Totally Unauthorized

If you have your own blog, you get to write about any darned thing you like.  Today, the subject is a movie review.

Gail and I just got home from seeing A Single Man at the Cinemark theater in Pleasant Hill. It’s a good thing I look so decrepit to the average 23-year-old ticket seller that I got the senior rate–that’s $3 less wasted on this overblown piece of cinematic self-indulgence.

The movie tells the story of a supposedly very closeted gay English professor in Los Angeles in 1962.  Somehow he lived with his partner for 16 years and nobody seems to have figured it out.  The lover dies unexpectedly, and our hero decides to end his own life as well.  There follows 90 minutes of slow, tedious film-making, accompanied by a portentous score designed to tell us that this is an important movie.

In case you don’t completely get the point, all the scenes where the protagonist is disaffected and not relating to the world are shot in very unsaturated colors, almost black and white.  Then when something touches him or he becomes more self-actualized, the colors bloom.  This technique would get a C- in film school.

Gail didn’t like the movie any more than I did.  Save your money to go see Precious.