I adore watching films.  It’s one of my favourite past-times, and I’d consider myself having a pretty open mind.  The carpet at the shelves of my local video-store is threadbare from me pacing up and down.  There is however, one genre which I hate with a passion, and that is experimentative film.  Basically, if you’re looking at the dust cover and you see ‘WINNER – Cannes film festival’ or ‘NOMINATED – Sun-dance film festival’ emblazoned at the top, you’re guaranteed it’ll be a great waste of your hard-earned bucks.

Take Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’, a film about the Columbine high-school shootings, or ‘Last days’, about the legend that was Kurt Kobain.  Both have the potential to be enthralling films, but they really aren’t.  Mostly you’re watching some half-assed acting (heavily abusing the ‘smell the fart’ technique) and very long and boring shots of people not doing anything at all really.  It makes me want to pull my eyeballs out with a rusty six-inch nail.  There are people out there who love this tripe, and I just don’t get it.  They use words like ‘Directorial Triumph’ and ‘Infuriating Impenatribility’, when ‘Pure Shite’ would clearly suffice.

I brought back a film yesterday named ‘Inland Empire’, directed by David Lynch of ‘Mullholland Drive’ fame, though I didn’t notice that when I rented it.

Me: “Can I have my money back?  I couldn’t watch this.”

Video rental man: “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.  It must be scratched.”

Me: “No no, it’s fine.  I just couldn’t bear wasting any more than fifteen minutes of my life watching it.  It’s crap.  It made me want to kill myself.”

Video rental man: “Ummm, really can’t help you there I’m afraid.”

You see films like ‘Sin City’ are surrealist in my view, but a fifteen minute long black and white shoot of a girl with a mascara streaked face staring at a dead TV screen and imagining people with rabbit heads on a stage doing nothing but spouting irrelevant statements is just a gratuitous glimpse into some oddball’s crazy mind.  Films like these should be restricted in availability only to those who use words like ‘Soupçon’ on a daily basis.

I watched those first few minutes of the film anxiously reassuring TAT that the madness would stop shortly and an interesting plot would ensue.  Less like watching a car-crash, more like watching maggots on a dead rat.  We felt a horrified boredom, an awareness that we had been duped, and above all, fury that such crud finds it’s way to the shelves of XtraVision. 

Yes, I’m shackled with the need to be entertained.  I want blood, explosions, unrequited love, conspiracy theories, back-stabbing, a twisted plot and mind-blowing music.  It’s not my fault I’m spoiled that way. 

Atmospheric genius? Avant-garde? An exercise in voyeurism?

Spare me.