Beginnings

How many times have I recently read favourable reviews of films only to find that they are not very good. How is it that the film "Beginners" has been advertised as having had good reviews from many critics, mostly with four stars, when on seeing it it turns out to be pretty awful? OK, that's just my point of view. But it's happened so often in the past year. I have seen at least four films that have bored me almost to death.
"Beginners" had, I imagined, the basic idea for a splendid film: a man of seventy-five tells his thirty odd year old son that he is gay. Hah, I thought, we'll see him going through the agonies of his confession and the son's reaction will, of course, be shock and awe. Not a bit of it. Christopher Plummer as the father tells his son, Ewan Mcgregor, of his secret as though he's telling him he's given up going to the corner shop for bread and is now going to the supermarket instead. And, instead of the son reacting like a man who's just experienced a life-altering moment, all he does is smile, look a trifle put out and carries on living his usual heterosexual way.
This part of the story is not a slow development: it's told us in the first two minutes, so the rest of the film is, really, padding because the strong story line has gone and we are left with a sort of long summing up.
It is an utterly boring film. Before I went I thought "here's a film with a strong story line with two of the finest actors in films - can't fail".
I cannot understand how it came to be distributed at the popular cinema outlets; it's film for art houses; its a gay film, it's art. Well, I think that's what the director (and writer) imagined it would be - art. It brought back to mind some of those French films I used to see: faces looking into space; philosophy of the cracker-barrel variety; lots of useless talk; crises in the lives of middle-class adults etc.
I am always wary now of a film which has been advertised as "Critically acclaimed". Art, in other words. There are very few films which are works of art; I can count them on the fingers of one hand; they are mostly Swedish or French or Japanese, raraly American. And they are all, in my experience boring, utterly boring.