Sunday, January 18, 2004

Portentous Twaddle

...AKA I just sat through 'The Hours' on Showtime.

Man, rarely have I seen such strong talent thrown at such mediocre material. I mean, really. Foreshadowing is a tool, not a bludgeon.

I almost turned it off, I really did. But it takes a lot for me to walk away from a movie. At the very least, 'The Hours' had good key-note performances from John C. Reilly and the underrated Jeff Daniels - but perhaps the reason they come off looking so well is that they were only in the movie for brief passages, and thus had less in the way of truly tendentiously awful pretentious dialogue to try and speak. Real people don't speak like that, the only people who speak like that are Movie People. I'm not asking that everything be straight from the Method school, but you should at least not be consciously trying to bowl me over with your affectedness.

And where was Philip Glass' score? Barely perceptible. All in all, it seemed nothing more than a hollow excercise in the most callow type of award-mongering I've seen in years.

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