Please join the cinetrix in a rousing chorus of Irving Berlin's WWI ditty, "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," won't you?
Oh! how I hate to get up in the morning,
Oh! how I’d love to remain in bed;
For the hardest blow of all, is to hear the bugler call;
You’ve got to get up, you’ve got to get up
You’ve got to get up this morning!
Some day I’m going to murder the bugler,
Some day they’re going to find him dead;
I’ll amputate his reveille, and step upon it heavily,
And spend the rest of my life in bed.
Why the warbling? Well, the cinetrix is beginning to harbor the suspicion that the left-coast chief film critic of the New York Times is not--how to put this delicately?--a morning person. Consider the evidence from what the Gray Lady persists in calling a blog [and a "family blog" at that].
After missing my first film this morning (the Woody Allen, which almost everyone seems to like, even supposedly confirmed Woody haters) and being shut out of my second...
Shut out? The co-chief film critic of the Times? I find that hard to believe. Easier to believe is that she maybe overslept? According to the Cannes site, Match Point played at the jet-lag-friendly hour of 8:30 a.m.
Perhaps that crucial three-hour time difference is the real reason Dargis opted to stay in LA?
Reading the latest Dargis "post," though, I'm thinking the time is right to pitch my script, Cinematic Avengers, about two tough but tender ypercineastes who school the hapless in proper movie-going behavior:
Despite the near-lack of air conditioning, the ringing cell phones and the two biddies in front of me who pawed through their plastic bags throughout the screening (I kicked one of their chairs a couple of times, but apparently not hard enough), I fell for the Fortnight's opening film.... I didn't have any idea what was going on for the first half hour, but was in tears by the end, which is fairly rare (big surprise).
Silly, huh?
UPDATE: Mike D'Angelo, the Esquire film columnist currently covering Cannes for Nerve.com, confirms my suspicions:
Nobody becomes a professional writer unless it's vitally important to them to be able to sleep past noon every day of the year. Movies should not be projected until McDonald's starts serving fries. Thank you.
Freedom fries, right?
