I'm dropping "and liked" from the title of this series. I plan to write about everything I saw in theaters last year and, turns out, I didn't like every one of them. But let's keep in mind going 4 for 10-career would make you a unanimous first ballot hall of fame lock. And at the very least these folks are doing something, anything. I'm sitting here in my pajamas. So I am going to make an effort to unearth the gold nuggets we might have overlooked in the rocky soil of disappointments. Or at least keep it light.
It turns out "disappointment" is a big part of the movie-going and movie-evaluating experience. We head off to see a picture we've been itching for since the trailers started showing up 9 months earlier. "I love that director," those actors, the book, the screenwriter, the director of photography, popcorn and red vines! Whatever. We're convinced it's going to shake the foundations of experience. Suck it Bill Blake! I want to fall from innocence!
And then we realize the director is punching a ticket (one for me, one for the studio), that actor, as charismatic as a stranger in cream-colors, is miscast, the book is better, the screenwriter's voice is washed out by the 12 mercenaries the studio hired, the DP, well, his work is always beautiful, but the popcorn is stale and, Jesus wept, red vines are $5.75! Whatever. There are, without exaggeration, at least 6,000,000 ways any given picture can die. Choose one. That as many as 10 good movies per year survive death sentence by committee is a bona fide miracle.
My point being we rashly, harshly and somewhat casually dismiss solid movies in that moment of hot disappointment, only to return to them later and concede, "Y'know "Observe & Report" was pretty good. It just wasn't what I was expecting that day. I'm going to go back and add a star in Netflix."
Peace be with you.
And also with your soul.
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