Trawling though Netflix for something decent to watch, I tried the series, Living With Yourself, which started out promisingly as it explores an intriguing idea/dilemma that results from a freak accident. It stars Paul Rudd, who I recognised as a boyfriend who passed through Friends at one point. He's a decent enough actor, but in LWY he really has too heavy a burden to carry, as the series decends into many typical Netflix failings:-
>It's too long.
> It chops the chronology around to little purpose other than to confuse.
> Like my complaint with Ozark, there are some under-lit scenes that probably look arty if you're lucky enough to be watching from the director's personal screening room, but don't work so well in my house.
So, what appears at first to be a light intellectual exploration of an unusual paradox suddenly backtracks to a time before the crucial accident, when nothing was unusual, and yet we are expected to slog through the dreary fertility problems of a couple that I was fast losing interest in. A woman sitting on a toilet was once a sign of edgy realism in a movie; why put it into this series, which is neither real nor edgy? ( In fact, LWY starts out with an interesting idea but soon degenerates into a limping rom-com without much com.) Anyway, that was the visual cliché that made me give up on Paul Rudd's banal problems and head for the "search" page again, in the dwindling belief that there are good things on Netflix, but somehow I haven't hit on them yet.
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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953
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