The Vast Wasteland

I hate the television for a number of reasons. One: I haven't had TV for the whole time I've been in LA, until last March when I moved in with Rebecca. Two: movie school can sometimes take away the appetite for watching anything because the thought of looking at all that work is exhausting. Three: TV is mostly crap. Four: TV is an assault on the senses that my crotchety old self can rarely abide. Five: DVDs and online episodes. And finally Six, the most visceral reason: the deaf old lady upstairs and her volume button in the middle of the night/at the crack of dawn.

No, I stick to movies. And my Netflix list is long and filled with many good-for-me films from long lists of recommended viewing. I put other things in there too. I haven't seen any of the Die Hard movies, so those are on my own list of recommended viewing, and there are some things that come out that I'm not willing to pay to see on the big screen. For the most part, though, I've set myself a dubiously entertaining schedule of a lot of older, slower, foreigner, blacker and whiter movies. Not that they're not great films. A lot of them are Great Films. They're just hard to sit down to after a long day. I've been watching a lot of them in multiple sittings, which is doubtless less rewarding than watching the whole thing straight through, but hey, I'm watching them, so shut up.

The other night I decided to click through the TV channels and see what movies were on there. I saw the end of Just Friends, which is predictable, though Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are super funny. And I caught the end of Just Like Heaven, the Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo RomCom starring San Francisco and ghosts. I just watched Mr. Ruffalo in My Life Without Me, and was impressed with his ability to turn banal writing and apparently absent direction into a pretty nuanced and credible performance. I hope he got paid a lot of money to do this Heaven movie, though, because it is one of the worst bad movies I have ever watched part of. The writing was poo, the acting (sorry Reese) was at times like watching a middle school play (but then, what are you going to do with such terrible writing?), the sets and the lighting looked faker than Britney Spears' current weave.

Here's my thought, though: this movie got MADE. People looked at this shitty, schmaltzy, predictable, surface-value script and said: let's make it! Mark and Reese wanted to make it. People wanted to lay money down to make it. And now people want to rent it. It's middling in the Netflix Top 100 Rentals In Your Area.

All this points to me cracking open my RomCom notebook and trying to have more ideas today. Because if you can write something that simplistic and get paid for it? That would be Just Like Heaven.