stories of suck
Meredith and I have a long history of going to see really really bad movies through no fault of our own. Sure, there are the times when we'll tempt fate intentionally, and we've got a cushion of funny people around us, but we have a bad history of being lured in by the promise of cinematic wonder -- or at least competence -- and being beaten into submission by movies that hate us.
Case in point: today, as part of our weekend together to reconnect and recharge our batteries, we hung out together at part of the Jewish Film Festival. It's important for Mer to connect with aspects of cultural heritage, and none of her Jewish friends are at all interested in seeing film festival movies. Anyway, this particular festival had been kind to us before. Some big highlights from festivals past included digitally restored (and slightly edited and retouched) footage of Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1962, a movie that's basically an awesome feature-length music video of Kurt Weill's life and songs (speaking to the German in me and the Jew in Mer), starring Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Elvis Costello, and Lou Reed, among others. And my favorite: one of the first horror movies ever made, an ass-kicking silent full of great German Expressionist sets (some better than Metropolis) and full of antecedents to Frankenstein and so many movie monsters to come: The Golem. The best part -- a live klezmer band to provide a horror score. I recommend all three of these, even the Eichmann documentary, but "The Golem" may not be a rental movie kind of experience. Even the pictures on this site really, really don't do the movie justice. (The extrerior sets made me wonder what Paul Wegener -- the director and Golem himself -- could've done with Lord of the Rings had he been alive and had the budget Peter Jackson did.)
Anyway. That has all changed. A disturbing trend has emerged -- don't take your husband Brian to the Jewish Film Festival, because the movies will suck. And suck. AND SUCK. Don't take him, and they'll be great. Past offenses for the past few years would include:
1. Something from Argentina about a whiny unappealing guy with pinkish puffy nipples and mangy, patchy chest hair. Oh, and he gets to sleep with models. Mer and I didn't focus on the plot too much because we were too morbidly fascinated by the main character's grooming problems.
2. A French movie in which a young woman has sex with (I guess) several different men, one of which is able to penetrate her through several layers of clothing. Either that or he's satisfied simply with dry humping. What do French men say during orgasm? "Mon Dieu. MON DIEU. MON DIEU." Makes sense, but it helps if you chant it in low, gravelly tones like a Marseilles sailor.
3. The most boring war movie ever made.
On to tonight's crapfest:
4. We were sold on an independent film set in LA with Nestor Carbonell, Janeane Garofalo and John Ritter. What we got was something that didn't have a coherent thought in its empty head and thought it was really, really clever. I bet the words "edgy" and "quirky" were used a lot at production meetings. Mainly I just wanted to take these characters and force them into timeout by watching the next movie on this list.
5. The Glow=The Slow. The whole movie is about a woman who may or may not have experienced a visit from an angel with a severed wing. Oh, and the Glow can drive beat-up trucks and make Star Trek conventioneers walk around on farms. Being the Kubrick fan that I am, I'm accustomed to glacially-paced movies, but mostly what I wanted to do here was sleep. I'm not really a pig by nature, but when I find myself wishing that the main female character (yes, her name really is Tinkerbell) would get naked simply to make this stupid thing more interesting, something's wrong. Something is doubly wrong when nudity is hinted at in one shower scene, and then delivered when an obese, hairy man is bitten in the ass by a spooked dog and wanders around in the dust clutching a bloody towel around his privates.
Meredith owes me, dammit. And so does that movie.
A long time ago, and we were first dating, I took Mer up to the German Film Festival up in the city, at the Castro. You may not think it, but it was every stereotype you could expect: a tall blonde woman in a cruel black leather outfit announces in accented English about the evening's film (and yes, it's a FILM, not a movie... oh the pretension); the short that precedes the movie is very very weird and disturbing but good; the movie itself is a three-hour adaptation of Kafka's last novel. Since the novel was unfinished, so is the movie: it abruptly ends in mid-frame. Thank God.
Since we had just started dating, we hadn't reached that point in our relationship where we were comfortable overcoming awkwardness and that very real desire to please and be accomodating, comfortable enough with each other to say: "Can we just leave this flaming bag of shit, please?" So, for three hours we nervously sat there, wondering if the other one was liking this... thing, this movie that has three hours of people wandering through blizzards, having sex on cold, sticky, dirty ice-encrusted German barroom floors, having conversations that went nowhere (which is kind of the point with Kafka, I admit), wandering through blizzards again, having sex on the barroom floors, more crappy dialogue, trudging through more blizzards...
I think it was a good thing that I fell asleep, otherwise I might've run screaming and then I might never have seen my future wife ever again.
I woke up and didn't realize that time had passed. Another blizzard.
Lest you think that film festivals alone are responsible for all this, we went to see Johnny Depp's latest. Boring as hell too. I think I started getting bored right in the previews, when I found out that there's going to be a Haunted Mansion movie. With Eddie Murphy. Me, I'm waiting for the "It's a Small World" movie -- they can play it for (or to) the prisoners in Guantanamo, since nothing else seems to be against the Geneva Convention there anyway.
And they say Hollywood is out of ideas.