WEEK 23

23. CALIFORNIA SPLIT, dir. ROBERT ALTMAN, 1974

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i guess the thomas crown affair was not my all-time favorite
though i basically liked watching faye dunaway and steve mcqueen
the opening song drove me crazy (& the choral repeat 40 minutes in was nearly enough to make me cover my ears!), and the split screens and fade outs turning into hyper-detail and color were a little out of my thrill-zone. yeah, it felt dated.
glad enough to have seen the original, and was fairly entertained, but had quite a bit more fun watching the remake years ago. liked where they took the hats.
ahhhh. watching this made me think about writing. why good criticism is so hard to come by: it is easiest to write well about something that you hated or something that you loved, much harder to write well about something you didn't hate or love. most things are somewhere in the middle, or somewhere slightly more or less than middle, and to be able to write interestingly about the mediocre is a super-skill, one that i do not do not do not possess. watching something that doesn't fire me up in one direction or another, speaking to the things about which i felt not much, i sort of melt into not just an inability to say something new, but also a near inability to say anything at all, or to even maintain proper syntax-recall (i.e. "ahhhh.", run-ons, etc.)
watching the middle and trying to write is clearly an exercise to try out more often. so, for this rememberance if nothing else, good to have seen it.
never seen california split, but hear it's super. robert altman, for me, is a general do-no-wrong.