Perpetual Motion Fuel

Last night Alicia and I finally watched Caché, which I’ve wanted to see ever since I saw the trailer on Apple’s site.

While I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorite movies, it was extremely refreshing. Recently, too many movies have been cliché and predictable. I can often predict how the movie will unfold, or narrow it down to two or three options. At the fork in the plot, is the author going left, or right? The recent (pseudo-)exception to this was Match Point, which was written and directed by Woody Allen, my favorite do-it-all movie type. My recent luck with movies had been so poor, that I didn’t even expect Woody to surprise me. I had stopped even considering the possible directions he could have taken his story. I was so convinced I knew how the story was going to end that I didn’t even consider the last major twist. This surprised and pleased me.

The whole point of this is not Woody Allen, who can do things both great and garbage, but Caché from Michael Haneke, someone I’ve heard of, but never seen any of his work. I’m not sure I’d completely agree with the review on the DVD case “Like Hitchcock, only creepier,” but it did have its moments. The import thing to me though, was I had no idea what was going to happen next, or even what the possibilities were. I had to leave myself completely open to anything. Even though Alicia and I felt it could have had more, been more, said more, etc. I’m not at all unsatisfied.

Caché did provide a movie-watching first for me. One scene simply floored me. My mouth dropped, and all I could do was gasp “What the fuck?!” Cronenberg doesn’t even do that to me.