Today was the most wonderful of days prior to this film. It was appearantly 103 degrees, hot as motherfucking Hades. It still is. I am pouring sweat in my room, sitting in a swimsuit since our house doesn't have AC. That is okay though, because I am no longer sitting watching that piece of crap movie. So yeah, earlier today I went to the Gay Pride Rally for a little while, walked around forever, and then came back, went to the park, sunbathed and read forever. Sang to David Bowie, stole a bunch of books from Barnes and Nobles with Bonnie, and then stole lots of yummy food, including the most insane amount of Amy's Burritos ever.
Then Bonnie asked me to go see this movie with her, a movie that I was sort of wary about going to see, fearing that it may be crappy, and I am on a fixed income, I'm a retiree, damnit, I can't be spending eight bucks to go see bad movies when I only have fifty left in my bank account. But, I hushed my doubts and excitedly went to go see this movie since I love going to see movies. Spending two hours in an air-conditioned place also sounded pretty damn good.
We sit down, the movie starts soon afterward and already during the very first scene, I am cringing at the badness, wondering why why why? The actors were so stiff and rigid, doing what was the worse blocking in the world. The actor comes home from work, talks to his wife, and slowly hangs up his coat, because obviously that's what people are supposed to do in films when they get home from work. Bahh. The dialogue - dear god, the dialogue, if you are going to have a movie entitled "Thirteen Conversations...", you damn well better have some interesting dialogue, not contrived attempts at it, that come off as cheesy as motherfucking Kraft cheese.
Scene two is what really sent me over the edge though, and led me to start pulling my hair, to try to make eye contact with Bonnie to see if she also thought this movie was terrible and wanted to leave. Do you remember how silly and over the top that rich white girl who became a crack-whore in Traffic was? Okay, that was nowhere near how silly this next part gets - you may think this must have been a parody of film cliches, but let me tell you my friend, it was not, not at all. Matthew McConaughy (MM) is some prosecutor out drinking with his co-workers all excited that they locked up some bad guy, that they won a conviction, talking about the rule of law and how it keeps everyone in check, how people need to be punished. Cut to MM driving home drunk, and yes, he hits some blonde girl, kills her, and drives off. Isn't this some video that we had to watch in Driver's Ed? It gets worse. The next day at work, MM is bleeding from the cut on his forehead, and a big drop lands on to his legal pad. It was that silly. I laughed. No one else did which annoyed me even more, that there was a theater full of people taking this bullshit seriously, not giving it the same ridicule treatment they would if this was some movie that was playing in multiplexes. Movie viewers privlege films that are marketed as independent or low-budget, giving it far more slack, and fail to hold these films up to the same critical standards that they would any other movie. Because these movies are "art." Yeah, fucking right they are - there's more art in my brusided toe, in my dirty laundry, in my fucking feces.
But wait, it gets even more contrived, more moralistic, and more dumb - MM is assigned to work on his own case, someone else is being charged with the crime, and it is MM's job to prosecute them. This was when I did some serious hair pulling action, some serious face in hands action, getting so frustrated, telling myself that this is not happening, that this movie could not possibly be this horrible. I don't feel like I am accurately conveying the horribleness of this movie. Let me explain a couple more things about it. You know Bahktin's theories on the dialogic nature of the novel? The polyglot and all that crap, how the novel is composed of so many voices, and that is where its magic lies. Well, I would say that film has even more potential to absord different voices, and these are the good films, the rocking ones. I mean why, oh why do some filmmakers make these horrible movies, ones like this one, and there are so many like this one. The characters are all rich, white people that are not like any people I know or have even encountered - they are stiff, lacking spunk, there are no fun editing cuts that would distinguish the film from that of a videotaped stage production, and the soundtrack is classical music. Can you get any more monlogic than that? It frustrates me so much to see films like these, where the filmmaker fails to exploit the potential of film.
Okay so yeah, I was getting fidgety, annoyed, and felt like I could not sit through this crap anymore and so I told Bonnie that I would meet her at home, and left the dark theater. I asked the theater employees if I could get my money back since I just stayed for the first half hour, and this stupid fag asked me if I didn't like it, and I said no. And he, like stupid fags all over this great country of ours, said that it was so good and that he couldn't understand why I didn't like it. Not that big a surprise, since he probably also couldn't understand why microwave popcorn pops when you put it in the microwave, so it is quite understandable that this mystified idiot with painted fingernails would not be able to comprehend why a movie is not necessarily good just because it is playing at the "indie" theater. Bah. And I didn't get my money back. They were so confused, and were like, Sorry, we don't do that here.
I left, walked home, wanted to cleanse myself of the bad movieness and I thought that the best solution would be to submerge myself in water, the beach would be the solution. And very bizarrely, Bonnie just came back from the movie talking about how much she misses the beach. Now, we are going on a walk. We have energy that needs to be put to use.
No comments:
Post a Comment