stick, then, becomes the great equalizer—a chance for every household to tap into a Hollywood-sized universe (or, depending on your taste, the comforting purgatory of endlessly rerunning sitcoms).The secret sauce? Surprisingly basic: a pocket-sized dongle, a remote so compact it could double as a prop in a magic act (disappearing nightly in a sea of cushions), and access to a claimed 700,000 titles. The Alexa integration gets top marks from a certain camp—a simple shout of “play Schitt’s Creek,” and voilà, you’re off. Is it really magic? Maybe not, but it certainly feels close, especially when compared to the stone-age experience of flipping through cable channels. Although, let’s be real: that homepage lag tends to trigger a peculiar kind of frustration—not exactly existential, but definitely annoying if your popcorn is already going cold. That and the remote’s vanishing act—some say it’s just bad luck, others talk conspiracy—either way, it’s oddly comforting to know the struggle is universal.Critics and enthusiasts alike keep circling back to one thing: it works. The “not so smart TV” becomes unreasonably clever for under the cost of a Friday-night pizza. Even the more skeptical reviews, laced with a whiff of world-weariness, stop just shy of an outright love letter. When was the last time bargain tech inspired that much un-ironic affection?But let’s talk sound, because what’s the point of a digital feast if the audio’s as thin as last year’s wrapping paper? Enter the Sony HT-S100F soundbar, a perennial favorite among those unwilling (or unable) to remortgage the house for better bass. Now that the price is doing its annual dance—hovering near $159 after dipping to $99 not too long ago—it’s hard not to wonder what, exactly, is in the box. Turns out, quite a lot. The “Cinema” mode drops just enough bass to make Mission Impossible stunts feel liable to shudder the plaster, yet skips the usual budget soundbar pitfalls: muddy dialogue, bizarre distortions, and the mysterious art of making whispers inaudible.Still, a small caveat—the subwoofer isn’t an optional add-on, it’s simply not on the menu. Some will grumble (those same folks who remember painstakingly wiring up 5.1 surround in 2008), but most will find the dialogue crisp, the effects competent, and the rest of the room’s peace undisturbed. Picture this: you can actually tell what’s being said, even over background static and Wilhelm screams. That sort of practical magic counts for more than a thousand “audiophile” badges ever could.The landscape’s changing quickly—just ask LG, which is tipping the scales not with hardware, but with content itself. No big fanfare, just a nudge: webOS TV owners wake up one day to find Sky Sports and Sky News, tucked in amongst a crowd of festive and oddly niche channels, streaming for free. Ad breaks will probably invite a few complaints, as ad breaks tend to do. Yet the option to dip into “Sky Sports Stories” or vintage classics—a buffet without a monthly bill—feels like a quietly radical move in 2025’s ever-intensifying streaming skirmish.LG’s winking promise? “Seamless access to high-quality, engaging content.” These days, it takes more than a shiny remote to serve as the living room’s command hub; curation is the new currency, and nobody wants to scroll through a wasteland of filler—though, on second thought, some of that channel-surfing nostalgia does have its charm.So the living room morphs again—streaming gadgets all but begging resistance, compact speakers that punch above their weight, TV platforms doling out free (if ad-supported) treasures. Meanwhile, the real drama unfolds in the domestic trenches: finding that missing remote, squinting through a fractional second of lag, perhaps overhearing an oddly-named WiFi network during setup (“Virus_Lab_5G”—is that the neighbors, or should someone alert MI5?). These moments are the heartbeat of the so-called home cinema revolution. The quest for perfection—the right device, the perfect playlist, the ideal volume for late-night movies—might be eternal, but maybe that’s beside the point.Because, after all, nothing says “modern entertainment” like chasing minor annoyances and ending up exactly where you want to be: sprawled across a familiar sofa, the screen aglow, bass humming beneath the floor, and the world safely shut out—at least until someone asks, “Has anyone seen the remote?”