Among the movies recommended by my daughter for weekend and early week viewing: Napoleon Dynamite and The Butterfly Effect.
About ND, I will say this: my daughter thought it was highly amusing. But then again, the beautiful and popular people in high school always think the lives of nerds, geeks, dorks and other assorted social outcasts are funny. In other words, crappy stuff is only funny if it isn’t happening to you. Other than that, the movie was a piss-poor imitation of other movies in which characters with no redeeming virtues complete absolutely no business, learn nothing about themselves and neither arrive at, nor help the audience to arrive at, any kind of epiphany or insight into anyone’s life.
About the Butterfly Effect: I appreciate the premise. But I could not watch the entire movie. It was too graphically violent. And perhaps events in recent weeks in my own life have overly sensitized me to the issues of institutionalization, psychology, severe depression and other various and sundry mental illnesses, but it was a troubling film in that it drew you in, so much so that you cared about the characters and were affected by the circumstances of what seemed a very horrible childhood. And once I was in that frame of mind, I felt blugeoned by the violence. Kids burning dogs. Parents molesting children. Kids beating the crap out of other kids. My brother, who served in Desert Storm, has indicated that since being in combat he has a difficult time watching war movies. Well, I have a difficult time watching mindless violence. Gratuitous violence. Even legitimized violence, such as the premise for the movie Troy (which was also on our rental list) recently makes me nauseous.
Perhaps its just TV. I can’t watch it anymore. It either takes itself too seriously, or not seriously enough. There is no balance. It is a tool for the delivery of advertisements. And frankly, that tool is becoming of less and less use on my personal mechanism. I’m becoming self-winding, so to speak.
