Lately, I’ve had a hard time finding a movie that grabbed me, but that’s partly my fault. I’ll put something on late at night and it feels like I’m just trying to get it watched and returned to Netflix or the library just to see what else shows up. It’s sort of an elongated version of clicking on a tantalizing internet link. (Will it be an interview with Herzog? The egg contest from Cool Hand Luke? A documentary about the Petr Sís mural in New York? Oh: just boobs. Only in this case, instead of a 2-minute loading time, it’s more like 3 days.)
But it’s partly the movies I’ve chosen, too. The Last Winter, minus a few sparks from Ron Perlman, was absolutely flat, despite the gushing reviews and the promise of a spook-filled enviro-disaster. Oh: just ghost elk. The Box was mildly interesting, but it runs afoul of the most basic law of human curiosity and the desire to solve a puzzle: the very quality of being intriguing makes a likely explanation and satisfying conclusion less possible. And the more baffling something is, the less likely a movie is to wrap up well. (Plus, every time Frank Langella was on the screen, all I could think about was him enraged in Dave: “Was he on the Trilateral Commission? Was he a senator? Was he in Who’s Who in Washington nine years in a row?!”) Scott Pilgrim didn’t even make it to the end before I wondered to myself how many strands of spaghetti noodles were left in the cupboard.
Most disappointing of all was The Beatles Anthology. I was shocked at how shoddy the editing and archival work was. There was no attempt at putting material in context (such as the scene of drunk and fighting Germans on the street: was it from a movie, was it news footage? when was it taken? and what did it have to do with the Beatles? was it even from Hamburg?) and the editing was terribly annoying (such as the multiple clips all spliced together of the band performing Twist and Shout). The film suffered from being a terrible mixture of letting the band speak for themselves (unfortunately not very illuminating) and lousy and selective archival footage, with no one to analyze anything critically (what about the wives/girlfriends? what about the band rivalries? what happened to Stuart Suttcliffe?) Oh, and the unbearably long scene of city names scrolling up the screen in huge letters? I got it, the Beatles toured a lot. But what I also got was a headache. After disc 1, I deleted the rest of the series from my Netflix queue.
3 Mulligans 