Timing is Everything

You plan and you plan, and what you plan is to watch Let the Right One In this weekend, both because you've been wanting to see it for months, and so you'll have something fresh to write about today. And besides, it feels like it's been a good long while since you're written a serious post about the horror genre. But your "planning" has actually consisted entirely of assuming that the film was available On Demand. Which, you found out yesterday, is not the case. So fine, go rent the damn thing. Okay, I will. Or rather, my wife says she'll pick it up on the way back from an errand she has to run. But our local video store is all out. There has, apparently, been a run on moody Swedish vampire films. As a result, I have no Let the Right One In to write about, but have learned, instead, a valuable lesson: planning gets you nowhere!

I'll watch some other movie soon and write that up instead, but, in the meantime, anybody else surprised about this?
I haven't seen the film yet, and therefore have no opinion, but I do know that it's hardly being heralded as a major triumph for David Fincher. Criterion has done this before, though, albeit some years after the film's release, with Ang Lee's The Ice Storm*. Maybe I'm just oblivious to the high regard with which Lee's film is held, but that one I have seen, and it didn't strike me as any kind of modern classic (or important, either). It seemed too scrubbed clean and proud of itself. But it was based on a novel by Rick Moody, so the being-proud-of-itself thing was probably built in. Anyway, I could more easily see a Criterion release for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or Hulk, for that matter.


*Of course, Criterion also has Chasing Amy, Armageddon and The Rock under their belt, but I always hoped that was just a phase they were going through.