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.
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