Thursday afternoon... 5 Media Units Consumed in 48 hours, not including Sesame Street or the opening scenes of Steel Magnolias (end of the movie too sad to watch any more than that). 

I've always considered my film preferences to be pretty refined, but there are still days when I need a good dose of "reality-lite" narrative.  It may be that I've become more honest about the fact that my "favorite films" are different from "my favorite films to watch." I love Amelie, for example, but I just can't watch it all that often because of the incidental depression that then sets in because I am not really European. Plus,  watching someone else be lonely (even if there's payback at the end) is not always easy to do. http://www.movieforum.com/features/festivals/tiff01/features/amelie800x600.shtml This is why I keep a copy of The Royal Tenenbaums and As Good as It Gets around. It makes me happy to know they are there, should I want to invest in the entire process of catharsis.  But in a pinch, I'm always slipping films like Runaway Bride or The Parent Trap (remake) into the DVD player instead.

So after we finished Ship of Fools (a smart and psychologically epic film by Stanley Kramer, 1965, http://www.dvdmg.com/shipoffools.shtml just a few years before he directed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), needless to say, I had to decompress: Immediately, we put on Loverboy (1989) through Netflix's watch instantly function. 

http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=loverboy

Partaking of this type of entertainment requires one to turn off one's brain.  Old habits die hard, though, and within time, I was comparing the cinematic pathos rendered in black and white with the slapstick bufoonery of a young and scrawny Patrick Dempsey. 

Ship of Fools is the kind of visual experience that levels you with private yet distancing moments of beauty (the Cuban laborers on the lower deck enjoying their dehumanizing hose-bath; the unraveling hair of the Flamenco dancers as they step it up; the doctor's heartbreak and subsequent heart attack  while he is alone on the top deck). It never ceases to amaze me how these two poles of the same artistic enterprise can co-exist and even claim the same fans. The title alone lets you know that you're in for a parable of sorts. Then, within minutes of watching people get on a gang plank and board a luxury liner, one of the passengers-- a "dwarf" wearing a tweed coat played by Michael Dunn-- comes up to the camera with a knowing smirk and hints at philosphical truths. 

My favorite scene involves the heart-to-heart between Glocken, the dwarf (the moral center of the film), and a soused American ex-ball player, who is describing how much his life has been ruined by not being able to hit "a curve ball on the outside corner."  The dwarf, watching intently and compassionately, gives this wonderfully impassioned speech about the bigger picture-- about how almost a billion people in the world don't even know what a curve ball is. The ball player, played by Lee Marvin  (who spends most of his scenes with his lower-lip hanging open) glares at him for a moment and then accuses the dwarf of being "a sawed-off intellectual." Then, they both erupt in laughter. Good stuff. Much better of a resolution than say the end of Loverboy, where Randy introduces his live-in girlfriend from college to his parents (a relationship he was too frightened to tell them about before) after having spent the summer as a male prostitute and having unwittingly convinced his parents that he is gay. You've all seen 80's movies: you know the way the scene ends. Randy's father pats him on the back and tells him how relieved he is.

Somewhere along the way, the line between artistry/talent and visual effects gets blurred. There are plenty of entertaining car chases, punch-out scenes and laugh out loud moments in Loverboy, (when the body-builder cuckold husband of Carrie Fisher discovers the "pizza delivery" bill for $200-- "And she hates pizza..."), but it's obvious that without the comedic timing of actors like Kate Jackson, Kirstie Alley and even Dempsey himself, this stuff is just swill. I can't figure out if it's a good thing for the genre of unserious films to have this pool of talent to tap into or a bad thing for the actors and crew to have to do them.  More importantly, I can't figure out why I need to watch them. 

I'll resist the need to analyze it too much and just point to a gnawing concern that it might be due to the ready supply of erasure available to us, an erasure that I'm not really ready to condemn, even though  I wonder if it is ultimately damaging for us to be able to wipe off the effects of a truly good film. For those who are prepared to be blown away by deeper realities, like, say, the first stirrings of terrible social and historical developments that occur in the world (the rise of the SS and the advent of World War II) while people continue to think there's nothing to worry about, here's a link to watch Ship of Fools instantly.

http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?hv=i3b2lH4c767ZYeaLcs7Bje9NnRE%3D&oq=&v1=ship+of+fools