[update: It was, indeed, disappointing, in that the plot was extremely formulaic. It looked like Barbara Stanwyck was thinking of more interesting things to do during most of the movie. Henry Fonda (as the naive snake-hunting scientist who falls for Stanwyck) was quite funny; I wish there'd been more of him, in fact.]
Has watching a video at home been unusual? Since I started constantly watching TV-on-DVD instead. Now, although I have to return The Lady Eve to the library tomorrow, I am loath to watch it. It is more than 43 minutes long! It is not part of a long, serialized adventure!
Strangely, these hesitations don't apply to movies in the theater; those are more event-like and hence have their own justification for existing (and more relevantly, I still feel justified in spending $10 on tickets).
Watching a season of a good TV show is like reading a good novel that was once serialized, but is now regarded as one unified book, split up into chapters (Bleak House, for instance, being one of my favorites in this category). I like those novels. I like how they fluctuate back and forth between characters and scenes, only to have those characters come together fortuitously in later chapters. I like their conscious ambition to present a social world.
I know that movies do these things too. But I'm in the mode of seeking long-term investment in a set of characters, and movies kick you out of their world after 2 hours or so (93 minutes, in the case of The Lady Eve).
I have some faith left in Preston Sturges, Barbara Stanwyck, and the romantic-comedy genre, though; I'm about to pop in the movie and see if that faith pays off.
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I often feel the same way about movies. Two hours seems like quite an investment, when I could just pop in yet another episode of Buffy. And in Buffy, I already know who everyone is.
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