I don't want to say I slept through a lot of Obex, but when I tried to form a distinct memory of it on Friday morning, it felt like an Alzheimer's patient grasping for threads in their brain. (I assume, anyway. Hopefully I won't have to deal with Alzheimer's for another 20 years, though I'm pretty sure I will have to deal with it at that point.)
I knew the experience had been a four-star experience. It's a very distinctive black-and-white film that, when speaking about it to a friend, I likened to things like Computer Chess and Pi, in that it is DIY and chock full of throwback oddities to the 1980s, including a ton of era-appropriate computer graphics and midi tunes. There's also some arresting imagery that makes it at least horror adjacent. I checked IMDB and horror is one of three genres listed along with sci-fi and fantasy. If that combination of genres sounds good to you, and you have at least a little appreciation of the two titles I mentioned above, then this movie is for you. It's directed by, written by and starring Albert Birney, a name that was previously unfamiliar to me.
But because I'd really liked what I saw -- which I have to say was at least 80 percent of it -- I wanted to be able to incorporate it better into my brain as an ongoing, living reference point.
So I watched it again the very next night.
That's a rather extreme reaction except when you consider the following: my $5.99 rental was only going to last for 48 hours, and to watch it again at some point in the future, I'd probably have to pay that $5.99 again. This isn't the kind of movie that is likely to pop up on Netflix.
Plus it was only 90 minutes, so that made it easy, especially since I'd already watched one movie Friday night: Coyote vs. Acme with my wife. I'll probably write a post about that tomorrow, so I won't spoil my thoughts before then.
This isn't unprecedented. I've watched movies twice in quick succession before. There's the famous story of how the (so far only) two times I watched Wristcutters: A Love Story, they were both in the same day. Just last year I watched the screener of The Dead Don't Hurt twice because I realized I'd missed something key about its narrative structure the first time, and that would prevent me from writing a proper review of it.
But I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I watched a movie twice specifically to capitalize on a 24- or 48-hour rental window. (I have to remind myself that the 48-hour rental period is relatively recent, maybe only the last five to seven years.)
Speaking of the last five years, the last one I can specifically recall was The Last Five Years, which I watched for the first time on March 2, 2015, and the second time on March 3, 2015. That would have definitely been during the standard 24-hour rental period back then.
Now that I've watched Obex twice, I've determined that I didn't miss very much the first time. But I also must have slept through little bits the second time, because there were things I remember happening the first time that I don't remember the second time. Together I'm sure I have one complete viewing.
And I do remember those bits a lot better know. So, no Alzheimer's yet apparently.
But also this is the sort of movie that feels like a dream, in the best possible way. It involves flashes of bizarre imagery that don't necessarily have an antecedent in the narrative, plus the blending of a real world with a video game world, though that would be a 1987 video game world and all the more charming for that fact.
And now that I've deepened my appreciation of Obex through that second viewing, I can return to this dream in my mind at any time of my choosing.
