Anti-Climacus

I occasionally like to indulge my taste in the avant-garde, and this bad habit plus a new netflix-discs account brought me around to Last Year in Marienbad. Even the general description of the plot seemed interesting, in the way that the description of a Borges or Cortazar story might be interesting--depends a lot on how the details are worked out.

I only made it through 30 minutes of the film. Not because of the repeated bits of dialogue (though there may have been some coarse language when I realized I was going to hear about the statues again), nor the game with the matchsticks, which seems like it'd be a moderately interesting thing to do at a dull party, nor even the weird stop-and-start of the actors. No, it was the never-ending and circuitous organ music that finally did me in. Even Sunset Blvd. knew to play it for laughs...