The
new Oldham Sports Centre opened some
months ago, featuring swanky new Technogym cross trainers complete
with Digital TV and Youtube. The access to this much of the internet
in such a location gave me a great idea for endurance work.
Training
for long periods can be monotonous, so an opportunity to watch a film
whilst getting fit at the same time is not one I want to waste. For
some time now I've been compiling a list of films that I want to
watch, so I made a start on these films today. Schwarzenegger zombie
flick Maggie was not on Youtube. Neither was John Niven adaptation
Kill Your Friends. I did, however, find David Cronenberg's adaptation
of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.
I
plugged my headphones into the cross trainer's jack and started
training. The volume wasn't really loud enough for me considering the
radio was being played in the gym, and there were other expected gym
noises. As for the movie, Cosmopolis is painfully slow. DeLillo has a
rare talent: he can make the mundane fascinating, the ordinary
extraordinary. Cronenberg does not have that gift. His films are mental by nature: a
guy turning into a fly, a guy reading people's minds until their
heads explode, a woman with a murderous rabid lump in her armpit...
etc. etc.
The
problem with Cosmopolis is the fascinating aspect of the book is
the language. DeLillo details, for example, how the stock markets can be predicted
using patterns in nature. But this had to be excluded from the film as there's no
way to incorporate it visually. Fair, a guy getting a rectal exam in
the back of a limo is unique and memorable, but it's DeLillo's
description of the mundanity of it that engages. Just showing us this
onscreen (thankfully not in the most graphic way possible) does not
engage. Certainly not for as long as Cronenberg drags out the scene.
It's implied that protagonist Packer is an insomniac, but that isn't an excuse to
crawl the story along at the pace of an overpriced limo stuck in a
riot-induced traffic jam.
Excruciating.
Just read the book.
The
exercise took 135 mins. I covered 6.18km and burned 1176 cals,
whatever that means. Feeling it in the legs now.
Send
me your Youtube film recommendations and I'll try this again soon!
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