Tuesday, April 7, 2009

I've Got to Stop Watching Movies

Just for a while. Watched three of the most profoundly affecting films I've ever seen in the past few days. And although only one of them is ostensibly a HORROR film, these films were so thoroughly harrowing and thought-provoking that I'm actually terrified of trying to digest them all.

Saw "Let The Right One In" at my sister's place over the weekend. It's been on everyone's best-of lists, and it deserves to be. Bleak, beautiful urban scenery, haunting, creepy performance by an amazing young actress. Quality gore. Painful, aching memories of puppy love, adolescent ennui and out-of-placedness.

My brother-in-law sent me home with "Oldboy". Those of you who don't know about this film, take a look over at the guy in the corner who does know. Notice that he's not freaking out, yelling "that movie ROCKS!!" No, he's smiling and nodding confidently, knowing that when you get around to seeing it you will be knocked speechless. To say that it is an epic Korean revenge story tells you only a tenth of it. To say that it has an astonishing fight sequence that leaves the viewer as whimpering and exhausted as the fighters gets you a little closer.

And now I've just finished "Synecdoche." Lovely, poignant, at moments quite funny. But overall, I'm just exhausted. Like I've personally had to live through fifty years of neuroses, ill-considered choices, examining, re-examining, attempting to impose direction, yet still failing to understand. Will my life be that puzzling? Will I recognize the grandeur of the puzzle? Will it full of self-inflicted pain, or will a find a way to resign myself with dignity? Was all that really in the movie I just saw, or am I having an aneurism?

Seriously need to cleanse my mental palate. I think I'm too shattered to watch anything with a plot right now. Where's my lava lamp?

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