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February 10, 2004
OGIC: The Netflix files, no. 1
As a Netflix newbie, I can report so far that watching the movies is only about half as fun as setting up the queue. (A warning: think twice before you go comparing the size of your queue with cinetrix's; trust me, you'll come up short.) Coming to the end of my trial period, I've received three movies and watched two. First was L'Auberge Espagnole, which made it into my queue on the strength of director Cédric Klapisch's previous U.S.-released feature, the très charmant Chacun cherche son chat [When the Cat's Away], a cute but not cloying portrait of a Parisian neighborhood, hung on the slender reed of a plot about a missing cat.Anyway, L'Auberge Espagnole was strained and disappointing, with nary a character you could warm up to, limp plotting, and cliché to spare. I was about to say, in a spirit of generosity, that it probably suffered from my having stepped out of character and viewed The Real World: Paris on MTV on a near-regular basis last year, and having that as a point of comparison. But this doesn't exactly look like generosity, does it? Regardless of the force of the comparison, the two were nearly indistinguishable.
Next up was His Girl Friday, a vast improvement. My only complaint is that I could have traded half the screwball capers in it for one more serving of pure banter between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant's newsroom Beatrice and Benedick. They're both splendidly tart and unapologetically urbane--"Oh, well that will be nice, a home with mother. Yes, yes. In Albany, too"--and I was surprised to read David Thomson's stern view of Russell, whom I haven't seen in anything else. In the New Biographical Dictionary entry on Grant, Thomson praises him for "goading Rosalind Russell into being bearable" in this film.
And hey, how can you not love all the nifty, avant la lettre self-referentiality? (For even more audio clips from the movie, look here.)
Next up: Pirates of the Caribbean and To Have and Have Not, continuing my Howard Hawks self-schooling.
UPDATE: Rick at Futurballa has good recommendations from his recent Netflix selections.
Posted February 10, 2004 4:22 AM
