For the last six months or so, despite belonging to Netflix I haven't watched a single movie, forget reading a book (haven't done that since Chicklet was born). As far as TV's concerned, I've just caught one or two episodes at abc.com of "Lost" and "Ugly Betty", the only two shows I still putatively watch.
Matter of fact, if I'm honest since January (is that when Iowa was?) all my entertainment has come from the War for the White House. That's no good. How can I do anything of worth if I don't know what's out there, if I'm not learning from the success and failures of my peers? Chris Matthews is great and all but can a constant diet of "Hardball" make me a better writer?
See I'd love to be one of those movie wonks who's a walking IMDB, who can quote lines from their favorite movies, furnish a filmography of obscure directors in a snap, who has Citizen Kane in their collection and watches it....and this fall instead of continuing to dream about it, I've decided in my own little way to fix my general cluelessness by carving out one night a week for movie night.
Movie night means a night spent watching a bonafide movie not a TV episode or an instructional DVD. It must be watched in the living room on the TV in one sitting, not via I-Tunes, not downloaded on the computer and rummaged through when I feel like slacking off work. I'm going to watch a bunch of stuff: new releases, classics, documentaries, including things I've watched before so I can see if they hold up to the grown-up, post-film school scrunity...
(cue the music!)
And now, presenting the Inaugural Review.
The first movie for movie night was Charles Ferguson's Oscar-nominated documentary on the Iraq war, "No End in Sight", cut, incidentally at New York's Edit Center where hubby got his training. This is a Netflix movie that we've been trying to watch for months but armed with my new movie watching manifesto, hubby and I fired it up on the DVD tray, confident that nothing could distract us, prepared to be blown away.
Meh, I didn't love the doc. Yes, it's interesting in its detail of how the US's bungling of three crucial decisions in post-war Iraq led to the quagmire that continues today. It's coherent and clear-eyed but I felt strangely disengaged. I didn't connect to any of the stories or characters on screen but instead kept wondering about production related stuff...which is always a bad sign... You know like how did they get this footage of Muqtada Al-Sadr? How did they manage to score a Richard Armitage interview? Did they do this effect in Motion?
And because I'd tried to watch parts of it before, I became obsessed with where exactly I left off. Also, none of it felt particularly revelatory or shocking, perhaps because much of the inside story on Iraq has seeped out to public knowledge since 2007 when this documentary was made. Finally, we had to keep stopping the DVD, (four times in all), cause the Chicklet was stirring, having a restless night.
I picked "No End in Sight" for movie night (hubby picks the next movie) and it was um...okay. Perhaps in prime screening conditions I might have sparked to it more but I preferred chewing over the larger thematic questions of Eugene Jarecki's documentary "Why We Fight".
Check it out for yourself. "No End in Sight" is the first widely released movie to be broadcast in its entirety on You Tube (between September 1 to November 4).
"No End in Sight" gets 3 Oscars out of 5.
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