Movies

I know, it's an uninspired title. So what?

My husband and I have been quite good lately about watching our Netflix movies. I got a subscription for 3 at a time in 2002 or so, and then allowed him to have one of those 3 at a time about 6 months ago. He's been particularly good about getting his back in a timely fashion, assuming I don't also want to watch the movie. But I've been terrible in the past, going as long as 4 months with the same movie un-watched and un-returned.

But in the last few weeks, with more vacation time than usual, less plans than usual, and less new television on to watch... well, we've been more attentive. We've seen some good stuff, too: Capote, Grave of the Fireflies, The Rat Pack, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Duma.

Over the holiday weekend, we had no movies, since we'd watched them all and sent them back. Which was fine.

It was kind of cool to get three movies in the mail today, too.

After bedtime tonight, I sat down to watch one of mine: Storytelling. Let me begin by saying that the description made it seem, well, promising.

Maybe it was that I watched the "unrated" version instead of the R-rated one, but, really, there was no promise. The "fiction" storyline was offensive, disgusting, awkward, and sadly predictable. The novelty of having a cerebral-palsy character was nice and unexpected, but seemed to have little to do with the storyline, if I understood it correctly. I feel like I could watch it again and maybe get something more meaningful from it, but I don't want to watch it again ever. The "nonfiction" storyline was okay at first, but it just got more absurd the more we got into the movie, and - spoiler here - the housekeeper blowing up the house and its occupants was way, way out there. Hell, even I was annoyed by the 5th grader, and I was totally bored by the main character, "Scooby." I'd have to take a toke or two in order to watch him again, much like he had to in order to let the guy that had a crush on him go down on him. While I know that description was very American Pie sounding, this part of the movie is not, so don't bother rushing out there.

Joe watched the first 5 minutes of the movie, grabbed his movie, and went upstairs with his laptop and headphones to watch it. His movie was Doom. When he first learned of the existance of such a movie, he was ecstatic, because he found out from his college hallmate, also the writer of the script, Dave Callaham. (I once proof-read Dave's English essays. Heehee.) But then Dave continued to email Joe about issues with his original script, which Joe said was quite good, and how the Hollywood people cut the best-written parts, wanted to put in a love interest, changed things from the idea of the game, etc. Joe didn't have high hopes for the movie, based on Dave's comments and what we saw on Ebert & Roper.

After my movie, which was thankfully shorter, I came upstairs to use the computer and rate it on Netflix. Joe asked, "How was the movie?"

My reply: "The worst movie I've seen in years."

Joe laughed. "You haven't seen Doom yet."

Poor Dave, poor Joe and I... we'll need to be careful with our queues in the future.

The worst part about this is that my queue has 368 movies in it. And I'm looking at all of them, wondering if they're going to be as big a waste of time as Storytelling was. I don't trust any of them. And after some of the heavy movies I've been watching, I'm looking for an intellectual but entertaining comedy. Is there such a thing that I haven't seen?

Btw, the third movie that arrived today? An oldie but a goodie. I'm hoping to torture Joe with it. I imagine it'll be going back soon, too; it's only 45 minutes' worth of torture at best.