yeah it's just a rant, no point pretending

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I watched a movie I enjoyed on Sunday night! I realise it doesn’t sound like a big thing but believe me when I say that it is. I think that if you’ve ever lived alone and been single for quite a long stretch of time you may know what I’m talking about. It’s the Sunday Night Meltdown. I can explain it if not.

In a nutshell: being single and living alone and, in my case and maybe in yours, being self-employed, means that I have to make one million decisions every single day of my life. There is no-one else who can make decisions for me. I make big decisions and small decisions; I have to figure out what I want to eat, what I want to work on, what I should do with my Saturday afternoon, whether I should run late to drinks or arrive without make-up on, and so on and so forth. It never ends.

Most of the time I’m fine with it. I know it’s responsibility but I also know that responsibility is, sometimes, the price of freedom, and that’s a deal I can live with. Sunday nights, though? That’s when the whole edifice usually crumbles. I’ve spent my week doing things and it’s 9pm and I’ve had my dinner and my bath and the last task I have to complete before Monday is to watch a movie and do my manicure. That is, in theory, straightforward.

In practice, however, what usually happens is that from around 6pm onwards I start thinking about what I want to watch and I look through Netflix, which I have because for some reason half of Morocco uses my login so I can’t delete my account, and I look at YouTube Movies if I feel like paying to watch something recent and good. I scroll and scroll and scroll, taking breaks to google whatever looks appealing, and slowly begin to lose my mind.

After about ten minutes, I have usually convinced myself that I have already watched every single movie worth watching. I’ve done all of them. I’ve completed cinema. There’s nothing left for me to do. After half an hour, I begin earnestly wondering if I will die alone, and if there is any point in me living the life I lead, given that it is impossible to derive any semblance of joy from it.

Sometimes the search reaches the hour mark, by which point I am so desperate to watch something but so hostile to every single option that I feel like a toddler having a tantrum on the floor of a supermarket. I want it all and I want nothing at all. In the end, I usually end up watching two episodes of a 40-minute series, which allows me to do both coats of my nail varnish and be sure that it will have fully dried by the time I go to bed.

To be clear, I do not believe that these Sunday night meltdowns have any real meaning. I’m not depressed and I broadly like my life the way it is. Instead, my ire is directed at streaming platforms, as well as everyone currently involved in the business of filming, editing and promoting movies. They’ve somehow managed to make the experience of “I would like to watch something that isn’t stupid but isn’t overly challenging either” a living hell.

It is especially infuriating because it feels like something that Hollywood was good at, for quite a long while. You’d have comedies that would last around an hour and a half and they would maybe make you laugh out loud once, and smile about half a dozen times. They wouldn’t be especially memorable and you wouldn’t go out of your way to recommend them to everyone you knew, but they fulfilled a purpose. Why don’t these movies exist anymore? Why are so many movies made by streaming giants just aggressively bad?

I’m a very easy audience as well, that’s what sticks in my craw. I’ve enjoyed so many movies which every other serious person loathed. I’m not asking for much! Still, I’ve often found myself closing the tab in a fury, because I felt insulted by the appalling quality of the dialogue, or the plot, or the action scenes, or a combination of the above.

All of which to say: I watched a movie I enjoyed on Sunday night! I was scrolling through Netflix and I could feel myself getting more and more insane by the second so I just clicked on something that looked entirely unremarkable and hoped for the best. I’m so glad I did it.

Confess, Fletch, is a movie you could only ever really describe as a caper. John Hamm is an investigative journalist turned “man who is generically around, probably doing some things but honestly who knows” (amazing that I enjoyed this film, I know) and his girlfriend is a beautiful and rich Italian woman, whose dad has been kidnapped. The movie begins as Hamm lands in Boston, where he believes that he may be able to find the paintings stolen from the rich Italian family, and demanded as random by the kidnappers.

The rest is…honestly, I’m not going to spoil it. I don’t think there’s any point. I couldn’t really tell you if the plot was occasionally unequal, or if I missed some crucial points because I was painting my nails, but crucially I didn’t care about it at all. It was such a charming and fun little flick. I had a ball watching it. It’s delightful. It also has a runtime of an hour and a half, which is really what you need on a Sunday night.

Sadly for me, my enthusiasm was relatively short-lived. I watched Confess, Fletch and it made me very happy, so I googled it afterwards to try and understand why I’d not come across it before. It came out in 2022! I go to the cinema a lot! How had I missed it? Turns out: no-one talked about it at the time. It’s not entirely clear what happened, but the movie simply had no publicity. It made no money whatsoever. It disappeared clean into the ether. There will never be a sequel.

It’s infuriating. Do you remember how much noise Netflix made when Red Notice came out? You just couldn’t avoid it. I’d told myself that I wouldn’t crack, and wouldn’t let Netflix believe that bullying works, but in the end I did watch it, and it was really awful. The same thing has happened to me a number of times over the past few years. Somehow streaming giants love to spaff one gazillion dollars on a cast of every single Hollywood A-lister currently in work but they hate giving them a decent story to work with.

Anyway, my point is: you should watch Confess, Fletch because I think you’d like it. I don’t believe you necessarily have to watch it on a Sunday evening but it really did feel right when I did. Also: John Hamm is often topless in it. I can’t say I was particularly riveted by that, because for some reason John Hamm just doesn’t really do it for me, but if you’re into that sort of thing then please know that you will have a good time. Also I did have one moment when I had to pause because I was laughing too much to listen to the dialogue. It was the delivery of “he looked like sauce!”. You’ll get it when you watch it.

On a different note

I was originally planning to tell you to read this Paris Review essay on Egon Schiele, because I stumbled upon it the other day and assumed it would be good, and I will always read anything long and pretentious on Schiele’s practice. I have now read it and must regrettably report that it was fine - definitely interesting and thought-provoking, especially on the role of gender and sexuality in his paintings, but it just wasn’t as great as I wanted it to be. 

I’m still going to include it here, on the off-chance that you too would like to read what I would describe as a solid 7/10 piece on art, pornography and desire.

If not, I would instead recommend this piece by the same author, who I googled post-Schiele because I did find his prose intriguing, and found myself really enjoying his big piece on happiness, and whether we’re all driving ourselves insane by trying to not only be but constantly remain happy. 

I believe that is all for this week. If I’m honest with you I thought I was only going to mention Confess, Fletch in passing then write a longer column about something else but it turned out that I had a lot to say on the topic. These things happen.

Bye!