The other day I got the movie Lincoln out of the library. I had grave misgivings about this movie, that stem from the fact that too damn many historians were exclaiming about how wonderful it was. Accurate. It really portrayed Lincoln.
I have had misgivings about movies and been wrong before. And it would have been a shame to miss out on something that was that good, and after all, free.
It was indeed impressively... accurate. The man looked like Abe and was just as understated as I would have expected. After about one-half hour, whenever Lincoln opened his mouth to tell another anecdote, I thought, "Oh, jeez, there he goes again." Maybe his friends thought he was a wit, but I imagine if you had to work with him, or were for god's sake married to him, you would have been resorting to a lot of eye-rolling.
After 50 minutes I found myself walking around the house doing things I'd forgotten to do earlier, without pausing the movie. This is something I never do. So at 60 minutes I figured my life would be able to go on without a serious lack of quality if I never finished the movie.
This need for movies to be just like real life has got to run its course at some point. But even movies that are not about historically important things have just too many scenes that are just like real life.
It took me a while to figure out why I was so bored with so many movies lately. At first I thought it was because they were about "young people" and they were all full of angst and obsessing about stupid things. But that wasn't it. I am definitely not above enjoying a movie about stupid things.
The new trend in movies is to have scenes replicate real life word for word. Last night I sat through Shame which I had had on hold at the library for quite some time. I'm really noncommittal about the sex scenes. I think I don't care enough one way or the other to have an opinion. They are usually long enough.
But the longest scene in that movie was the dinner scene. It was practically the whole dinner conversation. And it was really boring. And this is the kind of thing that is going on just too much in contemporary movies.
I imagine that there is just too much studying of the writing of screenplays. I can imagine the screenplay professor instructing his students to, "This week, listen to conversations. Then write them down." It has become important that people in movies talk just the way real people talk. And for the same length of time. Which makes a lot of potentially interesting characters really boring.
I couldn't believe it when the woman at the restaurant agreed to go out with the guy again. "Oh, come on," I said, "What are you going to talk about next time?" Turns out they ran out of things to do in bed before they ever had to go out to eat together again.
I have been accused of being anti-intellectual. So be it. I don't mind a movie that has some thought to it, but not if every thought a character has has to be verbalized. And I kind of think that Abe was a lot more clever than he appeared on screen, because nobody was being obsessive about "portraying" him.
I hope when things swing back in the movie business from this ultra-realism, it doesn't go the other way of having movies where nobody is even sure what is happening. I think reality is just fine, as long as there is some imagination that goes with it.
And some movement, for gods' sake. Let's please not have people sitting around at dinner in real time, because it just isn't as much fun when you don't get to choose who you're sitting there with.
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