Having Trouble Sleeping?

May I recommend Wong Kar Wai's snoozefestarama, My Blueberry Nights. It's peopled with very attractive folk - Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, etc. It's shot with lots of shiny, glowing, neon-lit surfaces and has some interesting mirror/glass motifs that can keep the grad students busy. But all in all, it's powerfully boring. Norah Jones, while pretty and certainly a good singer, doesn't have what it takes to provide an emotional buy in for the viewer. You just don't care about her. Jude Law phones this baby in on the strength of his floppy hair and accent. David Strathairn is always reliable and he provides the closest thing to emotional engagement in the film - but he's also only in it for about nine minutes.

I had heard that it was slow moving and that Norah fell short but that was months ago and, when I got to the video store, I wanted something light and romantic to watch with Suzanne. Then, I made the deadly mistake - I bought into the blurbs on the back of th DVD cover. "Hopeful!" it said. "Romantic!" it said. "So boring it will make you long for that time you rearranged your sock drawer by color" it did not say. So I was a sucker, believed what the advertisers told me, and I rented it. Don't make the same mistake, I did, friends. Avoid this film unless your Ambien prescription has run out.

P.S. At what point are we going to stop calling it "the video store?" Except for the old stuff, they don't even carry videos any more. But does "the DVD store" even sound right? Or will it just have to become "the movie store?" I think we should start calling them Cinema Repositories.