I’ve been renting movies like crazy lately, as I’ve been trying to bone up on my classic cinema. I’ve enjoyed some of my picks, but I’ve turned off several apparently universally-loved (by the “serious movie buff” demographic, anyway) films midstream in the last few days.
My Best Fiend: It was interesting for a while, but, having never seen a Werner Herzog film (I plan to fix that today or tomorrow, FTR), I felt like I was watching someone explain an inside joke I wasn’t in on for an hour and a half. Plus, I really wanted to see footage of Herzog and Kinski duking it out, and at the 1:15 mark I was a little ticked that I hadn’t seen any. I fast-forwarded through the rest just to make sure, and was awfully disappointed in the end.
Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios: I loved the cinematography, I liked the characters, I loved Almodóvar’s surreal little touches, I liked the general idea of the story, and I really liked the protagonist, but by the time they were racing to the airport it was just too much of a stretch. The plot started feeling more and more contrived as it went on, and the instant-knockout gazpacho really made me roll my eyes. It just felt too deus ex machina to me. That and the overemotional mambo taxi driver gave off such a cheesy-80s air. I turned it off right as the protagonist started chasing the old hag to the airport.
Boccaccio 70: I turned it off halfway through the first feature and I didn’t feel like giving the other three a chance when I had a long list of other movies I wanted to rent instead. The plot just seemed mundane and too attached to the Italy of that time. It seemed lacking in universal characters and situations that would still be relevant today.
Mulholland Dr: I know I’m going to catch a lot of flak for this, because it’s such a crime not to fellate David Lynch at every opportunity, but all the overacting (especially by Naomi Watts) popped me right out of the story and I was getting more irritated the more I watched it. I just returned the favor and popped the DVD out, after about 20 minutes. How the same director could elicit such overacting from this cast and such nuanced performances from the cast of Eraserhead baffles me.
Am I setting my standards too high? Am I not giving these films a fair shake? Should I be less picky?
You worry too much. None of the films you cite were universally loved. They are all rated between 7.0 and 8.0 on the IMDb. Except for the first of them, I would call them films with a significant cult fan base, but none of them are usually considered among the best films ever made. I’ve never even heard of the first film you mention, and I know cult films very well. Don’t worry about occasionally disliking some films that are recommended to you. Everybody dislikes some films that most other film buffs rave about. That’s how taste works. It isn’t universal, and not being enthusiastic about every film that you’re recommended proves nothing about how good a film fan you are.
Be less picky? What the hell for? Who are you watching the movies for, anyway…yourself or a bunch of people who think THEY know what art is? Sure, a serious aficionado should be aware of the “great” films…but critical acclaim should inform your viewing, not dictate it.
I haven’t seen Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Boccaccio 70, but based on your other two examples, I’m sure you didn’t give them a fair chance.
My Best Fiend will mean NOTHING to anyone who’s not familiar with the Kinski/Herzog on-screen partnership. At the very least, one must have seen Aguirre: The Wrath of God AND Fitzcarraldo for it to even begin to make sense. A viewing of Nosferatu is recommended too. There are other Herzog/Kinski movies, but I haven’t seen them.
How Betty (Naomi Watts) acted during the first part of the movie, all fresh-faced, perky and Nancy Drew-ish, was part of the plot, and was thoroughly explained in the last part of the movie, when the REAL Betty comes into play. It was one of the finest acting performances of the '90’s and quite rightly got Watts the attention she deserved, turning her from obscure nobody to A-list even without an Academy Award nomination (which she deserved too).
You can never be too picky about movies, since 99% of them are crap. But each movie also has its context. My Best Fiend, more than most movies, depends–critically–upon that context in order for you to appreciate it. All the other movies are also, in my opinion, worthy of attention, but again, different movies benefit from varying degrees of contextual familiarity.
Well, no, I didn’t give Boccaccio 70 a fair chance; it’s a series of four almost-feature-length films by different directors. But frankly, I was champing at the bit to grab some other rentals, I could only take out three at a time, and I decided to just bring Boccaccio 70 back and try the rest of it again later.
As for My Best Fiend, I wouldn’t say “nothing”–I got a fair bit out of it, and I watched an hour and fifteen minutes of the ~1:30 runtime, so for being a little misguided about what it would be, you’d have to say I gave it a fair shake in the end. But for some reason (based on a misreading of one of your posts, actually, IIRC) I thought that there would be more footage of Kinski and Herzog, and I was disappointed that there wasn’t. I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God tonight and I had planned to rent Fitzcarraldo next (I already had Killer of Sheep out and I also picked up Leon tonight), and yeah, I definitely wished I’d reversed the order of that. Having seen My Best Fiend actually took away a little bit away from Aguirre for me, which was nevertheless an awe-inspiring piece of cinema.
And I watched a pretty damn long stretch of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I didn’t turn it off without letting it offer me a couple of twists of decent magnitude.
Maybe I’ll give it another shot, but cliche irritates me, so I might not. I know he probably ended up lampooning the cliche, but I have a lot of movies to watch before my month-long membership expires. Anyway, the other acting performances irritated me too.
Given what I said about Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios, is there another Almodóvar film you think I should try?
Lynch wouldn’t know “cliche” if came up and bit him on the ass. Everything you saw in your 20 whole minutes of one of the best movies of 2001 (my mistake for calling it a movie of the 90’s) was geared to set you thinking one thing when the reality (of the movie) is something very different. Maybe that’s a cliche in itself, but it’s Lynch, man! Everything you see is not at ALL what it seems, and that includes Rita (Laura Harring’s character).
If you want me to spoil it for you I will…better that than you go on thinking that you just know exactly what Mullholland Drive is all about based on 20 freaking minutes.
I don’t think I know what it’s all about. I’m well aware that there are more twists and bizarre things in store. Do you think I’ve never heard anyone discuss that movie before? I don’t need you to spoil it for me, no.
I didn’t notice in my first post that you hadn’t watched these films all the way through. You should always watch a film all the way through if you want to state your opinion of it. However, you shouldn’t be too much bothered if you disagree with film buffs about it once you’ve seen all of it. See a lot of films (all the way through), read the opinions of other film buffs, and don’t worry too much if you disagree with them.
I sat through the whole thing and I don’t know what it’s all about. I do know that it irritated me mightily and ended up on the list of Lynch projects I feel no need to see again (along with Wild at Heart and Lost Highway).
You subjected yourself to the crap that is Mulholland Dr and you didn’t even hold out until the extended lesbian sex scene? For shame.
Not exactly. The first 20 minutes of Mulholland Dr was the first half of a pilot for a TV show that didn’t get picked up. All it did was set up some far reaching “mystery” that would have been resolved over a few seasons of said show.
Eh, I can get all the extended lesbian sex scenes I want for free on the Internet.
I’m glad I read your spoiler, BTW. I am definitely not giving the movie another chance, so Equipoise, you can go ahead and spoil it more thoroughly for me if you like.
I agree. You’re not obliged to sit through every movie all the way through, but the fact that you couldn’t sit through any of these movies says more about you the viewer (restless, impatient, quick to judge) than about the–IMHO–high quality of films you chose. I’d say anyone who can so easily turn off a movie (particularly one that’s both challenging and critically lauded) is someone who’s more interested in having a film approach him on his particular terms, and not those of the filmmaker’s.
Your crack about the month-long deadline also suggests that you’re trying to get the most “value” for your membership as you can; however, by writing off so many films based on what sounds like a series of kneejerk reactions, I’m inclined to believe that that membership is going to continue to yield nothing but “disappointments”.
It also seems like you’re picking movies without doing even a modicum of research. You pick Boccaccio but complain it’s too Italian. You pick an Almodovar but dislike the camp. You pick Fiend without knowing a thing about Herzog. And you sat through barely 10% of one of the most critically praised films of its year simply because you were unwilling to even wait around long enough for the director to establish his premise (Justin Bailey’s gross oversimplification of its “ending” notwithstanding).
Again, not every movie is for every person. But given the information you’re provided so far, I’d say the answer to the OP is a resounding Yes.
Is that so wrong? Taste is subjective, and I don’t feel I have an obligation to every single filmmaker to appreciate their films when they’re finely made but still fail to satisfy me.
How many times do I have to explain this? I didn’t feel like watching it that day, and wanted to return it for some films that I was actually excited about watching, leaving it for later. I was just Italianed out at that point.
I know that I’m finicky about camp, so I figured I’d just give his work a shot. As a Hispanophile, I’d actually done plenty of research on Almodovar’s work, and I knew it might turn me off, but I decided to give him a try. Am I now too open-minded? FTR, I plan to give him one more shot to win me over (Talk To Her).
No, I was unwilling to sit through saccharine-loaded cliched crap. The fact that it was part of a clever process of setting up his premise doesn’t change it for me. I’m willing to accept that lots and lots of people love that movie, and that that’s perfectly valid. But it’s not for me, because I can’t stand those cliches. Before I get piled-on even more, let me make it perfectly clear once again that I understand that those cliched scenarios are part of Lynch’s elaborate setup. But I don’t want to see it, because I can’t stand the cliches.
I don’t have hard proof for this, bur ISTM that a rating between 7 and 8 on IMDb is pretty respectable. In the IMDb Top 250, #168 (it’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 right now) has an 8.0 rating, and everything else on the entire database is rated at or lower than that, including a ton of movies widely considered to be classics, if not masterpieces. Even the #1 movie, Godfather, tops out at a 9.1 (with 250,000+ votes). So, I’d say, while not universally loved, an IMDb rating over 7 says to me that the movie was quite well-liked by the thousands of people who rate movies on the site. For whatever that’s worth to you… to me, it usually means the movie probably doesn’t suck too badly.
That doesn’t mean you have to like it. *Mulholland Drive *, though I liked it a lot, wasn’t for everyone, though I tend to enjoy David Lynch. YMMV, though I think it’s worth seeing until the end; it goes a lot of different places than you think it will based on the first 20 minutes. A movie has to really badly suck for me to stop watching it in the middle, though.
Anyway, the other acting performances irritated me too.