alex chiang: web 6.0

I’ve been trying to watch this movie forever, but I just haven’t had the chance. I mean, at this point, the movie’s been out for a while, and you kinda get the idea that it’s heavy business. You know it’s not the type of flick you rent on a Friday night and watch while hanging out with a bunch of friends. Nor is it the relaxing film you pop in right before bed and catch a few minutes of before nodding off. In fact, there really just isn’t an appropriate time to watch a film like this.

So tonight, I just bit the bullet and watched it. And I’m kinda glad I did, in the same sort of sense you get that you’re glad that you got a colonic because those things are good for you, but you feel a lot better afterwards than you did during.

Oftentimes, with movies like this, I find myself yelling at the characters on the screen, similar to the ironic self-referential scene in the original Scream, where they are watching the horror flick on TV and watching the protagonists do stupid things like splitting up to find the monsters, and the nerdy guy starts telling everyone else how stupid the TV characters are and says what they should have done instead.

This movie, you just watch Brandon lurch from one fuck-up to another and you wonder if his life and your stomach are ever going to settle down. There really isn’t anything he could have done different in small town Nebraska and still have come out ok in the end, except for moving to New York or San Francisco where being gay won’t get you killed. So you just watch and cringe as he keeps doing one small stupid thing after another and all of a sudden, they all add up and some serious bad juju comes crashing down.

So yeah — gut-wrenching all the way, and you come away realizing that we haven’t really made all that much progress as a species.