I snooze, you lose.
Now Playing: My thoughts on sleeping through movies.
When I was younger, I almost never slept through movies. That's how youth is, right? When you're hungry, you eat; when you're tired, you sleep; when you want to watch a movie then by gum you watch the heck out of that movie. But as I get older my free time has become more scarce, and so sometimes if there's a movie I want to see that's only playing for a limited time I'll see it when I can, while I can. This is compounded by the fact that I didn't have the Wexner Center Film/Video Theatre in my life way back in the day, and all the wonderful films it has provided have come at a cost, that being the fact that most films are programmed for two or three nights apiece. Which makes it even tougher to fit in the movies I'm excited for, or at least curious about. So you see my trouble, and many of you other film geeks out there will be able to relate.

Bearing that in mind, it has always been my policy to give every film I watch a chance (even CATWOMAN). I make an honest effort to keep myself awake when I'm tired, and if a film grabs me I'm almost always successful. If I'm not getting into a movie, on the other hand, I'm less prone to stopping the natural eyelid drooping. This was what happened last week when I watched THE BLANK GENERATION (1976, Amos Poe and Ivan Kral), a film that was interesting as a document of a specific time and place (CBGB's in the mid-70s) but pretty deadly in the execution. The bands were shown in Super-8 footage, but the filmmakers weren't able to record sound, so they dubbed recordings of the songs, and the synchronization is distractingly off. If the subject was less interesting (and less of a draw for that matter) this might have been an interesting experiment, but to be honest I wasn't there to be challenged cinematically- I was there to rock out to The Ramones and Television, among others.

I also lost my way, although to a lesser extent, in last night's screening of Masahiro Shinoda's PALE FLOWER. I was sort of digging the movie, but it really didn't hit me on the proverbial gut level, so eventually I gave up. I felt a little bad about it, but not bad enough that I'll buy a ticket again tomorrow.

On the basis of these two experiences I've decided to include [zzzzzzzzzzzzzz] ratings on my screening log, in the interest of maintaining a complete log, but I won't review the films here, because that wouldn't be fair to anyone involved. Just in case you were wondering.