Thursday, April 27, 2006

Frodo, were he to implore me to relive his 9-hour biopic on Middle Earth, would find an unwilling participant, a viewer prone to disappearing not by sorcery or the will of some dark lord given to sleeping in volcanoes, but by a magically short attention span. My movie ADD has grown epic. A two-hour flick, previously a staple of celluloidal consumption, now takes days to finish. It’s just so hard to sit in one place, you know?

What’s worse is I’ve imposed a kind of deadline on films. If what I’m watching doesn’t prove compelling in the first 50 seconds, I hit the eject button. Narnia felt the wrath. I popped in the disc and sat spellbound with boredom as poorly rendered warplanes whizzed through the sky. A profound sense of disengagement materialized after 15 seconds, then the DVD flew out of the player. Finito. Gone. For all I know, the witch was too short to reach the wardrobe and Aslan ate all the children before transforming into a walking alleg–SNRRRkkkkkzzzzz.

The criteria for passing the 50-second test are still unknown, but you may rest assured I will eventually uncover them. It’s not a matter of whether there’s gobs of action, I’ll tell you that much. Match Point, for instance, held my attention, even though it took a good two days to finish the movie. The film was tense and lean, a different kind of thriller, with sections where you knew Woody Allen was fully at the helm, manipulating your sensibilities to pitches of his choosing. Some parts were damn near unwatchable, and I mean this in a good way.