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On films I don't watch 26 November 06

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There have been dozens of movies in the past couple of years that I didn’t watch to the end, or avoided altogether. I have often considered including a category in this site to that effect. I avoid films with words in their credits such as: Spanglish, Translation, Lost in, Allen, Woody, Stone, Oliver, Wedding; to give just a sample listing.

Increasingly, when I want to rent a DVD, I select two, the second one as a backup. I rarely watch both, and sometimes neither. About a week ago that happened… I don’t remember the names of the two films.

Of course it is much easier to not finish a film when it is on a DVD, with about a two euro per day investment; leaving a cinema is a bit harder because of the annoyance of having spent seven or eight euros, plus the expensive popcorn if I hadn’t smuggled in my own. But then I start thinking about other things I would prefer to do and that usually outweighs the cost of the film.

My decision to stop watching can take place during the credits, or after two minutes or even 45 minutes of a film.

Tonight I got out a film I hadn’t heard of, I’ll leave out the name, and the credits and footage annoyed me so much that I felt like stopping, but then as the director’s credit rolled around I saw that it was a well-known director, whose first and last name happen to be on my list. I watched another twenty minutes or so, probably to either gloat or to confirm my view of him, or because it had Sean Penn in it, who I like. One of this director’s films many years ago had some good qualities about it because of its exposure of Wall Street culture; another was engaging because, well, it was about a president who has been cultivated into an icon.

In the first twenty minutes of tonight’s film (well, that’s all I watched) he used most imaginable styles of background music you can think of, all done cutely and annoyingly (I have my default Oxford dictionary open here in my iMac with a listing of synonyms for “annoy,” but annoy works best). The filming style was facile: just showing his facility with a camera, and editing. Facility is not good, by the way. Not on its own. In art there is often an inverse relationship between obvious facility and substance. This filmmaker is a great example of that.

Another filmmaker along those lines is someone whose films I do watch, if only because he really is honest about his facility and his intentions, namely to be successful and entertain; but he is also able to make films with such a harrowing lack of substance that they echo in their hollowness. He can take for example a weakly written book with a little bit of content on dinosaurs and turn it into an entertaining and well-made hollywood film gutted of any interesting thoughts.

Anyway, the second film I got out is with Johnny Depp—he’s not on my list.

EDIT: 26 November
So no, the second film didn’t work out either. I have other things to do; one thing is delving into learning more about Ruby on Rails →. I have already been through a couple tutorials and set up a Rails-made application called SimpleLog → locally in my iMac.

  • Title: On films I don't watch