three times

I thought I'd add my movie viewing on this blog.

I am watching a foreign film called Three Times (and I don't get why blogger has bold, italic but not underline and I have to do my own html code).

It was rated five stars somewhere and I put it in my queue but am wondering if I want to finish it. Subtitles, but there is not much conversation at all. I rarely do subtitles, as I usually watch movies while multitasking and there is no way to multitask while reading subtitles.

Supposedly it is a tale of three love stories. I have watched the first one and am in the middle of the second one. I didn't *get* the first one. So far, the second one is confusing me.

Therefore, I looked on Netflix to see why I put it in my queue. Here is what Netflix said:

Love is the central theme in this collection of three stories set in different years -- 1911, 1966 and 2005. In the first tale, a man leaves his true love to serve in the army. When he returns, he finds that his girlfriend has disappeared, so he sets out to find her. A man develops an unlikely bond with two women in the second tale; and four Taipei teens relieve their angst with technology and sex in the last story.

Roger Ebert called it wise and heartbreaking. AO Scott said it was a masterpiece and why cinema exists. Michael Wilmington said it was a masterful, moving film that should belong to every movie lover.

I am a movie lover. I love romance. Combine the two and I should really dig this flick.

All the first story did for me at the moment (without a few days of reflection), is show me how men can fall in love with anybody who pays them the least attention. I kept holding my breath, not because it was breathtaking as much as I was thinking "WHEN are they going to fall in love? Am I missing something? This is what really happened: He left his true love, came back, she was gone and then he played pool with some other chick and decided to write her and fall in love with her and THEN try to find HER. I intently watched for the falling in love part. As I said, there wasn't much dialog, so it wasn't the 'getting to know you' type of falling in love. They played a little pool (oh, and Mr J just said "Mr P's playing pool" right when I typed this!). This was enough for him to forget his first love that he came into the pool room to find and enough to fall in love with someone he doesn't even know. Men.

Then there is the woman, who starts receiving letters from this man from the military. I can get into that part. The art of writing and getting to know each other that way is very conceivable. Do we then assume they are both writing? We only see her receiving one letter. We don't know how she feels about him.


When he comes back to see her, she has moved not once, but twice. This is 1966. I don't know about you, but if I am writing to my true love, you better darn well know I am going to tell him where I am going to move. Women.

Well, I have five loads of laundry to sort and fold and about six more to wash. The viewing of the rest of this film must wait. I usually say, "Forget it!" and stop watching, but there has to be something about this whole movie that I just am not getting. And I am typically someone who doesn't reads reviews until I am finished watching. I don't want things spoiled. I want to watch it from my own eyes. After I am done I will read the full reviews and figure out what the heck I missed.

EDITED: after electricity was restored from the visiting Hurricane Ike, I finished watching the movie. I still didn't like it. I need to connect to the characters in a movie somehow and there wasn't much connecting going on here. The movie was filmed a little differently than most, I'll give it that much. Just little bits of people's lives as if they weren't aware we were watching them think, feel, do and go about their daily stuff that makes us people: pain, despair, frustration, anger. People going about chores, living, driving, singing. There was just the sound or lack of soundtrack and lack of conversation that made it gritty. I was just dumped in the middle of these people's lives trying to figure out what is going on, who is related to whom. Bottom line is for me, it may have been slices of three different times but I really had absolutely no connection to these people no matter how elegantly or how cutting edge/real it was filmed. As I talked with Mr D about it, he said, "Sometimes weird makes it art and makes it a masterpiece." Yep. But that doesn't make me like it. #two story - the man helps to 'free' a concubine, tells his OWN concubine about his great revolutionary plans to change the world but is keeping her trapped in hers. Men.

Story #3, they both are stinkers, cheating on each other's girlfriends without any remorse. Do they love each other? That would make it tolerable, but we don't see that, either.

Oh and on another note, the children's school is putting on the play Anne of Green Gables. Miss L has decided to try out for the part of Minnie May, Diana's annoying little sister. She doesn't quite understand what trying out means. But she does understand about being annoying. She told me that a certain girl in her class was going to get the part - she was sure of it. "What makes you think that?" I asked, thinking that the girl had been in dramas before and loved acting.

Miss L said, "Because she is the most annoying girl in the entire class!"