Another for the "Well, No Shit" File

Today is a cover-the-reception-desk-at-work day. It's also a leave-early day, as I'm out at 4:15 to catch a flight to Chicago for a long weekend. Because of this, I knew I knew I'd have some time to maybe do a post, and almost jokingly I asked Sara what I should write about. She said "getting married." Ok.

1. For reasons that will become clear, I believe that the one thing a man should keep secret from his woman (above your ATM pin or any other important financial passwords) is the password to his Netflix account.
2. Over the last two nights, I spent a total of 134 minutes watching the Sex and the City movie.
3. Ommitted for effect.
4. If you've watched a movie and are having a hard time deciding if it was any good, let me offer this tip: start it up somewhere randomly in the middle and make your judgement soon after; you don't need to watch more than the first 4-5 minutes. Make sure you start it up cold, meaning without any memory or residual emotion leftover from your first viewing. When you do this, you are getting only the quality of the film and you're most likely not getting a big climactic scene (that would have been closely edited by the filmmakers). You're also totally divorced from the emotional build-up, so the natural tendency of even the worst movies to suck you into the story is gone. (A feature film is like a book in that the simple time investment to complete it implants an automatic austerity to it. A thiry minute TV show that's of equal production value to a two-hour movie will never feel as good as a movie. Even two hours worth of TV shows would not be the same. After you've read even a mediocre book, there is always a period of time immediately afterward where you are smitten with the book and would be inclined to inordinately praise it. So too with movies, and that's why you need to strip away that bond.)
5. You noticed before I said I saw Sex and the City spaced over two nights. Sara gets sleepy early and so we only got through just under an hour on night one. She was angry with me for the first 20 minutes because I couldn't stop picking on the movie's shortcomings, but I started following the story and quieted down eventually.
6. Sex and the City is a horrible, horrible movie.
7. On night two, we started it back up where we left off and yowzer once again I couldn't stop make comments about how bad it was.
8. There wasn't anything different about the first five minutes we watched on night two (maybe minutes 55-59 of the movie) and the last five minutes from night one (minutes 50-54), but it was painfully easy to find fault with the former while glossing over the shortcomings of the latter. The emotional flow of the movie had been interrupted and the movie was left open for me to see it for what it was.
9. This effect might be in some ways similar to why it's often difficult for an actor to do live theater work, compared to films. In a theater, the actor has to do his own work in sustaining that emotional bond, while in film, any number of editing or directorial choices will cover an actor's deficiencies.
10. It almost feels frivilous to comment specifically, but Sex and the City is really bad. I will admit that I've watched several episodes of the TV show, sometimes enjoying them, sometimes even respecting their relative quality. The movie, however, is terrble. Almost every actor just phoned it in, though not so much as the writers. You would think that a writer constrained to 30 minute storylines would love the opportunity to add real depth to his characters when given two-plus hours to play with. Not so here. If anything, the characters are flatter and less interesting. Again, it's probably a waste of time to criticize this stuff as the movie was clearly made with its only purpose being to lure women into the theater. As with lots of our contemporary culture, mission accomplished commercially, mission big fat fail substantively. I guess it just offends me when someone who has the option to make something at least passably competent with what wouldn't even be any additional effort, but chooses instead to fill the cracks with shit. I don't really like the term "sell-out" as a slander because usually it's used hypocritically, but pretty much everyone involved in this movie sold out. Good for them, as long as they knew that's what they were doing.
11. Someone does indeed get married in the movie, in case you couldn't stand the garbage and turned it off before getting to the end.
12. On a brighter and barely relevant note, I read somewhere recently that Chris Noth's character on Law & Order is being replaced and the character is to be played by Jeff Goldblum.