I have a confession to make:
I am, in my own opinion, unqualified to review movies.
I hate movies.
I avoid them whenever possible.
That doesn’t mean I hate every movie I have ever seen. I’ve seen a few damned good movies and a quite a few decent movies in my thirtysomething years on earth.
BUT:
The casual misogyny that is passed off as normal in Hollywood grates on me. I’m sick of plastic bodies, pornulated hypersexuality, cardboard characters being cut down for no reason, normalization of torture. I am sick of plots too simple to entertain a single-celled amoeba.
If I have to watch a movie, I just assume that it sucks until proven otherwise. Saves time.
I don’t know about you, but I feel so overwhelmed by the complexity of modern culture that I screen out everything I can just to stay sane. I probably miss out on a lot of good stuff that gets stuck in the filter.
Sometimes that means I don’t have the opportunity of seeing something that is really worth seeing, something that will expand my awareness. That’s a shame, but I don’t really know what else I can do.
But the thing is, this time I stumbled across a movie that is great, and I want to write about it, but I am not qualified to do so in a way that would do my subject justice.
Oh, sure, I could just opinion-barf my way through it, but I don’t want to. I want to do it right. So I am researching how to write a reasonably serious analysis of a film.
It seems to be harder than I imagined, and involves tactics I never learned in English class. It’s a pain in the ass and I don’t want to do it. I hate movies, remember? Nobody is paying me for this, and very likely the world will go on lurching towards Armageddon whether or not I write anything at all.
I want to quit. Just say, “I liked this movie” like everybody else does and leave out everything that was special about it, because special is so hard to capture in words. And then go do something I like. Like painting, which I haven’t been doing because I’ve been writing like a fiend for some reason lately.
But I can’t. All things I loved about this movie are trying to burrow out from inside me, and I’d better let them out somehow, or they’ll find their own way out and that’ll hurt more.
So here I am, sitting up at 4AM again with another bout of insomnia, while the person responsible for this is likely snoring cheerfully away in his own country, damn him, and it’s no one’s fault but mine for watching it in the first place. Like any sane person sits up at 2AM on Christmas morning watching movies.
Damn this movie.
If I’d known it was so good, I would have skipped it.
Hey, that would make a good beginning.
Exiled Stardust 