I walked out of my first movie ever last night. I hated to do it, because it was a "World Premiere" and the director spoke before the airing. It was locally produced.
I'll describe the movie now, fuzzing up some details because it's not my intent to embarrass the director, who seemed nice.
It opened with a an aerial shot of a rivulet of water. Very pretty.
Two minutes later, I was thinking, "Uh, time to move on from this shot."
Then the sound started. It was people doing a chant in monotone notes.
Based on my estimate afterwards, we got 12 minutes of running water and monotonic chants. 12 minutes. Stare at some running water for 12 minutes while ringing your doorbell continuously and you'll see the challenge.
Then the scene switched to an aerial shot of some frozen body of water. One minute, two minutes, .... then the sounds came on, and they were random wildlife sounds. And when I say random, we're talking random. There were dogs barking, for example. Dogs barking while we looked down at the frozen water.
That went on for another 12 minutes or so and nothing on the screen ever moved.
Then we went to the third scene. This one had a boat on a lake, and I thought, "Okay, we're going to start hearing some narration now."
Nope. It was 12+ minutes of the boat sitting on the water, very slowly drifting slightly to the right, which was the most exciting scene of the night to that point.
The sound started for this scene, and it was someone saying sentences. I couldn't tell what was being said, because the director recorded five or six different voices saying the same sentences, and then she offset each voice by half a second. The result was cacophonic noise that was rhythmic enough to be really annoying, and you couldn't understand the words. That went on for almost ten minutes and I finally put my fingers in my ears because it was so annoying. Then she started strobing in bright pictures, still images that flashed so fast that you couldn't tell what the image was. Fast-flashing movie scenes really bother me, so now I had to either cover my eyes or my ears and I needed to cover both. I finally leaned over to my wife and said, "I can't take this any more. I'll wait outside." She decided to go with me and we left.
When we walked out, I looked at my watch and we'd been there for 48 minutes, minus ten minutes for the intro speech. They were still showing the boat on the lake when we left.
I'm fine with avant-garde stuff. It's not always my thing, but I can tolerate it. But this? This was painful. It was essentally 48 minutes of looking at three photos surrounded with nonsensical sounds. I can't figure out how that director put that together and decided that it was ready for the public. I felt like a meanie for walking out when the creator was in the audience, but life is too short for that, man. [Reply]
Started off with The Running of The Jew bit and people got up and left in decent numbers. Don't know what they expected but it wasn't that. My friends and I stayed and had a fantastic time [Reply]
Originally Posted by InChiefsHeaven:
So...what was the name of the film? Was it a documentary or like a story?
Originally Posted by TinyEvel:
Rainman, what did the director say in their intro? Any conceptual hoo-hah that might've given you some insight in how to receive this?
Sounds more like a film art installation than a "movie", I've been to art museums where you walk into a dark room and something like this is playing on the wall.
Only movie I walked out on was THE MASTER. Waste of two good actors in a terribly boring film. also, one other film around 2001 was called the Dinner or something about a dysfunctional family gathering after one family member died. It was dark and depressing, can't remember the name.
The director's intro was pretty routine, just thanking people and talking very briefly about the process of making the movie. The one key foreshadowing statement she made was something like, "I didn't intend this to be a documentary (on the nonfiction subject matter). My goal was to present how (the nonfiction subject matter) makes me feel."
My wife's theory after the movie was that the director was intentionally making the movie uncomfortable and disturbing to reflect the fact that she felt uncomfortable and disturbed about the subject matter (which, I'll reveal, is climate change). I can see that if she was going for pure avant-garde, but I don't think I fully agree with it.
I think each of the three scenes was meant to portray human impacts. The first scene was nothing but water, and that was pre-human. The second scene with the still scenery and random wildlife sounds was the introduction of people (or maybe wildlife) into nature. And the third scene with the boat was intended to show humans beginning to exploit nature. That would kind of make sense as a literal interpretation, but jimmy Christmas, you can do that a lot more efficiently than making us stare at nothingness for 48 minutes. Maybe if I had stayed longer, I would have cracked the code with confidence.
Originally Posted by ToxSocks:
Anyway....you can't tell use all that and not tell us the name of the movie. At this point, i want to stream it just to see how bad it is.
I'm looking for it, and I don't see it yet. Since this was a "world premiere", I'm guessing it's not available anywhere yet. I'll be curious to see if it actually makes it to a public screening, because I don't think it should.
Originally Posted by DJJasonp:
I was a film major.
That sounds like a college student film trying way too hard to be ironic.
You're even more right than you think. I'm almost positive that they introduced her as a professor of film studies.
My theory is that she was going for something really deep and symbolic. However, if people eventually get frustrated and annoyed enough to leave, you're not going to deliver your message. I think she tried to go high art and didn't acknowledge that it also has to engage the viewer in some way.
There was no context of anything in the 48 minutes that I saw. If she didn't say in the intro that it was about climate change, I would've never known. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Easy 6:
It was hurting my head just reading the op this morning, did you get the sense other audience members around you were about to die rolling their eyes as well?
Either way, you clearly made the right call... yeeesh
I was really curious if we were the only people who walked out, or if we emboldened others to do so. Maybe I'm projecting my own tastes, but I can't see how anyone would have enjoyed it. It was just staring at a non-moving screen while annoying sounds played, and it went on interminably. Who would find that interesting?
We were sitting in the front and the entry was near the screen, so it was mercifully a short walk to get out. I couldn't see how others were doing, but I could tell that the couple next to me were bored, because they were doing surreptitious thumb-wrestling or something below the level of the seat backs.
If the director chased me down to yell at me, my diplomatic plan was to say that I have trouble with flashing lights, and that's true. They issued a warning as it started that flashing lights would be happening, and I wasn't happy to hear that. [Reply]