enraged

yes, believe it or not, I was actually enraged Saturday evening after spending 96minutes of my life watching the most disconnected rant (movie) I have ever seen. Not even the music could save this snooze.

My dad called Friday evening telling me that he was feeling sick and asked me to attend the two movies that he my mom had bought tickets for Saturday. I wasn't too happy; the weather was 8C and sunny, it was my first opportunity to ride and the next few days had a forecast of rain. I ended up going. In the afternoon they showed two films in the basement of the Musee des Beaux Arts, "Un Cri dans L'univers" was a documentary about a Russian composer, Galina Ustvolskaya, who rambles on about her inspiration and direction of the perfromance of her 2nd symphony. Mildly interesting but hey, at 33minutes it was ok. "Maxim Vengerov" was a documentary following his 30th birthday and the sabbatical that he took from performing. It was a charming look with excerpts from many performances that I've never seen nor heard. So that was ok.

Then, I ended up dragging a friend into seeing the evening show, "Tea" directed by Frank Scheffer at the NFB robotheque theatre downtown. The director was there, and he intro'd the film and it felt cool knowing that he would answer questions afterwards.

After three false starts (technical problems), the film opens with some beautiful scenery in China, a rural family gathered around drinking tea; the sounds of water makes you almost smell the tea. Then, Tan Dun, the composer for the soundtrack of "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" begins his diatribe telling us that we will not explore the history of tea, nor the ceremonies around tea, but rather, about him, and his idiotic production, the "Tea Opera". I fell asleep about ten minutes later.

Unfortunately I woke up maybe 15 minutes into the film with a shake (you know, you doze off, get the shakes and wake up? That was me.) And I was now awake to witness 81 more minutes of philosophical rambling (in Tan Dun's accented English), unexplained scenes (driving through a city, some Japanese tea ceremony, some Chinese shadow puppets and of course, that damn opera). Some excerpts:

"man used to believe the earth was huge, but now we know the universe is larger. What is larger than the Universe? the heart. But not any heart, an empty one - so that you can fill it with more than the universe..." (at least this was coherant, and it wasn't even in English, it was a Chinese dude talking with subtitles)

Tea Opera scene, Tan Dun directing during rehearsal. Japanese prince character dressed in peacock costume "goooood!... baaaad! GOOOOD!... baaaaad!". Tan Dun stops him, says, "make, make it more twisted " riiight. I undestood that.

It ends with TanDun asking the audience not to typecast him into early Tan Dun works, or later, or China TanDun and manhattan Tandun. He is only, TanDun.

Nut.

My friend wanted to bold about 10 minutes before the end but we stayed to the end and left the moment the credits rolled. At least I know I wasn't the only snoozer, the lady next to us was fast asleep and she had some creditation hanging off her neck: I hope she was a judge.

The stupid thing is, there are movies my dad would enjoy that the rest of us hate, but this, this one scored bigtime, I'm 99% sure he would've hated it too. Damnit. This is the third time in two weeks that I've been getting unwanted tickets... grr...