Gerry

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I remember seeing the trailer for this in an actual theater. I can't remember what the featured presentation was, but I remember this trailer. I remember it for two reasons:

1. It looked like the weirdest movie of all time.
2. By the end, everyone was hooting and hollering and laughing ironically and making fun of it, because it looked so goddamn stupid and boring.

I said: "I wanna see that shit!"

Well, I didn't. But thanks to the miracle of Netflix, I now have!

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One thing is, I would never in a million years recommend this to anyone who might be reading this. If you are a JC BBS member, do not watch this movie. In fact, I was consciously grateful for the fact that, while watching it, none of you were in the room with me.

This is a movie that half its audience at Sundance walked out of.

This is a movie that, from accounts I've heard, half of everyone who ever went into a theater to see it walked out of.

And it's the kind where, if you check out it's ratings on MRQE, it gets either A+++ or F---- ratings, and nothing remotely in between.

It is, perhaps, the weirdest movie of all time.

Check it: The opening shot is of a car driving through the desert.

This shot lasts approximately 10 minutes, no fooling. And that, right there, is the most action you're gonna be seeing for the hour and a half after it.

Check it: One scene features the two actors (Matt Damon & Casey Affleck) walking on a salt flat. This single shot, unedited, and shot in real time, from one static angle, begins in near pitch black, and by the time it's done, the sun has risen and bathed the scene in daylight. In this movie, you literally watch the sun rise.

Andrei Tarkovsky would nod off at this movie.

When it started, I really wanted to like it.

Halfway in, even I was incredulous at how anyone could have the fucking balls to make this movie. These long shots would go on, and I'd be all, "Hey, cool." Then I'd be all, "Wow, this is really mesmerizing that the shot is going on this long!" But then even *I*, the ultimate patient viewer, am all, "Jesus CHRIST, man!"

Still, though, you have to really admire that sort of single-mindedness. Nobody makes movies like this. Primarily because nobody lets them, and many viewers would count that as a grace.

And through all of it, toward the end, we get to the aforementioned sun rising shot, and the trance fully took hold. The shot itself might be 10+ minutes long, but when it switched off, I was startled. Gerry had finally, after trying so hard for over an hour, worked its magic on me.

And now, I almost wanna watch it again, with my face right up close to the screen. I mention this last part because even if you don't like the movie, it would work fabulously as a Windows screensaver, because it's just gorgeous. Gorgeous, I tells you.

How can I rate this movie? As an exercise in writing, character development, and riveting plotline, it gets a zero, since there aren't any of those.

As pure entertainment, providing you're patient and curious enough to stick with it, and have smoked up ahead of time, it maybe gets **1/2. (There's little wonder that the film was dedicated to Ken Kesey.)

But as a pure aesthetic work of art, a reworking and obliteration of the superficial constraints of modern cinema, and as a pure example of unwavering dedication to a vision (however misguided the viewer might consider it), you really have to give it full marks. It does what it does better than any other movie out there, because no other movie does what it does.

Please do not watch it.

Four (****) stars.