Of all the emails I received about last week’s entry, the most disappointed ones came from people I know in real life — people, in other words, who know exactly what I waste my time watching instead of Casablanca or a classic Western. People who have walked into my apartment to find me becalmed by my skrillionth viewing of The Cutting Edge (D.B. Sweeney is cute shut up). People who have stared at me, baffled, when I correct them — offhandedly, but in a tone of authority — on a plot point in Contact. Because I have watched Contact dozens of times. On cable. Hundreds of classic films to watch, canonical works of English literature to read, and to what do I devote my spare time? Contact, a movie that is approximately 72 hours long with commercials, and features, among other absurdities, Matthew “Wooderson” McConaughey as a politically connected clergyman who has had a bunch of sex with Jodie Foster (…I know), but even if I come in at the beginning, I have to sit there for the whole three days and watch until the end, because I have a thing about Big Emotional Movie Scenes With Dads which goes a little something like “aw, that’s sweet…[sniff]…[sniffety sniff sniffle]…[eh boo hoo hoo hooooooooooo…hooooo].” It’s not like I have all these repressed emotions about a tragic blah or a missing blah or a blah blah blah; my dad is great, and as of this writing he’s in fine health. But a rapprochement or reunion with a dad, on celluloid? Forget it. Deluge. Never fails.

Do you know how many times I’ve tolerated Flatliners for that very same reason? That movie is horrendous! Okay, Kiefer is kiiiiind of cute in it, but it’s from, what, 1990? So he’s still in that Lost Boys phase where he hasn’t grown into his face yet and he’s all nose and jaw and coxcomb mullet and dated eyeglass frames, plus, you know, the plot involves med students killing and reviving each other in a bank lobby that doubles as the set of a Thompson Twins video, and not that anyone goes around describing Joel Schumacher as “an actor’s director,” but if Billy Baldwin is yawing back and forth between a Corey Haim imitation and looking like he’s about to throw up, maaaaaybe you could rehearse him a little. But none of that matters to me, not really; neither does the poor pacing of the flashbacks, or the extraneous presence of Oliver Platt, because I get my movie crack in the form of the BEMSWD between Julia Roberts’s Rachel and her junkie pops. I mean: a circular pan? It’s so hacky! He’s overdosing! It’s insanity. Love it. Can never not watch it.

I can never not watch Backdraft, either; if I need a good cry, I just flip that baby on and wait until the end, because the firemen’s funeral procession is utter manipulation from start to finish — the bagpipes, the strings on the soundtrack, the slo-mo, the folded flag, the helmets on the caskets, it’s all straight out of The Big Book of By-Numbers Touching Imagery, but I will give Ron Howard one thing: he may work almost entirely in visual clichés, but he has those clichés down cold, because I can’t flip past Apollo 13 if it’s on basic cable, either. It’s not like I don’t know what happens; it’s a matter of historical record, for one thing, and for another, I’ve seen it forty times. Why?

Well, certain movies I watch because I have already watched them so many times before. I really don’t ever need to see Overboard again; I think I may actually have written Overboard, so well do I know the dialogue. It’s vintage ’80s stuff — money doesn’t buy happiness, the love of a beer-drinker is a love that’s real — and it’s ridiculously simplistic, but I love it in spite of that. Wait: I love it because of that. Come on. They build a miniature golf course together and fall in love! Arturo! Caterina! I can never pry myself away from While You Were Sleeping for the same reason. She pretends she’s Peter Gallagher’s fiancée, and then she falls in love with Bill Pullman while Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns get into arguments? Jackie Aprile Sr. as the comic relief? Love it! And Bill Pullman is so cute in it! Seriously — he’s not even close to that cute in anything else. …Okay, he’s fairly cute in his uniform in A League of Their Own, but I’ve seen that one a hundred times because it’s a baseball movie, not because of Pullman…and because it’s not enough to have a good delivery of “there’s no crying in baseball.” I need to perfect it.

That said, the number of movies I’ve endured a half dozen times because it had a crushy actor in it is…large. And embarrassing. Point Break (Keanu). Dying Young (Campbell Scott). War Games (Broderick I was in middle school shut up). Rounders (Goran Visnjic is in it for five minutes shut up). Practical Magic (Goran Visnjic is in it for fifteen minutes and okay for several of those minutes he’s a zombie but he’s still Goran Visnjic so shut up). Pacific Heights (Matthew Modine, whose hotness is somehow undiminished by the fact that his character is in love with Melanie Griffith). Innerspace (Dennis Quaid, and ditto, except with Meg Ryan). Bridget Jones’s Diary (British hotties brawling). Crossing the Bridge served up a smorgasbord of bad, starting with the unsuitable-movie-boyfriends course: Jason Gedrick, way too short for me; Stephen Baldwin, midway through the process of turning into a sketchball; and Josh Charles, sporting easily the worst hair of his career. It’s a Mike Binder film. Enough said. And yet I’ve seen it at least five times.

Which is about seven hundred times fewer than I’ve seen School Ties, and I guess I could blame that on the early-nineties cast o’ hotties (Randall Batinkoff is in fact the driving force behind several shameful viewings of For Keeps?), but the fact is, I just…like School Ties. What’s not to like about the fictional defeat of fictional anti-Semitism? …Okay, besides Cole Hauser, what’s not to like?

At least it’s got something to like. Quite a few of the movies on my “cable magnet” list — the ones I find myself physically incapable of dialing past, or turning off, once I’ve stumbled across them while dialing around — have almost nothing to redeem them. I can’t claim not to know any better, because I’ve seen them all at least four times, and aside from the truly impressive pre-production hair-care regime Nick Nolte had going on, I really can’t defend my repeated viewings of I Love Trouble, in which Julia Roberts is only slightly more believable as the Hepburn half of a Hepburn/Tracy pair of rival reporters than her Irish accent is in Mary Reilly. And while I could lie and pretend that I watch Sleepers for the eye candy, the thing is, 1) I’ve never gotten that into Brad Pitt as a sex symbol, and 2) even if I had, his accent is atrocious — it’s like he’s got Ratso Rizzo caught in his throat, seconds after Rizzo popped an ampoule of Novocain. And speaking of the Riz, what is with Dustin Hoffman’s hair? It is in fact possible to indicate that a given character is a broken-down alcoholic without dredging the shower drain in the men’s room at the Y and dumping the contents on his head; just put him in a wrinkly suit with the shirt buttoned wrong, egg stain this, grizzly stubble that, glasses paper clip the other thing, hello, done. The Egyptian funerary pube headdress: no. And the flashbacks, jeez cheese — you know, it’s not my impression that anyone thinks getting repeatedly and violently bad-touched by the guards in juvie qualified as a pleasant, lavender-scented memory, but just in case, Levinson puts in at least fourteen different interstitial shots of a bare light bulb wildly swinging back and forth, scored by echoey screeches of rectal violation and interspersed with the occasional close-up of, Lord deliver us all, Terry Kinney making cheap scotch sex face. Now, I have a higher tolerance for Levinson than most people. He wrote and directed what’s probably my favorite movie, Diner, and several of his other movies also make the cable-magnet list — Rain Man, The Natural — but let’s face it, Captain Subtle he is not. Nice of him, then, to cast Jason Patric in Sleepers, since Patric’s acting style is what you might call “subtle,” if you felt particularly charitable. If you didn’t, you might observe that, if a man were to eat a hornet filled with pharmaceutical-grade absinthe, it would look remarkably similar to Patric’s rendition of “tortured revelation of abuse” in the scene where he reveals to a priest — played by, Lord deliver us all, Robert De-freakin’-Niro — that he had six degrees of Kevin Bacon in his pants.

Patric’s pants. Not DeNiro’s. The movie is shite, is the point, and I can argue said point with possibly more authority than Barry Levinson or Lorenzo Carcaterra (and the book is not Fitzgerald, but it’s pretty gripping, comparatively), because I have seen the film 58 goddamn times.

Why? Why? I could read Dante! I could catch up on vintage sitcoms! I could tutor a child or have tea with a friend! But no: I’ve got my feet up on the coffee table, sharing a bowl of kettle corn with an overweight feline and watching Stakeout — again! Actual astronauts do not know as much about airlock technology from the 1980s as I do, because I have seen SpaceCamp more times than Americans have gone to the actual moon! Do you know why I don’t watch Soapdish on cable anymore? Because the Couch Baron bought it for me because I put it on my wish list because I wanted to watch it even more!

In my defense, Garry Marshall’s “She’s a boy-ee!” is an all-time top-ten line delivery. …Come on. Right? And Robert Downey’s on the left side of the shot, literally turning green?

Aggravating factor: I am posting this piece late because I got distracted by, in order, a showing of UHF which I had to watch up to at least the Spatula City ad, a Law & Order episode with Lauren Ambrose in it that I’ve already seen sixteen times (Dick Wolf? Wrote School Ties. I know!), a set of Clone High DVDs (already seen all the episodes 14 times at least), and some heart-shaped cookies with pink sprinkles on them. I swear I will get around to watching all the westerns you guys recommended…during the commercial breaks when Casino is on.

February 6, 2007

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