Short Cuts: Actually, I’m not sure if it’s accurate to say that Everybody Loved this one, since probably a lot of people have never heard of it. I wish I hadn’t.

According to rottentomatoes, the critics loved it, at least. Of course, they hardly had a choice, since it was the work of a couple of famous guys. Which makes me quite the Philistine to be taking exception to it (but not literally).

The movie also contains a boatload of semi-famous people of the quirky variety, including: everyone’s favorite wannabe 9-year-old Hindu boy, Tom Waits; the pleasant-voiced Andie MacDowell, who plays the only pleasant (and indeed saccharine-sweet) character in the movie; and a little more of Julianne Moore than I signed on for, which, for me, cast a shadow over my enjoyment of the simple pleasures of Benny and Joon (which came out the same year, go figure).

The conceit of the movie is that a whole bunch of parallel stories involving different configurations of characters is going on at the same time. The characters involved in each story don’t know the other characters, for the most part, but they are all connected in some way. For example, one of the characters runs over the little boy of another character with her car, and kills him. The paths of the characters involved in this incident never cross again.

The other character connections which occur in this movie are less pleasant than this one, however.

I’m giving this buddy 2.5 stars because it’s quite possible I’d like it better if I saw it today. However, I don’t think my mental health will every be stable enough for me to willingly plunge into such a dark vortex of anguish and despair from which their is no escape. Part of the problem is the way that the movie was sold to me, which was that all the characters lead terrible lives until a major even occurs, which turns all of their lives around. This wasn’t the case at all, however, which I think was the point of the movie, and if I’d been prepared for that I might have appreciated it more.

Also, in general, I need to like at least a couple of characters in order to like the movie, tv show, or book in which they appear, and none of the characters in this movie are even remotely likeable. Perhaps this was the point of the movie, maybe, rather than trying to find the humanity within the characters, the filmmaker was trying to deny the existence of humanity; to point out that our worst fears are, in fact true: there is neither any ultimate meaning to the world nor any solace to be found in those around us. Even fleeting, temporary pleasures, which seem to be all that is left, become blunted, drowned, and lost, in an overwhelming flood of banality. There is no God, and even the existence of other people and the world around us is worse than questionable: it is irrelevant. It’s an existential nightmare: the only true reality is ourselves, and it is up to us to create our own meaning, but it turns out we don’t have the right equipment to do so.

Or maybe not. Another problem with my viewing of this movie is that I was around 19 at the time, which is pretty much synonymous with a lack of reasonableness in my actions and judgments. You might be able to find some sort of meaning in this movie, but then again it might be just an agonizing journey to nowhere.