We spent 2 months with Hulu (one month free) in order to catch up on some titles that we've been curious about but haven't seen streaming elsewhere. Some turned out well. Others not so much.
Here are three that didn't pan out, so we pulled the plug.
Title: DINNER IN AMERICA
Running Time: 106 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 5 MIN
Portion Watched: 5%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Watched the latest episode of "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 77-1
Comment: It was obvious right away that this is B-movie trash. The only question was whether sticking around for Hannah Marks ("Banana Split," "After Everything," "Mark, Mary + Some Other People"). It wasn't. This starts with a seedy leading man (Kyle Gallner), a punk rocker who will go on the lam with a fan. One of the first scenes features Gallner's character meeting the family of Marks' character, and would you believe the mom openly lusts after him across the dinner table? This one was going nowhere fast. It looked cheap and vulgar.
Title: MATERNA
Running Time: 105 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 41 MIN
Portion Watched: 39%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Watched an episode of the original British version of "The Office" on Hulu.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 13-1
Comment: This is a psychological study of four women revolving around their roles as (potential) mothers and their relationship with their own moms. We made it part-way through the second vignette, and the two lead women in those first two quarters were compelling at times to watch. Writer-director David Gutnik studies their faces intensely through frequent close-ups. We're a fan of Kate Lyn Shiel and never tire of her unique beauty. But her character's story was dishwater dull. Gutnik gives us long takes of her working on a virtual-reality project, interspersed with her routine daily habits (we get to see her water a plant and brush her teeth three different times each), all of which leads up to her discovering she is pregnant, performing a self-ultrasound (OK), and then conducting a medical abortion on herself. All the while, her mother nags her over the phone, worried that our heroine will turn into an old maid. The second vignette featured an actress, and that is one of our pet peeves -- actors playing actors, as if it's a back-breaking job. Jade Eshete is also fascinating to watch, mainly because of her perfect facial structure. But the tedium continued to build, and we started to squirm. Whatever Gutnik was trying to get across was lost in the monotony and lack of plot.
Title: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT
Running Time: 116 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 21MIN
Portion Watched: 18%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 60 YRS, 10 MOS.
Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Sampled "Dinner in America" before turning to the latest episode of "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 22-1
Comment: Here was another psychological thriller that was more annoying than intriguing. We enjoyed the last outing from writer-director Justin Benson, the mind-bending cult psych-out "The Endless." And Benson and collaborator Aaron Moorhead again star in this new film. Maybe we're getting old (see data above), but the first reel of this film is all over the place, and the characters were off-putting. It was too cryptic for its own good. Two tenants of an apartment complex have a meet-cute and then weird supernatural evetnts, like flashing lights, keep happening. It looked like it was going nowhere fast and that it was going to be a chore to keep up over two hours. This looked promising, but we delivered a quick hook to this sophomore effort.
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