The Changing Face of Film

I've got myself a problem.

Over the past year or so, I've jammed my calendar. I don't really know how it happened. One April afternoon I looked up and was booked well past the summer. The trend has continued and, with the birth of my second child happening literally any minute now, the odds of changing this trend is pretty shallow. Not to go on and on, but I've had about every minute accounted for, not including this blog post, from Tuesday morning up until Friday morning. Ug.

I'm not complaining, as a lot of the time is time well spent. I'm in a financial class, I'm teaching classes again shortly, I'm advancing my job, I'm spending time with my family. One big area where this time crunch has manifested the most is in how I'm looking at movies.

See, I still read AICN and CHUD and Rotten Tomatoes and all those sites, but the last movie I saw in the theater was a good two months ago. I rarely get out, and my family recently decided against Netflix because carving out 90 minutes once or twice a week for a movie is proving to be unrealistic. I know I just blogged about watching four movies in one night, but that's different from being "up on film."

The problem is this - I'm starting to love the junk and to avoid the "good stuff." I've always kept what I think is a really good balance of trash and art, challenging myself from time to time, and I guess when the right movie comes along, I can get into it. The last movie I can remember really challenging me is "Zodiac," and that was more than three months ago.

Let me give you a bad example, and the excuse I have for posting a nice looking picture of Rose McGowan. I saw "Grindhouse" in the theater and loved the overall experience. In fact, I'll put it as one of the best times I've had in a theater in recent memory. But after watching "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror" again, separately on DVD...man, I like "Planet Terror" and I don't like "Death Proof." We can argue, and I've seen the arguments where Tarantino's "Death," was the far superior movie, and I'll give him that it was more ambitious. But I didn't like it. I flat out didn't like it. I was bored by the banter, I was stymied by the "twist on the killer genre."

And it's not that I don't get what Tarantino was doing - he was more film literate, his film was far more clever, his characters were better fleshed out, but damn it...when the day is done I want a hot woman with a gun on her leg versus a hot but somewhat obnoxious woman I'm supposed to care about prattling on endlessly about ditches and boyfriends and text messaging for an hour while I wait for the car chase. I had fun with Planet Terror. There was no fun to be found in Death Proof.

That's what has me worried. Have I consumed so much trash that it is now all I can eat? God I hope not. I'm waiting for a film to come and blow my hair back, to move me to tears or to tear down some wall of misunderstanding I've erected for myself. What I really fear is I've seen what I've seen and it's all been done. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, maybe I'm intentionally not challenging myself, but everything I've seen on the indie circuit lately is either pretentious or old.

I don't know. Here's hoping for better film offerings in the next few months. And here's really hoping I have time to feed the soul through film.