Day: October 16, 2008

I really enjoyed Barton Fink for the first hour or so, I thought it was really funny in a ridiculous sort of way but towards the end of the film I found myself restless. Part of my restlessness may be attributed to the last half hour of a three hour screening, and although my attention span is certainly suspect I haven’t felt that way at the end of any of the other screenings so I think it is fair to say that that is not the issue. I think I lost interest because the story became perdictable – after Barton wakes up next to a corpse and Charlie helps him out I felt pretty certain that it was Charlie who had done the killing. When the cops show up to question Barton it confirmed my suspicions and I started to lose interest.

Adding to my frustration was the fact that I didn;t really understand what happened at the end of the film. It wasn’t until after the sceening when I was talking about the movie as I left did I understand that the girl on the beach was the same girl from the picture in the hotel – this raised a bunch of new questions and made me even more confused – did Charlie kill Barton? Whose head was it in the box? If Barton was dead how long had he been dead for? The plot line about Barton’s screen play becamse unintersting to me after a while and so did his interactions with the studio members (althought they were really funy). I also didn’t really understand what the whole dance/fight scene at the USO ball was about. I know that the viewer is not always supposed to understand everything that happens and that we are supposed to work a lot of this out on our own but I left the screening feeling like the movie failed to give me enough tools to do the job on my own.

Anyway if someone feels like explaining some or all of what happened it would be greatly appreciated.

Shortly after last nights screening of The Singing Detective I began to wonder when the show lost my interest. I can remember after the first two screenings I liked it so much that I would show up to the next weeks screening without knowing or caring what the sreened film would be because I was that excited about The Singing Detective. But shortly after the third screening I began to have doubts about how intertested I was in it and after last nights screening I have all but lost interest. Don’t get me wrong, I am still eager to see how the series is wrapped up and how all of the pieces will come together but somewhere in the various storylines and plot twists I lost interest in the story.

I think part of my problem can be attributed to the complex way the story is told and the multiple plot lines. There are so many story worlds within the story world that I find it hard to believe that they will all be completed or meet my expectations. I thought that by last nights episode the story would begin to become more clear and that the stories would begin to come together…and they did sort of – but not enough that I believe that all the stories will come together enough in the last episode so that it does not feel rushed or forced (I hope that this makes sense). I think that because of the way the story unfolds and is told to us, I became more interested in the form then the content. I understand that it is a mystery story and part of the fun is trying to figure out what is happening and what will happen but I feel that in this case the structure takes away from the content, at least for me, because I have become more interested in how the stroy is being told then what the story is.