Of all that Christian Marclay's horological odyssey achieves, the boldest feat is a simple matter of etiquette. If a movie's got you, it's got you. There's nowhere else you'd rather be. If a movie's really got you, you don't want it to end. So what do you do when a movie's lost you, when it's never had you, when you simply can't take another minute? You check the time. It's second-hand criticism.
For 24 hours, "The Clock" subverts that. It turns a form of judgement, of rudeness, of exasperation, of basic temporal orientation into an event. Every shot of a clock or a watch, whenever some asks for the time, you're made aware of how far you've come and how far you have left to go. In that sense, watching this movie is like reading a book. If viewed as intended, in a single showing, it's also something of a chore. This is one long montage, and it's frequently exhilarating as montages can be. But a conventional montage lasts, at most, a minute or two, and though the rhythms change (speed then deceleration, deceleration then speed), the compression of Marclay's narrative obsession lasts a whole day. So the compounded euphoria of experiencing disparate but familiar images compressed into a kind of unified story eventually starts to wear you out. A good montage is like good sex, and Marclay is asking you to have sex all day. As irresistible as that sounds, it's a demoralizing task. Marclay can go all night. I, as it turns out, cannot.
Watched: "The Clock" at the MFA, Part II
When, at about 4:11 a.m., Tom Cruise comes home from his old-boy " Night Gallery" orgy to Nicole Kidman, I felt the urge to curl up alongside them. The movie is " Eyes Wide Shut," and I still don't know what that title means, but its poetry neatly applies to nine hours with "The Clock." I arrived with Geoff Edgers a few minutes before midnight with no extra reserves of sleep and no supplemental canned energy. Initially, they weren't necessary. For about 230 minutes, I was in heaven. There's not much value in listing the movies and the stars, but one of the many beauties of this project is its cinematic egalitarianism. The way succession and recontextualization forge an illusion of equality. At about 12:07, Laura Linney looks at an alarm clock in what appears to be one of the bad crime-horror thrillers she's appeared in. Not much later, there's a clip from what looks like Béla Tarr's Hungarian masterpiece " Werckmeister Harmonies," and minutes later, a longish passage from "Shanghai Knights," in which Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan, pictured above, hang from the hands of Big Ben. Arranged this way, great movies are indistinguishable from crap.