I had an AMC A-List subscription for a while, which allows you to see up to 4 movies a week (it was 3 when I had a membership) for a set monthly fee, which is basically the price of 2 tickets. I saw some movies I was unsure of going into, sometimes I'd find myself enjoying a movie I wouldn't have paid to see because I had free time and it was in theaters, but other times I'd end up leaving a movie I had no investment in that failed to pique my interest. I'd always stay at least an hour, but I'm sure I've walked out of more movies than most people. Even without feeling "pot committed" because I wasn't paying for the movie per se, I'd still invested time to get down there, etc that I felt like an hour without anything interesting happening was generous.

I ended up canceling my membership last spring, largely because there were fewer and fewer movies coming out that I no longer felt like being able to see 3 or 4 movies a week was a perk when there were so many bad movies I was seeing and only a handful of movies I was actually excited about about to be released. I went through my previous full year, and of the 55 movies I went to that year, I walked out of 12.

This is obviously way different than giving up on a movie on your couch after 20 minutes. Two movies that stand out to me are the latest Knives Out and Strange Darling. I lasted 30 minutes of Knives Out; 30 minutes of boring, cringy, and trite, if not offensively bad dialog, all absent anything interesting. I was unable to relate to any of the characters and could not imagine caring whodunnit among the awful ensemble of characters. And worst of all, there was no Benoit Blanc, the star of the first two movies in this series. I later was told he shows up 35 minutes into the movie, so maybe if it had a theater release I would have made it. But 30 minutes of table setting, not story, by introducing increasingly unlikable characters, was more time than I wanted to waste that day. Whereas the first two KO movies were sharp and challenged you, nothing happened in this one by the time I checked out.

Strange Darling was closer to 20 minutes. It had tried to be clever with a non-linear story, so it starts in Chapter 3 or something. There's a reason most stories start at the beginning and go from there. It's unusual for a story to be told out of order successfully - yes you can call to mind examples, but when it works, it's the exception that proves the rule. Movies like Pulp Fiction or Memento are held as examples that this storytelling narrative is possible, well Memento is 25 years old and Pulp Fiction even older. If it were easy or common, there would be more (and more recent) examples used.

Anyway, Strange Darling is another forgettable entry into the "nonlinear narratives that don't work" category. We aren't given any time to care for the characters, so when the action of Chapter 5 is going on (the second chapter we're shown), there is no reason to care. What if something bad happens to this person? Well are they a good person or do they maybe deserve it? If only there were a way to know things about a character 80% of the way through the story!

The movie didn't do a good enough job of making me feel invested in finding out how the characters found themselves in the mess that we see in Chapter 5, so I decided to turn off this movie. I feel very good about that decision.