Movietime

[muckefuck]

monshu is like the Earth: You get so accustomed to his stable rhythms, you forget how drastically they can change. His regular pattern when I met him was to watch an hour or two of television every night to unwind before going to bed. After more years of Law & Order reruns than I care to recall, I begged him to buy NetFlix. There are too many good films I've never seen to spend that much time watching trash television.

When we moved into the new place, I readily agreed to buy an enormous HD tv in order to enhance the pseudocinematic experience. But in the first year we owned it, I don't know that we had it turned on more than one hundred hours--and more often than not, it was tuned to Bravo or Food Network. Every night, he would walk right past it to climb into bed and read himself to sleep instead. Our NetFlix languished to the point where I asked the Old Man more than once to cancel the subscription and be done with it.

Now the poles have flipped once again. For the past week, it's been on every night. This weekend alone, we watched four feature-length films:

1. The Awful Truth One of our orphan NetFlix videos; I think it showed up when we sent back Mothman Prophecies sometime last year. Its reputation as a classic may have worked to its detriment, since I went in expecting something as tightly-written as His Girl Friday; by comparison, Truth just seems to run out of steam about two-thirds of the way through and ends on an anticlimax, with none of the enticing loose ends gleefully tossed out in the first few minutes tied up at all. Still: Cary Fucking Grant, bitches!
2. A Single Man This, on the other hand, lived up to its hype. It's no small accomplishment for a work this meticulously crafted to be so affecting without any dips into sentiment. Twenty minutes with Colin Firth's cantankerous old fart and I already cared deeply about his fate. My only regret is that we paused it halfway through for a pee break which undermined the emotional momentum that had been built so carefully.
3. The Big Gay Musical No prizes for guessing who chose this big yawn. About the only thing that kept me at all engaged was Daniel Robinson's performance. The preachy, soporific musical-within-the-movie wasn't even credible as off-off-Broadway; in its absence, there was the audible ticking off of clichés as it slouched from one plot point to another. Glad I didn't watch the whole thing, wish I missed I'd given it a miss altogether.
4. Fuera de carta A zany gay Spanish sex farce! Starring a hot bear chef! What could go wrong? Well, how about the filmmakers backgrounding the central romance to the point of perfunctoriness? But of course, if they wasted time on character development, there wouldn't be time for an endless battery of screaming invective and boorish fag jokes. (El Mundo nailed the overall atmosphere when they compared it to "a backwards mid-20th century provincial club" ["de un retrógrado casino provinciano de mediados del siglo XX"]. But what it won't do for your knowledge of contemporary Castilian obscenities!) It's the anti-Cachorro, getting everyone wrong that that film got right.

So, as you can see, some quality-control problems after being out of the game for so long. But if this really is the new normalcy, we'll have plenty of time for fine tuning.

Comments

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

"Law & Order reruns than I care to recall"
Hi, my name is Molly and I've been L & O free for 5 years....its still one day at time and I nearly fell off the wagon into cable reruns when the series was cancelled .... but I stayed clean and I am still holding it together....

[gorkabear.livejournal.com]

Fuera de carta was, definitely, very topical. Javier Cámara is usually a decent actor but he plays the same role over and over. In addition, I just realized that the director was the same person that directed Cámara for a long-running comedy we had on Telecinco, called Siete Vidas.

TVE1 programmed "Cachorro" on prime time last Saturday. We watched it hoping to see if it still held up. I didn't like some of the acting (I love Elvira Lindo but she's an awful actress - she is the one that plays the boy's mother and protagonist's sister who is arrested in India). What I really liked this time was how the bad grandmother was played. The protagonist's performance is still good but the guy still waits for one more leading role to consolidate his career.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Javier Cámara is usually a decent actor but he plays the same role over and over.

I got so tired of that toothy sneer of his that by the end of the film I wanted to wipe it off with a blowtorch. Lola Dueñas' face reminded me of a young Carmen Maura, which was unfortunate because it invited comparisons which were very much to Velilla's detriment. He was clearly going for outrageous and loopy but it ended up excessive and shrill. Speaking of Almodóvar, I was probably most annoyed by the poor use of Chus Lampreave, who deserves so much better.

I actually watched a bit of Cachorro on Saturday. (Someone gifted me with the DVD.) That's one reason it was on my mind the next day. I plan to watch it over and over until I can actually make sense of the dialogue!

[gorkabear.livejournal.com]

Well, hopefully yes. If only the protagonist had a decent voice and not one spoiled by years of smoking cigarettes!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

¡Hombre, a él le entiendo mucho más que a la adolescente cotorra!

[gorkabear.livejournal.com]

Ah es que es el típico acento de adolescente cotorra... Créeme: ha empeorado

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Have you see I love you, Philip Morris?

It's clunky in places, but overall pretty good. I recommend not reading any reviews.