It’s hard to deny that, since I’ve relaunched the site, I’ve done little more than complain. Most of you should be used to that by now, but I told myself that I wanted to do more with this new site than merely vent my frustration about things that, in large part, make me quite angry at the time I’m ranting but evaporate quickly. For instance, I forgot I even wrote anything about Glee, because I stopped caring almost immediately after I hit the “Publish” button. (To that end, though, I do still think Murphy’s comments point in the direction of him being a terrible human being, and I’d have started boycotting his show even if I didn’t already find it unwatchable.)
So I’ve decided to devote today’s post to things that I love. Because, you see, even as I was bitching about Glee, I was in the process of binge-watching movies I hadn’t seen in awhile: Galaxy Quest, Moon (an unintentional Sam Rockwell sci-fi double feature!), The China Syndrome, Giant, and Rabbit Hole. Watching all these films in the span of a single weekend reminded me of something quite wonderful: I fucking love movies. It’s quite easy to lose sight of that when mired in draining pursuits designed to rob people of their love of the artistic power of a film. It’s really nice to just let a movie wash over you like a warm ocean wave, without having to analyze its artistic merits or commercial prospects, or thinking about how it fits into the current spate of releases, or thinking about anything other than what the film is offering.
I loved Rabbit Hole the first time I saw it. I couldn’t be sure whether or not I overvalued it, because I’d been mired in a sea of shit at the time I saw it. My viewing of it was surrounded by a handful of other theatrical releases—Casino Jack, Somewhere, Black Swan, and All Good Things—that were fucking awful, and I generally can’t stand Nicole Kidman. I had zero interest in seeing it, but I was the only one who could review it (being that it was released around Christmas), so I took the plunge, and I fucking loved it.
I watched it again, and I still fucking love it. It comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray on April 15th, and it requires your immediate attention. It got largely (and undeservedly) ignored at the Oscars, barely got a theatrical release, and was mostly dismissed, even by critics who liked it, as a dour, 21 Grams-esque film about grief. But that’s not what it is. Read the review I linked above if you want more information. My second viewing reaffirmed everything I felt the first time I saw it.