No Thanks, Sir, I've Had Enough

What's your policy about not finishing movies? Are you a walker-outer, a sit-and-sufferer, a go-to-sleeper? Back when I started my Oscar quest, my (and my friend Shane's) rule was that halfway was good enough if the movie was bad enough. Later, when I started my site, I reviewed two films that I thought were so awful that I turned them off.

But I had a change of heart several years ago. Someone pointed out, in a nicely written email, that I shouldn't dismiss a movie until I had seen all of it (even though one of my favorite critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum, apparently does this). I started to feel bad about it, and I deleted one of those reviews (for Palmetto) and rewatched the other (Gates of Heaven). And I actually ended up liking the latter, although the great second half didn't exactly excuse the difficult first half.

It's now my policy to stick it out, no matter what. Once I sit my butt in the theater, I'm not getting up unless I have to pee, and even then it's a toss-up. At home, I might only half- (or three-quarter-) watch, but I finish the damn thing.

But now I find myself in a fix. The movie in question is Hollywood Revue of 1929, one of those early talky Best Picture nominees that are sometimes painful. This one is different, though, because it's not really a movie. Yeah, it played in theaters and was shot on film, but it's basically a filmed variety show in which MGM shows off that its stable of stars can, indeed, talk and sing. Well, some of them can sing; Joan Crawford, who does a pretty awful song-and-dance number, sums up why she's known as a dramatic actress. It's such a drag. I got halfway through it, not even fast-forwarding through some of the awful musical numbers—in which forgotten or never remembered crooners sing treacly songs in very, very, very long takes—although my finger kept twitching toward that button.

But then I got tired, and I turned it off, intending to finish it later. That was over a week ago. It sits atop my television, mocking me, reminding me that if only I were to finish it, I could send it back to Classicflix.com and get a movie I might actually enjoy—the next films on my queue are William Dieterle's The Last Flight, Tod Browning's The Unholy Three, and Alfred E. Green's Parachute Jumper. Sure, I could just copy it and return it (not that I would do such a thing, no sir), but then it would sit around unnoticed; at least now it's sitting around reminding me of itself.

Writing this has energized me. I'm going to sign off and put that darned movie in. Oh, but I just got another Battlestar Galactica disc... and Netflix just brought me Point Blank...