(Wow, second straight post that combines our recent Netflix viewing habits with this column!)
Baby Mama! Far worse than Boat Trip, though not nearly as bad as Just Married.
My wife has had very bad luck with mainstream comedy rentals over the years. This has nothing to do with her taste, which I generally find impeccable, and very little to do her ability to predict movie quality. Rather, everything you know about a movie coming into it will set a reasonable quality expectation, within which there might still be some variance. The variance here has been her enemy. A lot.
Now sometimes she'll rent a movie and I can see a mile away how bad it would be, and I'll ask: "You saw that coming, right?"
And in fairness, there have been times where I was dead certain she'd chosen a terrible movie, yet the movie turned out to be quite good. Off the top of my head that includes Failure To Launch, Guess Who?, and especially High School Musical.
But the out-of-nowhere atrocities are what stick in one's head.
Unrelated to the main topic of this post, but wrapping up the commentary on our recent Netflix viewing: What do we think of Shadows and Fog? I'd file it under "OK, I guess," though I honestly wonder how many people my age (or a couple years older) ought to have become big Woody Allen fans yet had that process delayed quite a bit from being exposed to one of his "just humor him" movies before they had a chance to see Love and Death or Annie Hall or such.
Posted by Matt Bruce at September 12, 2008 11:11 AMI think your assessment of Shadows & Fog is right on. I remember the circumstances of seeing the film much more than anything in the film itself: I was wrapping up college, Kirsti and I saw an advance screening at the Paris Theatre (on Boylston across from the Pru, possibly closed by the time you hit Harvard). For some reason they preceded the flick by running a promo film for then-unknown musician Sophie B. Hawkins, where she walked around playing a drum and saying asinine things like "New York is my mother."
As for the fan/age gap...I don't know, 6 months after Shadows & Fog, he turns out Husbands & Wives, which IMO was his best since 1990. I think the gap had as much to do with his personal life than his output. I know grown people who still won't see his movies at all.
Posted by: Greg at September 12, 2008 12:17 PM