Last week I had more free time than usual, which, for some reason, I spent watching movies. This led to three realizations.
The first is that I miss having time to watch movies, so I'm going to start working a little less.
The second is that my boyfriend and I totally deserve each other.
While watching "Revenge of the Sith" (the first time I had seen it in English, actually), on finding out, moments before they're born, that Padme is going to have twins:
A: You think she would have seen a doctor.
B: What's WRONG with you?
A: Well, she's a senator. It's not like she doesn't have insurance. And couldn't the robots just do a scan or something? Why wouldn't she see a doctor?
B: WHY are you talking about "Star Wars" characters like they're real people?
Two days later, we were watching "Meet Joe Black," in which the two main characters hook up:
B: Are they going to sleep together?
A: It sure looks like it.
B: But they have just met. Are they even using contraceptives?
A: Maybe she'll get pregnant and it'll be part of the plot.
B: But that's SO irresponsible. Who does that?!
A: What's WRONG with you?
The third is that "The Piano" is a dreadful film. There are spoilers below, but who cares?
You might wonder why I was watching this movie in the first place, as it is not really my type of movie, critically acclaimed or not. It has to do with the fact that I was in middle school when it came out, which means that I was vaguely aware of its existence and knew that it was a controversial film. It also means that a handful of my contemporaries had parents who believed them to be old enough to see this film, which led to schoolyard conversations like this:
Classmate: I saw a movie with NAKED PEOPLE.
Everyone else: Tell us more! Tell us more!
C: They were DOING IT.
E: EWW!
C: It was ARTISTIC and BEAUTIFUL and if you're going to be so immature, I'm not going to tell you anything more.
E: Noooo! We'll be mature! Promise!
And that is why, in addition to not watching movies, my kids will be forbidden to attend school.
Naturally, I was intrigued, and this registered itself in the back of my little middle-school brain, not to the point that I ran right out and rented this movie as soon as I turned 18, but enough that, when I caught the beginning of it on TV, I thought, "I gotta see this."
The one good thing I can say is that Paquin did, in fact, deserve her Oscar. But, as for the rest of the film, I couldn't figure out how it got made. All that kept running through my head was that, somewhere, at some point, some executive decided that this film had artistic and/or market value. And based on what?
To start with, it's depressing. That's not enough for me to say it's a bad movie, but it isn't anything other than depressing. It's just depressing. Until the last five minutes or whatever, it exists solely for the purpose of being depressing. It's so depressing that, when you get to the big emotional scenes, you don't really care because, meh, we're all going to die and the world is running out of oil anyway.
Second, and this might just be me, I really hate it when love stories begin with prostitution.* I mean, if you're trying to make a comment about the transactional nature of all human relationships, then have at it, but if you're trying to do something that the audience will approve of, or even cry at the end of, try having your characters meet at a coffee shop or something.
What bothered me most about the movie, even more than all the gratuitous nudity, was that the major plot point relies on a misdirected love note. Why would you send a love note to a man who can't read? I mean, unless you needed some plot device so that your husband could act completely out of character, thus proving that he is not only wrong for you but also evil and therefore any adultery is totally justified.
And, finally (not, mind you, because this was the last thing I disliked about the film, but because I'm running out of synonyms for "terrible"), the ending felt really tacked-on. Was that really how the film was supposed to end, or was that some attempt at increasing market value? I actually knew how the film ended, because I remember my mother talking about it. I'm pretty sure it was in the context of her having been as annoyed with the film as I was.** She might be able to confirm that.
The lesson here is that naked people do not a good film make, even if they are doing it. And also not to take movie recommendations from your middle school classmates.
It does feel good to get all that off my chest, though. The nice thing about having a blog is that everyone within a 100-meter radius of me is spared from hearing about how much this movie sucked.
* - The other day, one of my students referred to "the great American film, 'Pretty Woman.'" This made me want to shout "we made 'Casablanca!'" and run out of the room in tears.
** - I'm scaling this to her disposition. On an absolute scale of annoyance, few people are even capable of getting as annoyed with stuff as I do.
If I weren't who's to say
14 years ago
11 comments:
I laughed and laughed at this entry. Don't think for a minute that it wasn't clear who was A and who was B, though I agree that you deserve each other.
Yes, The Piano really annoyed me. I can't even remember why, but I can say that Harvey Keitel is not a pretty naked man. But it came out many years ago and Patrick will still mention how very sucky it is. I get really irritated when something is critically acclaimed and I hate it. I wonder if there is something I am missing, or if people are really that easy to see through (meaning that their wishes for happy endings).
Of course your middle school conversation was hilarious. I've been teaching middle school so long that I found myself saying, "That's a middle of sixth grade to middle of seventh grade conversation."
Is Enchanted opening in Russia? It seems like a movie that might have some international appeal. I saw a preview for it in July and have wanted to see it since.
I think it's clear if you know that one of us isn't American, since his English is more formal than mine, and he was criticizing a common movie cliche, while what I was commenting on was just really dumb scriptwriting.
The only thing that didn't annoy me about The Piano was the child actor, which goes to show what a remarkably annoying movie it is. I actually had to look it up on wikipedia just to confirm that it was critically acclaimed, or if I had just gotten it confused with something else in my memory. Well, critics are people, too. I wonder if they'd like it as much now, or if they were all influenced by each others' opinions, or by the fact that it was a foreign film.
When I saw Meet Joe Black, I thought they should have just deleted every other word in the script. It was so repetitious that nothing would have been lost and 90minutes is about what that film should have been.
The only movie I've wanted to see for years and then finally seen that hasn't disappointed me is The Story of Adele H., but I think you sided with your mother on that one. There are some movies I just know she's not going to like.
Oh, before I get to the Piano: that "Pretty Woman" comment pretty much blew away the little that remained of my patriotic love of my native land. This is what we give to the world, and how they see us. . . (By the way, did you know that the grandson of the guys who wrote Casablanca is the GM for the Red Sox?)
You may remember The Piano as controversial because everyone loved it except your mother and me, so we had to go around frothing about how stupid everyone else is. I won't even go into most of it except to say this about the ending, which left me slack-jawed in stunned disbelief: it completely destroyed whatever indulgence I was feeling for the movie while watching it. There were not many good films that year and I will say that a lot of the iamges are really striking and I still have the soundtrack (I like Nyman's music, but I'm not wild about him). But that movie started me on my definition of a chick flick as one that is basically emotionally and intellectually dishonest. The Piano was a rom-com for people who wouldn't be caught dead at How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. But it's the same basic thing. You can be self-absorbed and not very interesting(and, if you're Holly Hunter, not that attractive) and all the men will still talk about how your dark soul makes you superior to them, and at the film's finale you end up with the guy you want, and a big house, and a budding career. You're having it all! So I thought, So what was the entire rest of the movie? A "my bad first marriage" anecdote? It really bugged me because the ending clearly had an academic motivation: there was this whole thing about how the great 19th century novels of adultery (Anna Karenina --choo-choo! -- and Mme Bovary, primarily) involved "punishing the woman" for "transgressing the patriarchal norm" blah blah blah. So for political reasons Campion had to stick a completely improbable happy ending onto the story. There was obviously no thought of what would actually happen to a woman like that in 19th century New Zealand (or Australia? I can't remember). And I kept wondering how Harvey Keitel and his tribal facial tattoos managed to get that big house in a colonial society, which tend to be more conservative than the mother society anyway. And it was one of those films that was so over-praised I ended up hating it even more just to correct the karmic balance.
When I saw Meet Joe Black, I thought they should have just deleted every other word in the script. It was so repetitious that nothing would have been lost and 90minutes is about what that film should have been.
The only movie I've wanted to see for years and then finally seen that hasn't disappointed me is The Story of Adele H., but I think you sided with your mother on that one. There are some movies I just know she's not going to like.
Oh, before I get to the Piano: that "Pretty Woman" comment pretty much blew away the little that remained of my patriotic love of my native land. This is what we give to the world, and how they see us. . . (By the way, did you know that the grandson of the guys who wrote Casablanca is the GM for the Red Sox?)
You may remember The Piano as controversial because everyone loved it except your mother and me, so we had to go around frothing about how stupid everyone else is. I won't even go into most of it except to say this about the ending, which left me slack-jawed in stunned disbelief: it completely destroyed whatever indulgence I was feeling for the movie while watching it. There were not many good films that year and I will say that a lot of the iamges are really striking and I still have the soundtrack (I like Nyman's music, but I'm not wild about him). But that movie started me on my definition of a chick flick as one that is basically emotionally and intellectually dishonest. The Piano was a rom-com for people who wouldn't be caught dead at How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. But it's the same basic thing. You can be self-absorbed and not very interesting(and, if you're Holly Hunter, not that attractive) and all the men will still talk about how your dark soul makes you superior to them, and at the film's finale you end up with the guy you want, and a big house, and a budding career. You're having it all! So I thought, So what was the entire rest of the movie? A "my bad first marriage" anecdote? It really bugged me because the ending clearly had an academic motivation: there was this whole thing about how the great 19th century novels of adultery (Anna Karenina --choo-choo! -- and Mme Bovary, primarily) involved "punishing the woman" for "transgressing the patriarchal norm" blah blah blah. So for political reasons Campion had to stick a completely improbable happy ending onto the story. There was obviously no thought of what would actually happen to a woman like that in 19th century New Zealand (or Australia? I can't remember). And I kept wondering how Harvey Keitel and his tribal facial tattoos managed to get that big house in a colonial society, which tend to be more conservative than the mother society anyway. And it was one of those films that was so over-praised I ended up hating it even more just to correct the karmic balance.
Yipes -- I had a couple of typos in my comment (some spacing and mistyping "images")! So much for my plans for posting in my own blog tonight.
We missed you at Thanksgiving. I bought a heritage turkey. Very exciting. I had never had to put a down payment on a piece of meat before. There's no going back to Butterballs!
I had to look up what a heritage turkey was and in the process ended up reading about factory farmed turkeys, so I am basically never going to eat regular turkey ever again. Not that turkey was a huge staple in my diet (unlike, say, chicken, which I studiously avoid knowing anything about), but it's probably good that I'm not coming home for Christmas, after all.
Oh dear! I have failed to mention that eating at your childhood home has changed a bit since your last visit. It started with high fructose corn syrup and then it moved to local eating and then to ethical animal treatment.
Free range chickens taste quite a bit better than grocery store chickens, so there's even a benefit to doing the right thing. Same with grass fed, humanely killed beef.
The heritage turkey was the best turkey I've ever had. Patrick is right that there is no going back. And now that you've read about the ones we eat, you can see that there should be no going back.
It's safe to come home, but you may have to listen to me talking more on this subject.
Another reason to go with grass-fed beef (assuming wikipedia is reliable): the turkey industry produces tons of unusable feathers, many of which are ground up and used as filler for animal feed. You have to really wonder about the person who thought of such a thing.
Russia doesn't really do free-range, plus I wouldn't be able to afford it, so if I'm really concerned, my option is to give up chicken completely, or raise and slaughter my own, which I don't think my landlady would be ok with. I don't know if I can give up chicken, though I already avoid eggs. At this rate, I'm going to be the only fur-wearing vegetarian.
Ah, back to the conversation about movies. The third reason you can tell A and B apart if you know that one of us isn't American is that only Americans would talk about insurance.
Patrick mentioned that Americans (for good reason) are obsessed with health insurance. And I had picked up on that, too. Also, I figured that no child of mine, raised with pretty conservative moral values, but on a steady diet of All My Children and Friends, would blink an eye at the old swept-away-by-passion-only-to-discover-you-are-pregnant plot.
Back to animals: one of the problems of feeding animals the byproducts of other animals, besides being disgusting, is that it is dangerous. It is the reason that mad cow disease was able to spread. I doubt that Russia uses some of the same practices used here, since it is not quite as industrialized yet. Michael Pollan answered the vegetarian question for himself (and for me) by pointing out that our meat animals wouldn't exist unless we were using them for meat. While I think most people would agree that a life in a confined, dirty space is not worth living for any creature, I think the thinking gets fuzzy when you weigh no existence at all against a nice life that ends up in an early, useful death.
Sorry I posted that long comment twice. My computer was acting up.
I have now realized that I need to stop saying "heritage turkey" without defining it, because everyone outside of the Bay Area has asked me what I'm talking about.
I think you should become a fur-wearing vegan. When someone asks you if there's a contradiction there, just narrow your eyes and say, "Those mink had it coming. And they know why!" (I wanted to do that last sentence in italics but I don't think I can in comments.)
I had to laugh at the comment about life not being worth living in a confined, dirty space because that describes every office cubicle I've ever seen. Vick, we all know that life IS worth living, but only worth living . . . if you're . . . Born Free!
I think the whole emphasis on the ethical treatment of animals was brought about under the sinister influence of Marcel and Madeleine.
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