I Hate Movies

Actually, I love movies.

So how come I don’t got see them anymore? There was a time I would not miss an opening of either an anticipated blockbuster like “Transformers” or a smaller flick like “Juno”. Haven’t seen either one of them. These days when it comes to going to the flicks I don’t really give a shit and I’m not sure exactly why. Although I didn’t see “No Country For Old Men” in the theaters, I did read the book. Let’s just say, it wasn’t any “Blood Meridian”, but was somewhat entertaining.  Anyway, after reading the book, I felt I had already seen the movie.  It read like a movie script. I didn’t see “There Will Be Blood” or “Michael Clayton” but I did read the scripts, and enjoyed both of them, very good reads. So I’ll read the book or script of a film, but for some reason won’t get my lazy ass up to see the movie in the theater. I don’t know.

I got back on the Netflix thing recently. I had been a member from the start, then dropped it after I figured out that you couldn’t rent as many movies as you wanted in a month no matter how hard you tried. The mail service only works so fast. Plus, despite the fact that there was no limit, I felt pressured to rent as many DVD’s as I could to make the investment worth my while. I never felt relaxed with the shit, so I let it go. Then I buckled under the numerous “Please come back to Netflix” emails.

So far I’ve rented four DVD’s. “The Collector” and “Harper” and “Cruising”. And although I had seen it before, I couldn’t get through “The Days of Wine and Roses”.

Talk about a schizophrenic flick. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Is it a drama with comedy? I love Jack Lemmon, he gives his all in the movie, but he was miscast. He pulls some of those classic Jack Lemmon faces that simply undermine the integrity of the material. And Blake Edwards is as pedestrian a director as they come. What did catch my attention about the flick was the lighting. Amazing. Lee Remick is great in it. Maybe I should have put her character in the “Tragic Vixen” post.

The weird thing about the movie and Lemmon’s performance is that it can’t escape, from my mind at least, the numerous comedic characters that Lemmon had performed all around it. “The Days of Wine and Roses” came out in 1962. From 1960 to 1968, Lemmon performed mostly in comedies. “The Apartment”, “Irma LeDuce”, “How To Murder Your Wife”, “Good Neighbor Sam”, “The Great Race”, “The Fortune Cookie” and “The Odd Couple”. And although “Wine” came out before several of those films, I can’t stop thinking about Lemmon as a comedic actor instead of an actor. So I didn’t buy him in “Wine”, and some of it is his fault for getting his Lemmon on with the character. However, he did rock it in “Glenn Gary Glenn Ross” and “Short Cuts”. I guess Cliff Robertson played the Lemmon role in Playhouse 90’s original in 1958. Maybe that’s the one to find.

I couldn’t sleep the other night so I decided to prowl through my girlfriend’s VHS library and ended up popping in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”. Lynch is a true American original, right up there with Altman as an iconoclast, and Woody Allen as an auteur . I was blown away by “Mulholland Drive” when I saw it in the theater, when I still went to movies, and I was still blown away by it, even on pan and scan VHS.

Other than Fellini, I don’t know of another filmmaker that can capture the elusiveness and familiarity of dreams on film. Anyway, the movie is mesmerizing, and reminded me, at 2:30 in the morning, why I love movies, even though I don’t go see them anymore. Even though I was anticipating when that dude behind the dumpster appears, I was so determined not to get freaked out that… I GOT FREAKED OUT.

Silencio!