Yesterday I didn't finish watching more than a dozen films

I must have gone through at least a dozen films yesterday trying to find something to watch. I’d started out renting on YouTube Francois Ozon’s 2012 In the House (top photo) a WIFF Weekend Recommendation. I love Ozon’s films and thought I hadn’t seen this one before. But it’s a rare movie I’ve missed and after some time it occurred to me – as these things do – that indeed I’d watched it in 'Ron’s Personal Movie Bank.' It’s a comedy drama but rather bizarre. And while starring some of my fave French actors (the versatile Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seigner). It started out well as a presumptuous pedant of a  teacher (Luchini) takes it upon himself

to mentor a promising writing student (Ernst Umhauer) it devolved into a tale of voyeurism and ended disastrously, leaving a sour taste in my mouth….And since I had a long afternoon and evening to pass in the middle of a holiday weekend, I forced myself (it’s come to that with film, unfortunately) to check out several films on Criterion and Netflix, none of which I watched in their entirety and many I nixed within 10 minutes. These included, surprisingly, since I otherwise admired her The Hurt Locker (2008), Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless (1981), Strange Days (1995) and the acclaimed Blue Steel (1990). None of them had the characters or driving plot; one (Strange Days) even seemed farcical. Then I tried a Terry Southern (“Hollywood’s Most Subversive Screenwriter”) series with Aram Avakian's End of the Road. It started out well – albeit a movie of its times – a kaleidoscope of American protest in the late 1960s but the literally frozen character of a supposedly numbed Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach) and mad characters at a psychiatric hospital may have played well when the film was released in 1970 but seemed ridiculously funny now. Okay, let’s see what was on Netflix, which is always a challenge. Actually, many of these I’d tried and given up on previously. They included The Love Scam, She Said, My Future You, Bad Influence, Life or Something Like It and The Life List. I even, shockingly, gave up on Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid (2007) which I think I’d seen before anyway. With still hours in the day to go I returned to Criterion and took a stab at Insomnia (Christopher Nolan 2002) and finally The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski 2010) (bottom photo). Finally, I thought, this is sure to be good – it’s Polanski after all! But I think it’s the worst Polanski I’ve seen – long drawn out even with Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Sex and The City’s Kim Cattrall. Derivative and so much a product of its time, a film where Brosnan stands in for one time Brit PM Tony Blair and his supposed war crimes and charges before the International Criminal Court ….. In my 71st year and having been a rabid filmgoer for the past 50 of them, have I simply become too impatient, bored or jaded with movies? They’re either too similar (broken relationships or families), derivative (drawn out police procedurals), or woke (politically correct). But, bottom line, they don’t do what movies should do – and that’s entertain, keep me on the edge of my seat, engross me in a thrilling and novel experience. I closed my computer and went off to read