I watched Easy Rider last night. It joins an increasingly long list of movies I’ve been getting through Netflix because they’re ‘classics’ or ‘great’ or ‘groundbreaking’ movies which just disappoint me. Movies which I find unimpressive and uninteresting and which do not grab or hold my interest. I’ll have to go home and look at the list of movies I’ve watched to give you a full recounting, but the list includes Easy Rider, Deliverance, Miller’s Crossing, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, A Few Good Men, and uhhh… a couple others which were apparently so un-memorable that I’ve forgotten watching them.
I can’t wait until I start going even further back in time to see movies from James Dean and Elvis, then further back to movies like Casablanca and Breakfast at Tiffany’s… I’m guessing that it just gets worse the more ‘classic’ a movie is. Well… I’ve seen Citizen Kane once or twice and I didn’t hate that, but … I have yet to see why so many people consider it the best movie ever.
Ooh! And Netflix just got copies of Godfather II in, finally, so I’ll bump that trilogy towards the top of my Queue soon – I’ve never seen those. I always try to have high expectations for these movies, I don’t want them to suck. But then they do.
I got to the end of Easy Rider and they just died all of a sudden and … nothing had happened the entire movie, there was no point at all, it was a complete waste of my time and … well, if it hadn’t made them a lot of money and fame, I’d say it was a waste of the film crew’s time, too. I watched the little making-of video they put on the DVD, and I could see that they obviously had a good time making it, but man… I just can’t see why it became a phenomenon. If it were made today it would be lucky to get diistribution at all, and then would be killed by word of mouth. Terrance Malick (sp?) makes more engaging films!
Anyway, I ought to be working.
Update: Looking at my NetFlix history, additional movies which disappointed: Rain Man, Glengarry Glen Ross, Far and Away, Network, and … and … I had to put in an email request for my full history, and it wasn’t instant. Sigh.
