Marina and me were invited to the PBZ Indoors tennis tournament. It was a joyful occasion as Ivan Ljubicic kept advancing in spite of his fluctuating game and the challengers who were playing some pretty good tennis. Tim Henmann was good in spite of his injury and the Serb-Montenegrin Novak Djakovic will be a hell of a player soon. “Ljubo” finally won the semifinals match we have seen and have apparently won the finals the next day, when I traveled somewhere and have missed the news. It was a busy week with three trips to different European cities. We concluded that tennis is a great sport to watch in real, better then when transmitted on TV.

Yesterday, we went to cinema and, by coincidence to the nice tennis experience, we picked Woody Allan’s “Match Point”. I admit of being skeptical of cinema industry for years now, actively avoiding going to cinema for big productions, but I got confirmation and much more yesterday. “Match Point” is a thoroughly repulsive piece of unbearable aggression, hard to watch in spite of its precise execution, which has been hailed as W.A.’s best movie in years by many critics all over the Net. It succinctly reminded me why cinema might be worse than smoking. I do believe that it actually damages your health, just as cigarettes do, and I hope the industry will get hit by the lawsuits just as the tobacco industry got its share of responsibility once the consumers understand how the mad violence of the fast moving pictures made them less capable of living their lives to the full. Watching invented reality is apparently something that can hurt your mind just as smoke kills your lungs. In the pre-media times it was healthy to see a tragedy or two every couple of years for a total of probably twenty stories during one’s lifetime and probably it really had a cathartic effect and have cleansed one’s feelings for a better understanding of one’s emotional environment. Nowadays, we are hit with as much in a month and morals of these stories really become irrelevant and beside the point as watching the movies takes time from our own true lives. Also the deep human internal fault lines exposed by a good story are monotonously and virtually recycled over and over again in the storylines of an average quality. Every second lost to a true life is a second gained by a producer. If the capitalism of the movie industry would be true to the good American habit of giving you a “money-back guarantee”, I would really ask Woody Allan to cough back the money I paid for the preposterous play he arrogantly built up and would, in addition, like to ask him to pay me for the time I lost watching his tormented and void narrative. More skillfully he told the story, more blatantly he exposed the unbearable banality of his message. We all know, hopefully, that it is not good to hide the truth; we all know that the stable and calm relation is on a long term more feasible then the fascinating passion. We do not need an arrogantly tragic story to remind us the most simple facts of life. The movie is such an overblown piece of everyday banality that one really starts asking oneself – is it really possible that most of the people got that lost? What troubled me the most, and before I shred the film itself is the fact that all the critics I have seen on some five pages of Google results kind of kept the sweet secret of the plot which is a disgusting murder as a point that should make every movie goers a merry little camper, instead of clearly saying that it is irrelevant, banal, constructed and repetitive. I really disliked the self congratulatory idea in which a director, just because s/he is a movie-buff and a “filmophile” is granted a license to rerun the common points of past stories and get free points on that exercise.

In short, and I will revisit this post, this movie is a good example of how the movie industry (big productions or independent alike), are consciously taking our lives for the scope of their profits by selling us stale, received and irrelevant stories. These stories are puffed up in a vain effort to produce an intelligible moral dilemma for the overloaded consumer, ever more emphasizing ever more distorted behavior. We would do good by rejecting these products and devote more of our time to our true dilemmas and dealing with them in the most truthful, honest and transparent way, together with those that share our time in life.