January 21, 2006
match point (quantity v. quality)
Here at sugarhigh! we're promised to write a brief something about each new movie seen, if only so that we can recall what we saw at the end of the year. After seeing Match Point last night, we pondered in conversation with friends whether it was more or less boring than Brokeback Mountain (seen in 2005), which admittedly managed some emotional weight despite the requisite Ang Lee yawns and horrific soundtrack.
It's not so much a difference in quantity as quality. Brokeback Mountain offers its boredom as a marker of aesthetic virtue: the standardized indie [sic] mode of proffering slowness (and its invocation of mid-century European cinema) as a proof that this is art we're watching, gosh darn it. Jim Jarmusch, we're looking at you! Though Ang Lee is at least as villainous in this regard; alas, no amount of homotext can free Brokeback from the director's addiction to making vague impressions of genre films that didn't need tarting up (or down) in the first place (cf. Crouching, Hidden).
Match Point, on the other hand, would have genuinely liked to be darkly sprightly, to zip along from plot point to plot point in an accelerating descent; Woody just doesn't seem to have the chops anymore (Mr. Rhys-Meyers' acting didn't exactly help), and the boredom is incidental to a more generalized incompetence.
We have no verdict, as yet, as to which of these qualities of bordeom is preferable. It may come down to a taste for landscape porn as opposed to real estate porn, or the reverse.
Posted by jane at January 21, 2006 11:44 AM | TrackBack