Summer Hours

And the cinematic coincidences just keep on coming. (I was wrong about Boogie Nights being the second Netflix movie that would finish out the handful I had moved up in order to watch while Amy was gone - but more on that in a minute.) After being oddly productive this afternoon - I cut the grass and pulled some weeds and then went to Lowe’s and bought some miscellaneous items for outdoor upkeep work - I went downtown to the library and hunted around in their CD collection until I found a CD I read about in Newsweek a couple of days ago.

Seems that Jada Pinkett Smith has her own metal band. The band is called Wicked Wisdom, which is also the name of their second album, and the music is...well, it’s awfully metally. It’s the only CD I’ve ever listened to where it actively occurred to me that the band’s drummer is really good at playing the bass drum.

After that, I took a short walk around downtown and then it was time to treat myself to some movies. First was Herb and Dorothy, an intimate, endearing documentary about two art collectors in New York who set the art world on fire by meticulously putting together, over the course of more than forty years, a collection of art that no one ever believed would set the art world on fire. The collection becomes so vast - they have stored all of it in their tiny rent-controlled Manhattan apartment - that they wind up donating it to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

So it goes. There’s even “extra” footage during the credits, showing Dorothy doing what all high-quality, artistically-oriented people do when it’s time to buy a computer - namely, buying a Mac laptop. That movie ended in just enough time for me to dash up to the theatre to catch Summer Hours, a new film by Olivier Assayas, which is largely concerned with - wait for it - the dispensation of a large collection of art and other highly valuable objects such as armoires and desks.

The trouble with Summer Hours is that it hops from scene to scene - sometimes with no connective tissue other than lines in the script that let you know that certain things foreshadowed in the preceding scene actually came to pass between the two scenes. Following the progression of the story isn’t the problem - the problem is that the bits Assayas decided not to show almost certainly would have been more interesting than the bits that he did decide to show.

Factor in a couple of inane subplots, that add nothing to the movie other than minutes to the running time, and an ending that only barely works in a certain way while being mostly disingenuous and slghtly forced in every other way, and what you wind up with is a movie that just can’t possibly end too soon. See...it’s about this really old house and all the stuff that has accumulated in it over the years. Hélène, the owner of the house, is getting older and knows her time is short, so she tasks her three children with either keeping the house or selling it and its contents.

So the movie is really about the house and its contents, and what those things means to Hélène’s children; but the inconvenient script has each of her children living on a different continent, so that much of the story is disjointed and rushed, which is bad, Olivier - and it makes me think that maybe Assayas doesn’t even know what his own movie is about. Of course, it’s also possible that I should not have tried to watch two movies about what to do with the collectible objects of old people in the same day.

And that coincidence that I mentioned, the one that had to do with Boogie Nights not being the next movie in my queue? Well, the cast of Summer Hours includes Juliette Binoche, so the movie that was in my queue where I thought Boggie Nights was supposed to be, wound up being, naturally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.