My Nerdflix Queue is Like an Eternity Long

It seems like any nerdy person is at least slightly OCD in some capacity. Even more interesting, they're almost never ashamed to divulge such organizational or hyper-analytical processes in a semi-ironic confessional manner to whoever is willing to listen. I am no exception to this pattern. You see, when I first got my Nerdflix account, I might have gone a little wild. I rated movies more compulsively than I checked for new comments on the Blogulator, back in ancient times before the e-mail notification feature. After rampant IMDb searches, skimming down lists of the greatest movies ever from various sites/critics/awards histories, and several recommendations from Nerdflix themselves, I suddenly I had over 100 movies in my queue. I instantly got nervous. I knew what would happen, and it did.

Only a month or so later, I started receiving DVDs in the mail and asking myself, "what the hell is this and why did I put it on my queue?" I had absolutely no connection between my desire to see a certain movie and the movies I actually ended up watching at home anymore. Oh and it never really got better, either. I just had to deal with this new way of movie-watching life. Let's not even talk about how Jerksica reacts to this when she gets to the mail before me. I attempted to use my OCD for good, limiting myself to only 100 movies in the queue at a time, but that soon failed when I started reading Pajiba on a regular basis, where I get an idea for a movie to add to the list almost every day. Here are a couple examples from the recent past that resulted from this kind of random Nerdflix-mania...

David Gordon Green Movies: I honestly don't remember reading about this director, but once I got his movies in the mail, it totally made sense that like two years ago I probably read about him or one of his movies on some site and decided I needed to see his movies. He's basically a working-class Terrence Malick. Slow-moving elegaic movies with sketches of characters, naturalistic settings, and deeply pretentious dialogue and/or narration. So right up my alley. I popped in All the Real Girls and from the opening frame of seeing Zooey Deschanel say something soft and whispery about love while staring off into the distance past her male counterpart's eyes, I instantly hated it. I continued to hate the movie even though it had all the aforementioned traits that make me love a movie. It felt totally disconnected, too concerned on this guy and girl who are completely uninvolved with the rest of the world, and thus I did not care about at all. I couldn't stand the movie. Next in the mail I got George Washington, which had all the exact same things as All the Real Girls, but featured a strong cast of various child/teenage characters as well as some of the working class characters from Real Girls. Also, there was an EVENT in the movie. Who would have thought that by simply making it an ensemble and adding a main EVENT to center the movie around, you turn a terrible idea into the best movie I've seen in years. Real Girls, stay away from it. George Washington, so very highly recommended for fans of pretentiousness. I wondered if he had any other movies and why those weren't also in my queue and then I found out he made Undertow, a little retro-western/thriller that I randomly rented from Hollywood Video back in the day, which is a solid movie that I'd like to revisit.

Asian Movies: How is it that there are so many great Asian movies that never make it to American theaters? It boggles my mind how many are out there, waiting to get a cult following. Now only one of the three I saw in a row would I consider great, but they're all pretty good. The requisite horror movie that somehow found its way to me was South Korea's A Tale of Two Sisters, a creepy little movie where two BFF sisters return from time away in a mental institution to their father and stepmother's home, which has some dark (maybe haunted?) secrets within. Very subtle and switches from the mundane to the completely freaky within minutes, and has more twists than a sock hop curated by M. Night Shyamalan. It's silly at times and melodramatic, but overall was a pleasant enough diversion from the nothing-but-terribleness that is American horror. Next was the truly awesome Last Life in the Universe out of Thailand, an almost impossible movie to describe without giving away too much. A huge event screws up the life of our protagonist in the beginning, so he escapes his city life to trod along a beach with a girl for a gorgeous slow-blooming minimalist love story. It's like a Gus Van Sant movie where he gave the camera to Scorsese only for the beginning and ending. Soooo recommended. The final film was Japan's Vital, which starred the same lead actor from Universe, but turned him into a stoic amnesiac who begins to unravel the mystery of his memory loss as he dissects his first body in medical school. Intriguing concept executed in a mildly dull and blasé manner, but almost worth it for the gut-wrenching and mind-tripping conclusion (and I'm not talking twists here, I'm talking hypnotic cinematography and an editing sequence that would make grown men cry).

It was a tough couple months indeed getting through all these movies that I can't remember for the life of me why I queue'd them in the first place. Overall, however, with only one of them being downright horrible, looking back on this reminds me of just how not terrible most movies are. It's almost JUST those movies out in theaters right now that I end up paying more money for that are the stink of society. As far as my concern for never "renting" a movie again that I actually have a desire to see when I watch it, I came across two solutions: 1) Move movies to the top of your queue right before they're about to send you one! I did this in order to see In the Valley of Elah, because I had read a particularly passionate review of Tommy Lee Jones' performance and the movie in general from someone known to hate all things Paul Haggissian (Crash, The Last Kiss), until he saw this movie of his. I had to find out for myself, and indeed, with the exception of a cheesy flag metaphor and a sometimes overly-distraught Charlize Theron, the movie was not that bad. 2) Utilize the 'Watch Now' feature on Nerdflix! I used this to indulge a random desire to watch a Lili Taylor movie (she rocks!) and because I saw one which was also about military men, a subject I was interested in after watching Elah. So I plugged the laptop to the TV, pressed 'Play' on Dogfight, realized yet again how much of a better actor River Phoenix was in comparison to his lazy brother Joaquin, and thoroughly enjoyed the simple love story that took place over the course of one night and adorably reminded me of my love for Before Sunset.

Three cheers for new technologies and OCD habits that help remind us that there are indeed good movies out there somewhere! We just have to deal with them being a few years older, not having unintentionally funny scenes, and being on a tinier screen. I was getting worried about the lost art of enjoying movies when I saw Shutter and most of our group (including myself) thought, "huh that wasn't that bad of a movie."

This entry was posted by chris, on Thursday, April 17, 2008. You can leave your response.