The latest foray into my Netflix queue was a Friday viewing of Idiocracy. Like Mike Judge's previous feature Office Space, this movie was dumped by its studio with little fanfare to a tiny contractually obligated release, and will find its audience (if at all) only on DVD. Critical opinion is pretty split--was it dumped because it's lousy, or was it dumped because they can't handle the truth? It barely crossed the Rotten Tomatoes "fresh" threshold, but if you look closely a lot of the good reviews can't be distinguished very much from the bad reviews.

I think this is the one that got it right. The movie is kind of moronic, and not just because it's satirizing moronicness. But a lot of the gags are great, and the concept behind the film was better than the execution. As that review pointed out, a lot of poorly executed movies that didn't even start with a good concept get released, so why not this one? I guess the message is that you can be bad and stupid, or good and cutting, but you can't get away with mediocre and cutting.

Still, I thought there were enough laughs to sustain the movie, especially since it's under an hour and a half. It's not like you're wasting a day or anything.

I had scheduled its Netflix arrival to coincide with Christmas break, but I never got around to watching it then, and so it sat here for a couple of weeks while I looked for a four-hour time bloc. Today I finally got it, so I took the plunge. I watched Heaven's Gate.

A whole lot has been said and written about this movie, and I found it hard to watch without all that baggage. But I tried.

In case you didn't know, Heaven's Gate is a Western from 1980. It was Michael Cimino's first movie after he was annointed the next big thing when The Deer Hunter swept through the 1978 Oscars. United Artists gave Cimino a lot of leeway in developing his next project, and the production hemorraged money. Then he turned in a first draft to the studio that came in at five hours long. It was cut to 220 minutes for the New York critics' screening, where it was met with stunned silence and a slew of horrific reviews. The studio recut the movie to below three hours and ultimately to a 90-minute version, both of which were incomprehensible. The movie only grossed a couple million dollars, and bankrupted United Artists in the process. (UA continued only as a brand owned by other companies.)

The version I watched was the New York critics screening cut, which has been continuously available on video and now DVD for a while. Looking across the Internet reviews from 1980 and from more recently, the original set is abysmal while the newer ones tend to say that it wasn't nearly as bad those reviews suggested, and some even suggest that critics were out to get the prima donna-ish Cimino. (It worked; his subsequent career is slim pickin's.)

I'm hear to tell you that the newer critics are right that the 1980 critics were too harsh, but they weren't too harsh by very much. That is to say, there are a few things to like about this movie. The underlying story (not the way it's told, mind you) is compelling. The cinematography can be kinda cool at times, with differing levels of sepia-tone and other color effects. It's fun to see Christopher Walken in an understated role, and to repeatedly see Isabelle Huppert naked. There's one belly laugh at about the two-hour mark.

And that's about it. The movie plods. Every scene is a minute too long, some are 5 minutes too long, and some are just pointless. I don't know whether to blame the editing, the cinematography, the directing or the script, but you often can't tell who you're looking at. The dialogue is poorly rendered, often difficult to hear, and often in untranslated Eastern Europe languages that I don't speak. The epilogue is even more pointless than the famously pointless prologue. The climactic battle scene is in two acts, and while the second act is well done, the first is just hopeless chaos. And for some reason people go around calling each other "citizen," and no one ever explains why.

The Heaven's Gate debacle was so bad that it made people re-examine The Deer Hunter and question whether it was really that good in the first place. I've never been a huge fan of that movie to begin with, and I should have anticipated all of the problems in the later movie, because I'd already recognized them in the earlier one. If the debate over Cimino has three positions (1. Unrecognized genius screwed by critics; 2. Mixed bag--Deer Hunter really was that good and Heaven's Gate really was that bad; or 3. He was never that good to begin with), I'd have to lean toward the third choice.

I know this is a philistine thing to say, but I've been saying it for a long time and I stand by it: I hate reading movies. Some people just don't like subtitles because they're work; while that can be true especially if you're tired, that's not my main objection. My main objection is that most non-English movies that become one of the foreign films that you're supposed to see become that way not due to their plot or characters, but because of their visuals. But instead of watching the cool-ass visuals, you have to spend half the film reading the bottom of the screen instead of looking at the cool stuff.

I bring this up because I saw a couple of foreign films when I was in L.A. I saw the apparent flavor of the moment, Pans Labyrinth, and there's no question it's a pretty film. The actors are good and it's undoubtedly beautifully filmed. I liked it OK, but I didn't love it. Part of it was the distraction of the reading. The other part was my annoyance at the general idea--it's a hyper-violent, R-rated film about war and revolution, but it's also a fairy tale. So it's a fairy tale for adults. Ridiculous concept that bothers me to no end.

The other one I saw, on DVD, was City of God. This one doesn't fit my standard objection--even though it is a visually impressive film, it's also heavily plot and character-driven and the sound and music is excellent as well. I can't add much beyond what Peter Travers said here. Along with Chungking Express, it's one of my two favorite non-English language movies, and I couldn't think of a third that's close.