There was supposed to be a pretty big storm today but it wasn’t as bad as expected. The snow started in the late afternoon and only left about 3″ of new snow on the driveway. We still decided to stay in.
During the day we tried watching a couple of long movies. My girlfriend Chris is a huge Kris Kristofferson fan and somehow I had hear that the infamous film “Heaven’s Gate” was really much better than people said it was on initial release. I had the director’s approved 3 hour and 47 minute Criterion blue-ray copy. We started.
About 25 minutes in, it was still unclear what was happening and only about 10 words of dialog had been spoken. Then more words were spoken and they were unintelligible. I’m not necessarily against slow paced films but it was still unclear who was who, and why 20 years had passed between the opening scenes and the disconnected place they ended up later. We skipped to the last 15 minutes. Still not much happening. Glad we didn’t wait 3 hours to get there.
We tried another long film I wanted to revisit, Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time In America”. It still has great crowd and city shots and good acting and an intelligible story. Plus dialog you can understand. However, I felt the subject matter wasn’t to my taste and we stopped a couple hours into that. (It is also about 3 1/2 hours long).
We ended up watching “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” which none of us had seen before. Chris’ room mate Laura had joined us by then. It’s a very funny movie with some well placed social commentary. And dumb humor. It was really fun.