Effete, aggressive elocution

These were the best three words I could come up with to describe John Malkovich's particular speaking style in Dangerous Liaisons, a favorite movie of mine that I had not watched since the 1990s, for no good reason except a lack of availability. I never seem to see it in libraries, and in fact, when I did finally watch it again last night, I had to rent it from iTunes.

I had a little trepidation when I started to watch it, as you do with any cherished movie you are mildly concerned will not live up to the lofty standards you assigned it many years ago. Fortunately, I quickly realized I didn't have to worry about that with Stephen Frears' 1988 best picture nominee. Before long I was luxuriating in Christopher Hampton's cleverly nasty dialogue, just as I always had.

Much of that clever nastiness belongs to Malkovich. I'm pretty sure this was my first exposure to the actor, and what an exposure. He commands the screen like few others in this movie -- like few others in this movie, but like few other actors do in their own movies, period. It's not just those intricate linguistic gymnastics that make him sound like he's finely carving up a dictionary with a scalpel. It's also the intent and the intensity of that stare, which might make a person look away as they would the sun. He lacerates with both his tongue and his eyes.

In past viewings I had recognized Malkovich's Vicomte de Valmont as essentially loathsome, so obviously a person of brusque manners and no delicacy that I always wondered why Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer) would ever fall for him. But this time I decided that his unmistakable magnetism might be transferable with charm. Or perhaps, his brand of charm was so different than the bland politeness of other society men that it might entrance a person. Or simply, women often fall for the bad boy.

One thing that makes his style of speaking so memorable is that it's Malkovich's own voice, not the British accent so regularly used in period pieces regardless of where they're set. Of course, Malkovich speaks so "fancily" that one might mistake his ordinary speaking voice with the equivalent of what Madonna does when she tries to sound British, but that's just the proof that he's so well suited for the part. All of the actors use their own speaking voices, but they just try to make them a tad ... "fancier." Interestingly, the choice to use normal speaking voices was repeated in Milos Forman's take on the material the following year, called Valmont, a film I greatly disliked. When I reviewed that movie for AllMovie about 15 years ago, I wrote "No one in either film speaks the novel's native French, but at least Frears opted for high-minded dialogue and sophisticated accents, both genre staples. Forman inexplicably favors a looser, less poetic, more American vernacular staging of events, and cast members Fairuza Balk and Meg Tilly are unfortunate byproducts of that decision." I guess Uma Thurman and Michelle Pfeiffer are just better with "fancy" American accents than Balk and Tilly.

I don't suppose I have any really new interpretations of this film from my most recent viewing. I did, however, wonder about the validity of a previous interpretation ... which I suppose could be a new interpretation.

In one of the final scenes, Glenn Close's Marquise de Merteuil tears up her chamber in a fit of weeping hysterics, then screams at her attendants to get out as she collapse to her knees, wracked with sobs. I had always interpreted this as sorrow over the death of Valmont, who she secretly still loves (or perhaps not so secretly, since she admits as much to him).

However, this time I wondered if she values her position in society so much that the actual circulation of her damning letters would be enough to reduce her to this state. After all, she must have figured that a consequence of revealing to Danceny that Valmost was sleeping with Cecile would be that Danceny would come after Valmont and try to kill him. But perhaps she was so many layers removed from reality, and considered both herself and Valmont so indestructible, that the only outcome she imagined of a Danceny-Valmont duel was the death of Danceny (which she also wanted, feeling spurned by him). And then there's always "don't know what you've got until it's gone" ... which I suppose could apply both to Valmont and to her public shaming.

Which do you think it is?

The great unwatched

I've been trying to get my wife to watch Dangerous Liaisons for some time now.

Yesterday, I returned it to Blockbuster unwatched.

And, pursuant to what we were discussing on Tuesday, that's ... okay.

You see, not only had I been dominating the direction of our theatrical viewing experiences, but apparently, our home viewing as well.

And in this arena, I don't blame myself as much. It's the queue's fault. It's relentless, and it must always be fed.

For those of us who use an online rental company -- Netflix and Blockbuster are, of course, the industry leaders -- a fun little way to pass the time is to reorganize our queue of movies we have lined up to see.

It might surprise you to know that I am a somewhat absentee proprietor of my queue. Of the 74 titles I currently have in there, 50 have been in there for as long as two years. Those lingering titles were films I sort of wanted to see at some point, and they have been leapfrogged countless times by more urgent titles. I guess I am using my queue as a warehouse to store these titles, as a reminder that I may someday want to see them.

There's a part of me that wishes the titles would just come up randomly -- that it would be a surprise which title I'm receiving next, all part of the random pastiche that comprises a person's day-to-day movie watching experience. But I do have to control it, and I use three basic methods of determining which titles I move to the top: 1) movies that I need to review, and specifically, movies that are crappy that I need to review, so I can watch them at the gym; 2) movies that I have recently discussed watching with my wife; 3) movies that I haven't recently discussed watching with my wife, but which I have decided to promote to the top of the queue for some reason or the other.

It's that third category that gets me in trouble.

See, once a movie is sent to me, it means that it (by necessity) needs to get prioritized for a viewing sometime in the next week or two. Yet if my wife didn't specifically ask me to get something, it stands to reason that she shouldn't be forced to agree to that timeframe.

And it certainly won't surprise you to know that I get agitated the longer a movie sits around unwatched. The more days a movie sits at home, the less value I am getting from my monthly payment to Blockbuster. And if I have two movies that just can't make it to a viewing -- I get three at any one time -- then the problem compounds. Earlier this year, I held on to The Wages of Fear and Aguirre, the Wrath of God for almost two months each, because we just couldn't find the time to watch them. My wife was more interested in her second viewing of the first than her first viewing of the second, so I eventually watched the second by myself and returned it with a sigh of relief.

By contrast, my wife has a lesser Netflix plan that allows her only one DVD at a time. So my three Blockbuster DVDs gang up on her one Netflix DVD, and bully their way into our DVD player. You might consider that a metaphor for what Blockbuster is trying to do to the (presumably less well-funded) Netflix, which pioneered the concept of DVDs through the mail.

Of course, I make matters worse by also trading in watched DVDs for new releases from the store, which is one of the prime advantages I consider Blockbuster to have over Netflix. Those films take on the online rental terms, which means I don't have to return them by any specific date. But Blockbuster will hold the next film in my queue until I return that movie to the store. So I am motivated to do that as quickly as possible.

One more complicating factor: I double my list of three titles by getting out three movies from the library every couple weeks. We know those won't all get watched, because they are due back two days later. But we usually try to watch at least one of every batch.

The best solution would be if I were to keep my wife apprised of which titles are coming up near the top of my Blockbuster queue. That way, she could tell me which films she had a likelihood of wanting to see relatively soon, and which I should just push lower because she doesn't want to prioritize them. But that seems a little ridiculous, doesn't it? "Warning, honey -- Dangerous Liaisons has risen to third in my queue."

So the other solution is just to return them unwatched, as I did yesterday. Recognize the miscalculation and just cut your losses.

But I have to say, this does kill me a little bit every I do it. "A bird in the hand" becomes my guiding principle with these movies. I wish it could just be "Well, whatever the decision was that caused this movie to get sent to us, it's in the past. The movie is here now, so let's prioritize watching it."

My wife doesn't work that way, and that's fine. In fact, it's probably normal, while my way is probably weird. She has to be in the mood to watch a particular movie, whereas I'm more likely to sacrifice that if it means keeping the titles moving back and forth. As I've discussed other times, we have particular movie nights that we think are suited more appropriately or less appropriately to certain types of movies, as most people probably do. Circumstances and the vicissitudes of life could easily cause a movie to miss its ideal viewing night for several weeks in a row.

And so it's okay to return a movie like Dangerous Liaisons sometimes. It doesn't mean we'll never watch it. It doesn't mean we are disqualified from ever renting it again. It just means we won't watch it right now, and that's ... okay.

I've done it before. I returned (and still have never seen) The Mission in early 2008, when I realized I simply didn't have time before our wedding to give it the kind of viewing it deserved. And earlier this year, I even used my queue with the specific intention of watching a certain movie under a certain set of circumstances only. I rented Step Brothers, which I love and had already seen twice, in order to bring it for a weekend away with friends, in case they hadn't seen it. When it turned out they had seen it, I didn't feel the need to watch it a third time by myself, just to get my "money's worth." I just dropped it back in the mail and got the next movie.

Our queues. We should own them rather than them owning us, right?