Old Joy

Repost from old blog, 4/20/2008God, how stupid is this? While wasting a perfectly good half-hour browsing user reviews on Netflix, I became troubled by all the negative reactions to the 2006 film “Old Joy,” which was one of the best movies I saw that year. I was compelled to write my own review, but when I tried to submit it Netflix gave me this dumb error and wouldn’t take it. I’m going to post it here so my waste of time isn’t even more wasteful. Why do I fucking care what people on Netflix think of a movie I like? I hate the internet – it’s like this, you know, continually making mountains out of molehills, getting you lost in little insignificant alleys of data and opinion that are fucking meaningless, time-wasting, ignorance-building, distracting.

And so, my take on “Old Joy”:

The opening scene of “Old Joy” shows a man meditating in his back yard, and getting distracted. I suppose that’s as good a metaphor for all the negative reactions here (on Netflix) as any. This is a movie that requires you to sit, to let go; but naturally some viewers are going to get anxious – for movement, for change, for distractions. I wasn’t one of them. This was one of the best movies I saw last year. It’s certainly not about plot or characters changing and having some grand revelation. It’s meditative, it’s poetic, it gives you spaces in which to think and to lose yourself. The characters are wholly convincing and fully realized. Subtlety like this is rare.

Note from 2010: As of right now this film is available to view on Netflix Instant View.

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