how can i be productive when there are tons of movies i haven't seen yet?

i need a job for the fall. in fact, when i took my job in august, i knew i would be laid off right around now. so i should have been spending a lot of time already doing that whole resume/applying/looking thing. i've dabbled. but largely, i watch an unhealthy amount of movies in my free time. why do i do this to myself? a) my job makes me constantly exhausted and i don't want to move anything, not even my fingers across a mousepad. b) there's so many movies out there! do you KNOW how many movies are available on nerdflix? almost too many. so i have a lot of work to do in both fields: job-searching and movie-watching. here are my results of the latter in mini-versions because i am lazy and don't want to bore you.

waitress is the only movie where i took my dumb self and got out of the house to watch at one of those movie houses. felicity stars in a dark comedy about getting out of a rut and doing what you're capable of in life. sounds like someone i know who watches too many movies. she's really good at making pies in the movie and i'm really good at thinking about how much i wish someone made me a pie. pies are really good and people should make me them more often. grade: B+

third man i ended up watching at amy's after the electrelane/the blow/tender forever show we were at turned into an electrelane-with-three-terrible-local-bands show and decided we didn't want to endure local music for 3 hours to see electrelane. i fell asleep. i hate these "classic hollywood film noirs" that turn out to just be boring traditional classic movies with a murder plot (also see double indemnity). i'd much rather watch over-the-top film noirs like detour or gilda. i woke up for the ending though, and that was pretty gorgeous to look at. grade: D+.

five easy pieces was the best movie i saw out of the bunch in the past week. it was facebook-profile-addition-worthy. that good. and basically, i think zach braff saw this movie and got "his" "idea" for garden state, just before cameron crowe watched garden state and got "his" "idea" for elizabethtown. jack nicholson hates his life and has to visit home to see his dying father and has an affair with a random girl that connects with him unlike anyone else he's ever met. brilliant character study with an amazing existential ending. grade: A.

tootsie i watched because i wasn't really awake yet and didn't want to get up but didn't feel like i should go back to sleep because it was already 10:00 a.m. and it was on the nerdflix online thingy. also 30 rock referenced it hilariously and it's one of the funniest movies of all time, according to the american film institute. and my screenwriting professor often referenced it as "a perfect screenplay." what do i have to say about it? well, bill murray was great. grade: B-.


the elephant man is quite possibly the most depressing movie of all time. having become one of those creepy david lynch fanatics in recent years (later than i should have, i admit), i had to see it. after job searching/studying all day long one sunny saturday, mark and i decided to reward ourselves by watching a movie that reminded us how terrible the human race is. regardless, it's one of those movies where you'd feel like a horrid person if you didn't say it was good. but it was good. (looks around). seriously. grade: B.


henry fool is an art movie from 1997 that just spawned a sequel that's out in limited release now called fay grim. you know how you always see a movie on the video store shelves and think "i should rent that one day," but you never do? this is one of those. luckily this new sequel made me move the original (generically about a stranger that moves into a family's basement apartment) up on my nerdflix queue. upside: it has overly pretentious tongue-in-cheek avant-garde dialogue throughout. downside: this gets old and irritating after about 10 minutes, and the movie is 2 hours and 17 minutes. upside: the score is so amazing that it made me go immediately to amazon to buy it as the end credits rolled. grade: C+.

so as you can see, not a bad haul for a bunch of random (mostly "classic") films i had never seen that i finally got to see because i had a new object of procrastination. thank you impending unemployment!

This entry was posted by chris, on Friday, May 25, 2007. You can leave your response.