Boredom and Bad Movies

Monday nights were dull enough during the television season but at least you had Tuesday’s Buffy to look forward to. Now, with nothing on for the majority of the week I’m enjoying more National Geographic, Discovery, Tech and BBC. I’ve also been flipping to the movie channels more and more often with varying degrees of success. Last night’s find was a bummer, though. My Beautiful Laundrette, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, just about put me to sleep. In fact, I turned it off about half-way through and took a bath.

The blurb says something about an exploration of racism in Great Britain centering around a gay couple who run a laundrette. The movie jumps all over the place and the dialogue is so choppy I had no idea what the hell was going on for most the movie. It’s more than 45 minutes before the titular Laundrette appears and more than an hour before said “gay couple” materializes, by which point I was already so confused about who everybody was and what their motivations were that I didn’t even care if these guys were into each other–a limp revelation anyway, which came out of nowhere. Besides, just before these two started kissing, the one guy’s female cousin had her tongue down his throat. Who knows.

Anyway, the racism in question was supposed to be British on Pakistani, but neither party was sympathetic and there didn’t seem to be much exploration going on. The racist Brits were a pack of skeezy hoodlums while the Pakistani family was a bunch of low-rent slum lords.

I guess the gay guys (one pakistani, one brit) and their “love in the midst of adversity” relationship, along with their “squirrel trying to get a nut” business venture, are supposed to be the heros. But since I didn’t care enough to wait and see what happens to them, that obviously didn’t work. Really. The laundrette could have burned to the ground and I still wouldn’t have understood why the one guy’s uncle gave him the job in the first place, or what the videotape escapade was about. And the familial relationships? Not a clue how these people were related. The word ‘uncle’ got bandied about a lot but that didn’t always seem to be accurate. And the lead character’s screwed up relationship with his father bordered on disturbingly sexual, which may have been intentional (it was an indie film, afterall), but ew.

So there. This probably belongs over at Blue Glow or Stomp Tokyo or something but that’s what was on my mind this morning, so that’s what you get.

Leg workout this morning with Michael was half-assed at best. We were both cranky and tired from the start. Not everyday can be a good day, I guess. At least we showed up and did the reps, even if they weren’t enthusiastic. I need a pick-me-up today. Somebody tell me something funny.