The Hours deserves nothing

Jessie Augustyn

The Hours is about Virginia Woolf and how her work affected two other women from different time periods…or at least that’s the plot. The actual point of the movie is clearly to be a vehicle to win Oscars. Great acting on a background of mind-numbing tripe might be the best way to describe this agonizing two-hour experience. I want my $5.25 back.The three main characters have more psychological baggage than the crew in One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest, but hardly any reason to be depressed. Maybe I’m being terribly insensitive, but a woman living comfortably in southern California, with an adorable child and loving husband doesn’t seem like the saddest person alive to me. I can already hear those of you who like this movie saying, “But depression is a mental illness.” I whole-heartedly agree. It’s just too bad the characters come off more as whiny, self-centered, self-serving egotists than people with actual medical conditions.

In addition to self-centered, undeveloped characters, the plot moves at an incredibly slow pace. The acting was good, but how many meaningful looks can one person sit through before you beg for something interesting to happen? If you saw the first five minutes, you saw the whole movie. Too bad I didn’t know this before I wasted two hours of my life.

My friend and I were the only two people in the theater, and that should have been enough of a warning. My only consolation in this (besides being able to yell comments at the screen through the showing) was that no one else was suffering through what we were. After all, how good can a movie be that ends with the main character stating the title? Clearly cheesy, and at points, laugh-out-loud funny, my only hope is that I can save other people from experiencing the pain I did.