Two hours I'll never get back

I wasted a perfectly good dose of insomnia last night watching Atonement, yet another period piece starring Keira Knightley, animated coat rack. It is long. It is pretentious and it's boring as all get out. It also failed to cure my insomnia as I was up a good hour after the movie was over.


As is my wont, after it was all over I looked up reviews to see what the critics had to say about this particular cinematic endeavor. Only one came close to being as unenthusiastic as I was. The rest were in raptures. Raptures. Particularly over a single, long-winded shot of the Dunkirk evacuation that went on for about five minutes, but felt like five hours. I particularly detest these bravura gestures that do nothing to advance the plot or help us understand the characters but show what visual geniuses the director and cinematographer are. Yes, James McAvoy (SPOILER ALERT) dies before he's evacuated, but they could have killed him off so much faster.

As Elaine Benes of Seinfeld so succinctly put it when discussing an equally boring, pretentious and long-winded romance: "Die already!"