The Double Hour (Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009)

Apologies if my last few (and next few) reviews don't seem up to their already low standards of quality. I've seen a lot of bad movies at the Portland International Film Festival and I'm trying to plow through them as quickly as possible to get on to the good stuff (also I'm blocked on my totally rave review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which looks like it's gonna be the far away winner unless Alex de la Iglesia's new movie blows me away tomorrow (a possibility, de la Iglesia is awesome!)). Promise they'll get better once I start writing about stuff I like again.

One might call director Giuseppe Capotondi generous, in a way. Instead of one bad movie he decided to give us two, loosely connected by a mid-section twist that works in the sense that it would be impossible to predict, but doesn't in that the only reason it is impossible is because it makes almost no sense. Given the buzzing conversation of patrons as I walked out (and the fact that the festival arranged for an extra screening, because the movie was proving so popular), it seems that this kind of mystery-weaving is what people want these days. The forsaking of ideas for the minute pleasure of confounding us. It's a neat trick -- a sort of magician's distraction -- showing people two things that don't go together, but feel as though they should, and letting people use that as a means for discussion, causing them to ignore the bigger issues of why the director even asked us to watch it in the first place. It even goes to the effort to throw in a last-minute reference the way Inception does, inviting the viewer to wonder what is real and what is not real as they throw their leftover popcorn and soda in the trash can.

I don't know, to me it's a thriller without any thrills (mostly lame jump scares, and zero scenes with a hint of built up tension), a romance without much chemistry, and features a main character who early on has sex with a woman and then basically tells her to get the fuck out and the movie somehow appears to be on his side. He's sad and dark and conflicted, so it's sorta okay that he treats some poor lady like a prostitute he didn't have to pay. Nah, not buying it. The movie, the actor, the character, the gimmick, none of it.