I Said No, No, No

As a Netflix subscriber, I am quite diligent and thoughtful when it comes to rating the movies or TV shows I've viewed. Like many, Netflix has sort of turned the once leisurely activity of watching entertainment into a task bordering on a chore and I often find myself putting in extra effort to consume enough media to get the best of my monthly subscriber fee (this is especially the case with unwatched mail-in DVDs which just sit on the counter as a conspicuous red faced reminder of my laziness). So when I get through a title, I find it to be a triumphant ritual to give my immediate one to five star impression of it. Additionally, constant feedback is what allows the cutting edge Netflix personal recommendation algorithm to continue to give me astoundingly accurate and spot on suggestions.

As far as my grading tendencies go, I'm a relatively soft grader. The way I see it, the fact that I had enough interest in the TV series or movie to select it to watch should give it at least a presumptive 3 star rating. In the end it all sort of works out to a curve with the great majority of titles residing in the 3 to 4 star, ok to good, territory. It takes an exceptional film to get a 5 and it takes a pretty lousy piece of cinema to get a 2 (1 star is exclusively reserved for my all time, truly terrible, eighth circle of hell, films of which there are only currently eight; I may cover these in another post but to give you an idea one of them is "Nothing But Trouble"). Since an exceptional 5 film or a poor 2 film are both equally rare, it's always a notable occasion when I run across one.

Unfortunately, this time around the latest outlier was a 2 rating for the 2000 Sandra Bullock dramedy (although it really fails on both levels) "28 Days". I had the absolute lowest of expectations going into this movie since I just needed something to watching while trying to get to sleep, yet it somehow failed to even live up to these low stakes. Actually, if the film was even duller and it instantly put me to sleep, I may have given it the gentleman's 3 for getting some beneficial reaction out of me. In the end though, the film turned out to be so muddled in its content and middling its delivery that it failed to entertain even as a failure (which is truly the worst kind of failure).

The brief as possible summary is as follows: Sandra Bullock is an alcoholic along with her jerky enabler boyfriend (Dominic West in actual English accent mode); she gets drunk at her sister's wedding and ruins the whole affair (although the ridiculousness of her actions and the damage she causes makes it look like alcohol causes her to go temporarily insane); which gets her sentenced to a rehab retreat populated by a bunch of "quirky" addicts including Mike O'Malley (playing the same cap wearing laid back dude roll he has played in everything), Viggio Mortenson (as the possible love interest), the guy who played Poppy from "Seinfeld", and some vulnerable looking teenage girl who I immediately (and correctly) predicted would die later on to lend the story some tragedy; after some initial friction Sandra comes to grips with her problem, makes friends, makes amends with her sister, leaves rehab and her boyfriend, and looks ahead to a clean and sober future.

The main problem with the film is that it is indecisive on whether it's going to be a black comedy or gritty drama about addiction and fails at being both. You know the old joke about "28 Days" being the prequel to the zombie horror film "28 Days Later"? That is funnier than any of this film's attempts at humor. O'Malley is supposed to be the sarcastic comic relief but he's had better material in his cable commercials. There's another resident, Gerhardt, whose fey eurotrash German-ness is apparently supposed to be inherently funny. Once again the indecisiveness of the filmmakers when assembling the supporting cast of residents sinks the film. They apparently didn't want everyone to be one joke caricatures but they also didn't want everyone to be complex, grimly realistic depictions of addicts so they found this bland medium of lame partially formed characters that the audience isn't really compelled to care about. As for the drama, every time things start to get serious or we start to learn about the sad history of a resident, the film tries to be light and immediately reels back. As for Sandra's character there are all these flashbacks and implications of a traumatic childhood for her and her sister involving their alcoholic mother and her untimely death, but it gets resolved so quickly after one quick heart to heart chat between the sisters towards the end that you wonder why they never got around to this prior.

In addition, the film also doesn't seem to know what to do with Viggio Mortenson's character. Even though he's probably the most fully realized supporting character and has one of the more interesting back stories in the film, he's a famous baseball pitcher currently in rehab, they never really go into it all that deeply nor do they show him making progress with his addictions at the clinic. From the outset you think she's going to fall for him when he makes his first appearance in the film by heroically carrying her into the rehab center after she nearly kills herself trying to escape through her window. There is obvious tension between them throughout and they do have an awkward kiss and he has a confrontation with the boyfriend but then he sort of disappears for a while down the final stretch. Even all the way at the end when she's leaving the facility and he chases her car down to have a big final confrontation with her, they make their peace but it doesn't end with them falling in love. She just goes back to her life, decides to leave her boyfriend, and that's how it ends. I guess it's commendable that the filmmakers were trying not to go with the cliche ending but the alternative seemed incomplete.

Oh, and I also forgot Steve Buscemi is also in the film as Sandra Bullock's counselor. As you can tell, his character was just as forgettable as most of the others.

Put it all together and you have the makings of a ultimately forgettable 100 minutes and a textbook example of how to become a 2 star film in my account; neither memorably awesome or memorably awful. There's a reason you probably haven't thought about the film since around 2001 and that this review is probably the detailed discussion of the film since then.

Walden 2.0

If you ever wanted to know if you were really addicted to something all you have to do is ask yourself: what are the things you need automatically (aside from the whole shower, clothes routine) once you get up in the morning? Whatever that is, whether it be the bottle, the needle, the pipe, coffee, World of Warcraft, love, or potato chips; that is your addiction. In my case the first thing I usually reach for after getting my glasses on is the remote. I am fully aware that there is absolutely nothing worthwhile on or that whatever piece of possible morning news will be of little consequence in my usual daily schedule of doing nothing. However, from the moment I get up, I need the mindless chatter of Al Roker talking about diet tips or the opening guitar riffs of a Saved By the Bell rerun, or the optimistic pitch of a Body By Jake infomercial filling my room to truly start the day and make me feel right again.

Of course another good indicator of addiction is the five to eight hours or so a day I spend watching TV at home during the summer. You can also throw in the internet into that addiction checklist as well. It's a pretty substantial supplement to the TV watching and when I'm at school (where I have no personal TV) it basically acts as a total substitute. So yeah, my name is Victor and I'm a TV/Internet addict. Shocker! It could be a lot worse, I could be a heroin junkie or be obsessively into bodybuilding, or have an out of control addiction to inhaling computer dust remover.

Having just read this startling personal revelation of mine, try to imagine the sort of unspeakable red nightmare that I had just gone through in the past three plus days that my television and internet was out! That right, due to a freak thunderstorm early Monday morning the cable line to my house got damaged enough to completely cut me off until a repair crew could have been sent. Unfortunately the earliest the cable company could have sent someone was yesterday afternoon. These 72 or so hours I spent broken down on the side road of the information superhighway were just about the longest in recent memory. I have in the past gone just as long or even longer without access to both TV and the internet but usually I was distracted by vacation or camp or being four years old. This outage was during my prime summer weeks where I hardly do anything else but watch TV and go on the internet!

While this was a deeply scarring and traumatic ordeal for me, as with every trying crucible, one comes out of the fire with some hard earned personal insights and revelations. Fortunately my insights came in a convenient list form:

Insight 1: DVDs are as never as good as television. My attempts to while the hours away by seeking refuge in my DVD collection reaffirmed the old truth that a show or movie you catch on TV is always better than you putting that exact same show or movie's DVD in and watching it. There's a certain satisfaction of just casually running across an episode of Seinfeld that you've seen a million times over actually going to your shelf, picking that DVD and selecting it. Perhaps its the element of surprise, perhaps it's because that extraneous step of getting it all set up before watching it (like fumbling with a condom before sex) just ruins the mood by the time it starts, or the fact that you can skip to any part immediately makes it all too easy. There's just some unknown quality about it that makes everything taste a lot less sweet. When it comes to shows and movies I'm like a snake. I'll ignore the prepared, laid out dead mouse of the DVD and go for the chase of a real live mouse to the TV.

Insight 2: Microsoft Hearts is totally rigged. The loss of the internet was a particularly emasculating experience for my computer. This once wondrous gateway to wikipedia, sports scores, and pornography became basically just an elaborate word processor...and Solitaire/Hearts machine. I haven't this much Hearts since the first month we got Windows 95. I never really got down with he singular joy of challenging myself in Solitaire, when there was the opportunity for a tense, ruthless four way battle between East, North, West, and myself provided by Hearts. However after dozens of games of Hearts I've come to the conclusion that there must be some programed fail safe device that prevents anyone from winning more than 30% of their games. Whether it's hand after hand after hand of getting stuck with the Queen of Spades or the one side shooting the moon multiple times a game or losing by a single point in the final round; I am fairly convinced that there is some serious collusion going on between the other three sides.

Insight 3: Public libraries still have the crappiest computers around. Like Thoreau in Walden I was not technically cut off from all contact. I did manage to briefly check my emails one day at the local public library. It was like being teleported back to my middle school typing class. These seemingly ancient, glacier slow, sticky, computers with outdated software made for a frustrating half an hour of reserved time. I'm surprised it wasn't running on Prodigy internet and there wasn't a desktop shortcut to play "Sim Tower" (actually "Sim Tower" would have been pretty sweet). Of course in a perverse way these are actually the perfect computers for the overwhelming majority of the people that actually use them: old folks (and possibly tech savvy homeless people). A feature laden, modern computer with a complex interface and a lightening fast broadband connection would confuse and stupefy your average geriatric library patron as they try to sign into their AOL account to forward an amusing e-card to their grandchildren.

Insight 4: Life - (TV+Internet) = OMFG TOO MUCH TIME ON MY HANDS!! As I said before, these three days were really the three longest days I could remember. You never realize how much of a prodigious time sink TV and the internet are until you have to fill in the hours of the day without them. I could easily burn through hours and hours watching the tube or surfing the net but it takes a Herculean display of will power on my part to just sit still for one whole minute (try it yourself, it's a lot more difficult then it seems). It's almost like being in a coma, you don't move and a huge chunk of time passes, and at the end you have nothing to show for it. I don't even know what I actually do online or watch on TV; it's like seemingly instant bridge from the morning to the night. It should fill me with an incredible sense of sadness at the countless hours of my youth spent just staring at screens if it weren't for...

Insight 5: Even if I cut down on TV and the internet, I still probably won't do anything productive. This is the big final insight I gleamed. I shouldn't feel any guilt or shame about spending my days dicking around on the internet or flipping channels for hours on end, because in the end I most likely would not have done anything more productive with that time. The copious amounts of free time that were the by product of my cable outage did not open up a whole new outlook for me nor finally cleared my life of the distractions that were holding me back from accomplishing life goals or whatever. I didn't paint a portrait or run a 10k or write a novel. A significant part of my time (aside from all the Hearts games) was just spend staring the walls or sleeping. At least with TV and the internet I'm passively picking up new information (albeit 99% trivial and useless) and writing an infrequently updated blog for all you fans out there.

Regrets? I'm too distracted to have them.