Not A Review Of “Fast Color”

Ever since we got a good-sized television and a Netflix disc subscription, we haven’t been to a movie in the theaters. Not once. Not even for Avengers: Endgame*. But that’s okay, right? Because now it’s out on Blu-Ray and surely Netflix will have bought a zillion copies of it** so that everyone who wants it can see it right away, right?

Wrong.

Since its release on September 10th, while Avengers: Endgame has been sitting at the top of my Netflix queue at status “Short Wait”, these are the movies Netflix has sent instead:

• Mortdecai
  Wife: “It’s Pepper Potts! But she’s not playing Pepper Potts.” (loses interest)
  Me: “But look, it’s Johnny Depp.”
  Wife: “But is he playing Jack Sparrow?”
  Me: “No.”
  Wife: (loses interest again)
• Cemetery Man
  Me: “This reminds me of the kind of movie I would subject Auntie to on ‘Night Flight’ when I would stay over at her house.”
  Wife: “Yeah, I can see you watching this when you were a kid.”
  Me: “Except for all the nudity.”
• Fast Color
• The Lego Movie

Some of those movies were, uh, better than others. But this is not a “Not A Review” of all of them. It’s a “Not A Review” of one of them:

Fast Color is basically a superhero movie without the superheroes or supervillains, like maybe if Lucy met … uh … well, insert the name of a woman-centric generational family drama movie here. (My depth of knowledge of woman-centric generational family dramas is nowhere near my depth of knowledge of, say, Marvel movies.) It starts off with the main character, Ruth, on the run from mysterious pursuers. And one of the first things she does upon her escape is stop remove some tightly-tied rope from her bloodied wrists.

Wife: “Ew, that’s gross. Do I want to watch this?”
Me: “Yes, you do.”
Wife: “Why?”
Me: “Because it’s good.”
Wife (beat): “Why is it good?”
Me: “Um, I don’t remember exactly. I just remember hearing it was good***.”

Fortunately once we got past that, there wasn’t much more gross stuff. Nor was there a lot in the way of action, superhero or otherwise. You know what there was? Plot. And character interaction, too!

This managed to hold my wife’s attention for a full 45 minutes, which is pretty good for any movie, let alone a quasi-superhero one.

Wife: “I’m falling asleep.”
Me: “Okay. 45 minutes, that’s pretty good for a superhero movie that hasn’t got Tony Stark in it.”
Wife: “Or Pepper Potts.”

After that, about a week of, you know, work and stuff ensued, but finally we were ready to watch the rest of the movie. Or were we?

Me: “Do you want to watch more of the movie?”
Wife: “What movie?”
Me: “Fast Color.”
Wife: “Oh.”
Me: “Do you remember anything about it?”
Wife: “Wait, don’t tell me. Um …” (thinks for a while)
Me: “Do you remember who’s in it?”
Wife: “No. But don’t tell me!”
Me: “Okay. Do you remember who’s not in it?”
Wife: “Tony Stark is not in it. Neither is Pepper Potts.”
Wife thinks for a while longer
Wife: “All right, give me a hint.”
Me: “It’s about that girl who’s on the run and goes back home to her—”
Wife: “Oh, right. Yeah, I want to watch more of it.”

We then proceeded to finish the film in a second sitting, which, again, is pretty respectable where my wife is concerned. It’s not at all uncommon for it to take three or four (or more!) sessions for us to finally finish a movie, not including the ones my wife tunes out immediately. Of course, it’s not quite up to the standards of her favorites like The Professional, or the aforementioned Lucy, or Cyrus, or a certain other movie that Fast Color made me think of:

Me: “This movie reminded me of Beasts of the Southern Wild.”
Wife: “I liked that one.”
Me: “Oh, yes, I remember.”

^* Which as of the time of this writing, October 5th, I still haven’t seen. Mutter mutter. Hopefully they will have FINALLY sent it to me by the time the post actually appears on October 29th.
^** I mean, it’s only the current #1 movie of all time. Why would they buy a few extra copies when surely EVERYONE has seen it already?
^*** This is how lots of movies get into the queue. And then I forget where I heard of them or why I put them in the queue. Sometimes this works out pretty well. Sometimes not so much.