Wasted Time with IFC

Confirmed yet again that there's a reason why indie movies stay indie (IFC = Independent Film Channel) - or in this case, why indie is often just a code word for "forgettable." I watched the last part of the Ninth Gate, which was all right, and the Final Cut, which stunk so bad I have to go bathe in tomato juice now. The Ninth Gate stars Johnny Depp, features a nerd convention of bibliophiles and Satan worshippers, and has a twist at the end that's so obvious you figure out an hour before they actually tell you. But you know, it was quirky and didn't try to be more than it was. I liked the critiques cited in wikipedia:

'[Ebert] also claimed on the show Roger Ebert & the Movies that the film was "full of unanswered questions and unquestioned answers" to which Joyce Kulhawik (that week's guest critic) responded: "This is such as silly movie! It's hard to believe that Roman Polanski, who gave us Rosemary's Baby, a horrifying movie...gave us this! I was reminded of Scooby-Doo when Dean Corso put on that cloak to disguise himself."'

Then there's the Final Cut, a truly awful heap of trash. Robin Williams plays a guy who edits the memory chips in dead people's heads and assembles movies out of them to be shared with loved ones at memorial services. Yeah, I know. Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite!) plays his completely irrelevant love interest. Now, if they had just left it at that it might not have been so bad, but then they had to "deepen" it with the most puerile, heavy-hande moralizing - only to twist it at the end with an even more puerile moral ambiguity that doesn't really logically follow. Let's see, it would be like asking us to feel strongly, for two hours, that chocolate ice cream is more morally righteous than vanilla ice cream, only to spring it on us at the end that no wait, vanilla is actually better. There's also a murder scene at the end that's so out there, it would be funny if it weren't so dumb.