must love what?

You know that horrible feeling? The one you get when you are passing a ghastly roadside accident and you try not to look but you can't help focusing your eyes in its direction, reassuring yourself that you're just checking to see that everything is okay (because what do the paramedics know?), when really you're propelled by the possibility of discovering something lurid, or gory- perhaps to subconsciously remind you of your own mortality? I had that experience tonight, though it was not a horrific car accident. Not in any literal sense, that is.

I had just returned home from a very enjoyable Knicks game (they broke their winning streak tonight by getting "ass raped!", as my courtside companion magically declared in a sudden moment of silence so perfect that the consequent choreography of turning heads seemed like it must have been planned). I turned on the TV, as I had the previous night, when, after cooking dinner for the first time in ages, I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice variety of programming on: reruns of Six Feet Under, Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, The Devil Wears Prada.... Tonight I expected to find more of the same. Instead I found Must Love Dogs. Like the aforementioned tragic roadside accident, I couldn't help but slow down and look.

Must Love Dogs has to be the worst film I have ever seen in my entire life. The actors- God love them- did the best with what they had, but what they had was shit. There was no spatial congruity in the shots, no sense of breath, pace or flow in the structure; the music was abysmal, there were some serious cases of miscasting, the script was trite and superficial, and the movie was left with not so much as a shard of bone or shred of muscle to stand on. And yet I could not stop watching. I watched until the end, and then walked away with that vague sense of nausea that accompanies all traumatic experiences.

The Knicks game was fun, though.