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.
It never fails. Assuming there were a notary awake, you and I would go to his office and present tonight’s discussion on fancy parchment, have him trot out the seal–you know, officiate this shit. Note in your records I’m typing. On the keyboard. The time is 11:58 PM, which is kind of late, but that’s overshadowed by the cavalcade of time-outs on Blogger. The Internet should conform to my schedule and plan its outages for another time, and by golly I demand a snack and a nap right now.
The interns offer a comforting connection to campus, usually by sharing bits about university goings-on and mutual professors and, in the past few days, a nasty stomach virus. The experience has been a delight, so much so that I’ve realized my favorite sickness is, despite all my firmest convictions, the sore throat. Stomach viruses are just insidious, buried deep in your trunk and striking seemingly on a whim. A sore throat is more honest, don’t you think? When it’s there, it’s there, no ambiguity, no second thoughts about whether you’ve really gotten better or whether you’re basking in temporary respite.
Well, my psychotic neighbor upstairs is shouting again and pounding on his wall in a profanity-laced attempt to silence the apartment next to him. He’s a guy in his mid-forties who, after every screaming match, will inevitably bump into me in the parking lot and apologize profusely, claiming he wasn’t the one who was swearing.
I once helped him haul a television up to his apartment, being the goddamn saint I am, and he casually invited me to watch a movie. This was the second invitation, actually, and rhetorical gymnastics were passionately employed to maneuver around it. I don’t believe I’d bring much to the table, understand, which is to say I’m not yet ready to have my entrails fashioned into curtains while he whispers nursery rhymes. But the flu? That’s something to share. When he apologizes on Saturday or next Tuesday, we’ll shake on it.
Outsourced. There are currently 19 of these, by the by. The well is deep.