Netflix to the Rescue

So I've sat here for a few minutes trying to think of something sarcastic to say about Netflix, but I can't. It's a great service. I've had it now for a week or so, and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Currently I have 145 movies in my queue to go along with 579 rated movies, identifying me as someone who clearly has too much time on his hands.

Not quite this much, but pretty close.

So I'm liking the service. It gives me a chance to watch movies I've wanted to see but not enough to go buy on spec. So far, I've watched three of these, with another (Shoot the Piano Player) here on my desk, and I thought, in my capacity as a person who writes about Hollywood and movies, that I'd briefly review them. So here goes.

Movie #1, La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), is a boring movie about bored people. That's it's not phenomenally boring is actually something of an achievement, since it's protagonists, a married couple played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, go through the movie phenomenally bored by everything: parties, restaurants and especially each other.

They float about in a kind of haze. Always polite to each other, but never more. Mastroianni's character gets involved in little flings. He tells his wife about one and she brushes it off as though she doesn't care. She takes a taxi to the dilapidated building they lived in as newlyweds but doesn't smile, and when Mastroianni comes to pick her up she observes it will probably be torn down soon.

You get what I'm saying? It's like that. Later they go to a party at the house of a rich man. Mastroianni gets a job offer and tries to seduce the rich man's daughter. Meanwhile Moreau wanders the property, briskly walking away when anyone gets near her.

I started watching the movie last night when I was tired and I had to turn it off 35 minutes in when I nearly fell out of my chair and hit my head on the side of my bed. I finished it this morning mostly out of habit.

My grade: 2 stars out of 5

Go West (Buster Keaton, 1925) was made during Keaton's "golden era" during the 1920s, but it's not one of his better movies. Keaton stars as "Friendless," a down on his luck drifter who gets a job on a cattle ranch even though he knows nothing about being a cowboy. Though this sounds like a potentially comedic situation (or perhaps it doesn't), the movie is only occasionally amusing and doesn't really go anywhere, even after Keaton makes friends with a cow named Brown Eyes and tries ineptly to save her from being slaughtered.

The final sequence, with Keaton dressed in a red devil's costume leading a herd of cows through the streets of LA to a slaughterhouse (if the cows don't get there, the man who owns the ranch will be ruined, and Keaton has become sweet on his daughter), is the best part of the movie, even though, when you think about it, it's just a lot of walking.

My grade: 2.5 stars out of 5

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), the legendary neo-realist movie, was the best of the three. With a cast of non-actors, the movie (also known as The Bicycle Thief due to a translating error), is about a poor man and his son searching the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, which he needs to work.

Though it drags here and there and features a notably bleak ending, I found it a fascinating portrait of an honest man stuck between his principles and his need to work. In 1952, four years after it was made, it was deemed the best movie of all time in the first Sight and Sound poll, now held once per decade (in the latest poll, held in 2002, it placed sixth).

Now, it's not as good as that, but I found it a well constructed morality tale. In the Alewine household, however, I was in the distinct minority, as my brother (whose idea it was to watch the movie in the first place) declared after it was over that he would have turned it off after 20 minutes. My father, who came in for the last 45 minutes or so, turned to us after when the credits started rolling and said, "uh, whose idea was it to watch this movie?"

My grade: 4 stars out of 5

So there, assholes.