Thursday, November 2, 2006

Try as you may to staunch the flow of media, earnestly guard against its time-thieving wiles, it will eventually overtake and dominate you. This is like natural law or something, so what happens when you have more entertainments than time? You employ the 50-second test, which we discussed in disciplined academic detail a few months ago, and basically it involves giving a piece of media less than a minute to grip you.

I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. Published authors allegedly spend tremendous effort on the first chapter, presumably to compel you to continue reading their works, and I don’t see why movies, for instance, should be any different. I paid to put your shiny behind in my DVD player. Now dance. You might suspect the 50-second test, brief and time-saving as it may be, allows you to sample all media, indeed transform you into a kind of ecumenical moviegoer. Wrong. Just as you would intuitively avoid something like Hostel, so too would Pride & Prejudice invoke fear and vomit well before the play button’s pressed.

So, M:I III. Patently delicious. I don’t think you’ll find innovation in it, certainly none of that “plastic bag swirling around in an alleyway” shit, but damn it if J.J. Abrams can’t write. This is the guy who did Lost, you know? Or at least the first few episodes of the series, until that ship sailed straight into the danger zone. He knows motion, smart motion, and the movie had me from the word go.

But Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, despite the title’s willful disregard for punctuation, may have been the better movie. Sure, it’s got style, but the dialogue? Crackles. I felt bad, guilty even, for missing it in theaters. I think I’ll live it down, though. What I won’t live down anytime soon is the fact I also watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I failed the 50-second test, in this case.