There's more than one way to...

Fill up movie time, apparently.

A few years ago "Eyes Wide Shut" became a critically acclaimed masterpiece for two masters of cinema. Stanley Kubrick did the set up, Steven spielberg brought it home. This gritty invasion of upper middle class sexuality has set teeth on edge and hearts afire the world over by finally showing what everybody has been wanting to see.

Sex between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Now I am among the last people to avert my eyes when attractive people have sex on screen, hell, I watch ducks fucking if given the chance. But this EWS-thingy was bad. There was no real sex to set my teeth on edge, and my heart did not get all fired up by a wel masked and caped Cruise stumbing into an orgy but then doing jack shite about it.
The movie DID set my teeth on edge by it's incredible, astounding, aweinspiring boredom.

The words "aweinspiring" and "awesome" are misused in modern linguistics, both denote a sense of awe, described by my dictionary as "an overwhelming feeling of admiration, fear, dread or reference". Nowadays most people find every bleeding thing awesome, and it is just wrong. Nope, the fact that your dog barks when you ay "bark" is not awesome. Or it might be, if a dog doing what it naturally does inspires you to fall to your knees, tears streaking down your face, and makes you raise up your hands in thankfulness for being made able to watch this spectacle.

My housemate usually tells me during discussions about language that "if everybody uses the words like that, it is a correct usage". And she has a point. Eventually usage will become so commonplace it is the standard, and therefor correct. In most cases this works retroactively, thereby making all previously wrong uses right. She mostly takes this stance when she is on a position that will undoubtebly become right soon enough, but is not quite yet, but that is ok, she is a very bright young woman and even though I will attack her position here until the cows come home, I am more than willing to accept that one of those cows will have a note stapled to it's side explaining she is from then on right. This saddens me, and in a way it saddens her as well, as it means that language has lost the battle once more.

Thus as well with "Awesome" and "Aweinspring", words that will be given over to the void of mediocre impressiveness soon enough. And I am quite happy to do my thing to delay this point in time. So, when I say that EWS was awe-inspringly boring, I actually do mean I was overwhelmed by boredom, and did indeed fall to my knees in front of the television (luckily I rented it) and cried for all the wasted minutes.
Becasue it wastes minutes. Major minutes.
The sad thing about masterpiece-dubbed drivel is that it inspires other filmmakers to try and do the same thing. And they never, ever, pick the things that make the movie slightly interisting, and they always pick the easiest stylistic choices to recycle.

An example of this would be Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Scream was a satire and immitation of 80's teen slashers, with intelligent references, reasonable acting, a convoluted plot with enough twists to keep it going, and a bit of self-deprecating humor. IKWYDLS was a satire and immitation of Scream, with lousy acting, no references, no acting worth three shakes of a musquito's genitals, and all the humour to be found in the braincells of a clown.
In short, they did it wrong.

EWS was mirrored in a barrage of movies with one simple characteristic. A characteristic I could easily explain by stating it, but is perhaps best described by the reaction this little thing draws out of me. When I see a movie that has this characteristic I have but one thing on my mind, one sentence that reverbrates trough the grey folds of my brains, one cry in the night of stars that is my life.
It is, in the simplest and most easily understod terms, this; "IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD, GET ON WITH IT!"

Gods but movies are SLOW. People....talking...about...things....with...all...the...speed...and.....emotion....of..............a..........dead....slug.
It annoys me no end.

This weekend me and Sabine watched three movies. To wit: "Lady in the Water", "Zwartboek" and "Brick". and christ did we stumble into the realm of movies that could well lose twenty minutes an hour if people JUST GOT ON WITH IT.

As to Lady in the Water, what to say. I have seen 4 of M. Night Samalamadingdong's 5 theatre-exploits, and bar none have I been annoyed. I have now decided I will just never see one of his movies again, until someone comes out of one with a truly, truly compelling reason. The buffer members of Take That and 'NSYNC naked in a pool of whipped cream would not get me into a theatre for that man.
The thing with S. Day. Shawoodiebop is that he tries to put in plot twists that any thinking man, woman, child or slightly bright rock can see coming from miles ahead. He's dead... He has asthma, so will be saved... water kills them... those beasts are fake... these are not the droids you are looking for... to serve man is a cookbook.
In this movie as well. The titular character needs to be saved by a bunch of peeps, a healer, a symbologist, a guild and a guardian. The requirements for these people are given, and we have, over the course of the movie, seen the people who fit these requirements.
But they don't go and get these people. Noooooo. They (slowly) go and get people we have not or barely seen before to fill the slots, and get all surprised that they don't do the job well.
A big woohey to that, I say. And a slow Woohey as well, because it was.

Zwartboek, a movie that has the same slow style of delivery, and actually does make it work, because the situations and plot allow the actors to set up a style of communication and deployment fitting to the situations. A movie that already has some reputations, and rightly so, as it is an incredible movie. Subject matter aside, when one grows up in Europe it is hard to miss all information about the second World War, the movie creates a morally ambiguous universe where right and wrong may not be clearly delineated, but nonetheless make themselves known and get their point across without ever insulting the intelligence of the audience.
Mad props to Carice van Houten by the way, an actress I have up til known barely been able to stand, but pulls through the 2 hours and 20 of movie-power in a way I have rarely seen an actress do with such flair and, well, beauty.

Then, Brick. A film noir set in the drug circuit around an american highschool. Film noir is one of my favourite genres, to be fair, and mostly because of the stylistic language and mise en scenes this type of movie demands.
And this is a style of movie that practically denotes slowness and articulated delivery. And it, well, delivers. It starts out a bit too slowly. The first half hour is a bit of a "yesyes, please do something now" string of moments, but it works, for when the movie does get going, it stays going.
And it mostly keeps going because it is Noir. Not Nu-Noir, not Noir-for-the-new-Era, it is simply Noir. It has the hardboiled dialogue, the violence, the dames and the angels. It actually has a girl you know is trouble as soon as she walks into the room, and it sticks to it's stylistic guns, which is apparently a brave thing to do nowadays, when was the last time we've seen a mainstream, hollywood blockbuster to stick to the same theme and structure and still got it's point across? Christ even bleeding Superman had an amusing side story and the denownment of the villain as ultimately futile, and I liked Superman, so don't start the hate just yet.

All in all, I had a good weekend. Even though I have had way to little sleep and done way to much, I had fun. I hope you all had as well, as usual, I would appreciate some feedback.
Oh, and a wave to all my new readers.. My numbers have been growing exponentially, apparently :) (Two people I know of have started reading this... )

Grtz,
Kevin.