The Tube

Today is about movies, after seeing EPL (Eat Pray Love) again yesterday with a friend. It was even better the second time probably because I'm reading the book, and also for the subtleties you pick up the second time around. I've never understood why people criticize movies made from books, saying it's not like the book, but is it ever? There's no way to transcend the depth and richness of hundreds of pages into a 2.5 hour movie.

But I think EPL came close. It came close the way The Secret Life of Bees came close and Jurassic Park came close, which is to say not close at all but close enough to hit the highlights so the audience experiences the idea of it, the moral of the story. I usually read the book and watch the movie. It nourishes my imagination and fills the gaps in the movie when necessary.

We joined NetFlix the other day to address the family paradox of a movie fanatic living with an entertainment black hole. I suck at sitting through a movie except occasionally when the subject matter captures me, and that is rare. Mostly, I watch movies from the kitchen doing dishes or from the garage tossing in a load of clothes, or at the desk checking email or writing bills. I hear the movie, I comment on the movie, I race back and forth to catch the highlights. Anything anything but sitting there from start to finish. I get more done during movies than at any other time. You want that floor scrubbed, just pop in Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

My sweetie is the opposite, of course. He drives me nuts with his considerate pausing of the DVD when I step out of the room because he doesn't want me to miss any part of the experience. Isn't that sweet? He owns hundreds of movies organized by name and genre, right at his fingertips, in little shelves he built himself. Before we met, I think I owned ten VHS tapes, and two of them were family vacations.

I really thought 'we' resisted NetFlix because, a) it will make us lazier than we already are, and b) it will make us lazier than we already are. I didn't really understand the need since we had some movie stations already. But in the end I wanted NetFlix because it makes him happy.

He hungers for the first run new releases, seeing what perceptions are out there, special effects, character, plot and intrigue. He misses them. Now he has access to tons of newer things he missed in the theatres and I can blog or reorganize the attic or read or pick dead blooms from the flowers out back. And if it's a tenderhearted tale, or has really hot guys in it, I can enjoy it with him.

At any rate he gets a nice respite from my irritating habit of flipping mindlessly along with the remote, flip- flip-flip-flip, and invariably settling on a movie partway through. I seem only able to commit to the last 20 minutes because that is my attention span, and everyone else in the room fidgets and politely waits me out until in exasperation they say: we have the movie and wouldn't you prefer to watch it from the beginning?

Nah, I'm good, I reply: you can have the remote.