The all-emcompassing Movie Hate is not so new anymore. It is difficult to pinpoint when it all started, but think it began around the holidays, when the gf and I went to Casino Royale in Tacoma and were underwhelmed. I do remember enjoying The Prestige in Taipei, and I also remember loving The Squid and the Whale on DVD back in November, but I can't locate a traumatic episode that may have caused my Movie Hate. Some switch somewhere got engaged, that's all.
Last week I saw that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was playing at the Arclight (the best theaters in LA) as a part of AFIFest or something like that. Aha, I thought, this will be a great test and will determine for once and for all: Is it the movies that are the problem or is it me? I actually fantasized about blogging afterwords, how I would declare that cinema had been redeemed and how I'd thrown away all of my DVDs and replaced them with a singular copy of WAOVW that played in a loop.
My expectations rose. A lot was a stake.
I hadn't seen Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf since college and that worried me. One by one my heroes were being cut down to size. What's next? The Coen Brother's pre-Fargo catalogue, no doubt.... But WAOVW was especially important and pivotal filter back in the day: Could one be trusted if they didn't like this movie? Could you ever really be friends with someone if they didn't "get it"? Could you ever really be intimate with someone who didn't think Duck Soup was funny?
Well now.
In the end?...
In the end Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was....pretty good.
But it wasn't amazing.
And the last half of the movie dragged and dragged and dragged. Sure, it dragged like a long night of alcohol-fueled arguing would drag, but why would I subject myself to that punishment???
But I will say that the first 30 minutes were stellar. And I laughed out loud, over and over and over, with a packed audience. And then I just got bored with George and Martha and their schtick...and then it got very very melodramatic, much more so than I remembered...
But it was still pretty good. And that is all we can ask for.
And it was interesting to see it big. With an audience. And it clued me in to how I have changed as a viewer.
My new favorite moment? When Richard Burton gets the shotgun out of the closet and walks into the living room and levels it at Elizabeth Taylor's head and pulls the trigger and eveyone screams and this umbrella comes out of the end of the gun.... Taylor gets up and lunges toward Burton, and she's playing this mixture of utter relief and fear and hilarity and drunkenness and the total BURN of the joke makes her kind of horny too and she starts making out with Richard Burton right there, in front of the guests, because she's actually kind of happy to be alive and with him...
That was great.
4 comments:
That movie is over after the first act, as it were. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the ultimate burn-out drunkenness of it all, but my hell.
I will say that movies are markedly more enjoyable if you can say "the first thirty minutes are stellar" and have that be a good thing, when all is said and done. Also, movies are markedly more enjoyable if your standards are both broad and low, as are mine. It's all good then.
I agree with lisa b. You just need to lower your standards--which, come to think of it, is close to my advice about lowering your expectations in your dunking project.
I love WAOVW! But I will admit it has been a long time since I watched the whole thing. Mostly I just show a bit of the first part to my classes to demonstrate "good dialogue."
But I agree about lowering standards. Which I can't quite seem to do with novels, yet.
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