Paul’s DVD Reviews: Sympathy . . . Look It Up

My wife got up and stomped out of the room halfway through, mumbling about perverts . . . and the seriously perverted stuff hadn’t even started yet!

Self-mutilation and sadomasochism, the perversions in question, don’t do it for me. One, I can’t sympathize with people who have these things inside them, even if they’re cute and sexy on the outside. Two, when filmmakers tackle topics best left locked up in the attic, no matter how sincere their motives, it always comes across as cheap exploitation.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nude scene?  Cheap and gratuitous. When a man and woman have sex in bed and he gets to keep his pants on but she has to be naked, what does that say about filmmakers’ motives?  This was an exploitation flick, pure and simple.

I ordered the movie from Netflix and didn’t remember their plot summary saying much, if at all, about subject matter. I went back and re-read it, and owe Netflix an apology . . . all the warning I needed was there in black & white, had only I bothered to read it. I’ll be more careful in the future!

It’s so depressing watching movies about people who destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, especially when you know they’re not only not going to stop but eventually die from it. Once again, I grow cold, judgmental, unsympathetic: “You won’t quit, Edith, even though you know it’s killing you? Then die.”

I don’t know if La Vie en Rose got any less depressing in the last 25 minutes, because I simply couldn’t accompany Edith through the last throes. I used to drink, a lot.  I’m very hard on myself when I think back on those years, so there’s plenty of reason for my lack of sympathy.  I took a vow to quit drinking, and I did. Now I’m taking a new vow: no more movies about drunks.

Netflix (and Amazon, and Barnes & Noble), are you listening? From now on, plot summaries for movies about drunks should simply state “About drunks.”