Van Halen – "Finish What Ya Started" (1988)

Come on, baby

Finish what you started

I’m incomplete!

A couple of Christmases ago, one of my children gave me a year’s subscription to the Criterion Channel, a streaming service that allows you to watch thousands of classic and contemporary films from around the world.

Those movie offerings are supplemented with trailers, introductions, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, and commentary tracks.

My only problem with the Criterion Channel is that it’s hard for me to choose which of its many films to watch on any given night.  It’s like having access to a great wine cellar – how do you decide which bottle to open when there are so many great ones to choose from?

Like many streaming services, the Criterion Channel allows you to save titles you’re interested in to a list that you can browse through whenever you’re trying to decide what to watch.

That function is a disaster for people like me because I spend more time browsing through the channel’s film library and clicking the “add to my list” button as I do watching movies.

Currently, my Criterion watch list contains no fewer than 407 titles.  The chances of me viewing all those films are infinitesimal.  Nevertheless, I keep adding movies to it.

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If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know that I’m the poster child for people who don’t actually have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (“OCPD”) but act like they do.

Given my OCPD-ish personality traits – e.g., striving to do things perfectly, devotion to being productive, and preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists – it should have come as no surprise to anyone that when I got interested in Alice Munro’s fiction, I first obtained copies of all 14 of her short story collections from my public library and then read each of 140-plus stories in those books in chronological order.  I also meticulously recorded the titles of each of those stories along with the date that I read it in a notebook – which is how I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read for almost 50 years.

Likewise, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I took an equally systematic approach to choosing films to watch on the Criterion Channel.

After viewing a few random classics that I had heard about but had never seen – like Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – I decided to focus on French films.

My original plan was to start with The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut’s legendary 1959 movie, which I had seen when I was in college – and work my way through the films of Melville, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and the other French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) directors.  

I went to the library and checked out a comprehensive history of French cinema, which I planned to use to identify the movies I should watch.  But after reading the first few chapters of that book, I decided I needed to start by viewing the French “poetic realism” films of the thirties.

I began by watching Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, and then worked my way through the movies of Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko) Jacques Feyder (Carnival in Flanders), Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game – a truly remarkable film), and especially Marcel Carné, whose three-hour-plus Children of Paradise – which I had never heard of – is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all French movies.  (I wouldn’t argue with that judgment – it’s epic, dude!)

It took me a little over a year to work my way from Zero for Conduct to Henri Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, the 1942 movie that was the subject of a recent 2 or 3 lines post.  Altogether, I viewed about 30 French classics from the thirties and forties.

I didn’t watch old French films exclusively during the last year – I also saw movies by Kurosawa, Scorsese, Peckinpah, DePalma, John Woo, Tarantino, and Richard Linklater (my personal favorite) as well.  

I know all that because I’ve started keeping track of the movies I watch in the same notebook where I record the books I read.

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Who am I making that list for?  Who do I think is going to read it?  I suppose one or more of my children or grandchildren might flip through my notebook someday.  If they do, they might find it somewhat interesting that I bothered to keep such a comprehensive list of the movies I watched and the books I read – but I seriously doubt that they will spend much time mulling over my viewing and reading choices, much less let the movies and books I listed influence their own choices.

(If my father or grandfather had left behind a notebook listing the movies he had seen and the books he had read, I’d be fascinated by it.  That’s no surprise – someone who would keep such a list would be interested in someone else’s list.)

The fact that I keep such a list is very interesting to me.  But what’s even more interesting is the particular way I’m now choosing the movies I watch and the books I read.

Why?

Why did I read 140-odd Alice Munro stories?  And why am I going to watch roughly a hundred classic French movies over a two- or three-year period? 

No one assigned those tasks to me – I’m not a college student whose professor assigned those stories or movies to his or her students.  

And no one would give a rat’s ass if I stopped reading Munro halfway through her oeuvre, or suddenly switched from old French films to the Fast & Furious franchise.  

Except me, of course.  I would not be happy with myself if I didn’t finish what I started.  

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All this nonsense almost certainly has something to do with the fact that I’m almost 74 years old.  I rarely think about dying, but I’m not stupid – I know what it means to be that age.

And what it means is that I have limited time left.  And what that means is that I feel the need to accomplish more than I’ve accomplished to date.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to read all of Alice Munro’s stories and watch all the great French films the Criterion Channel has to offer before my time runs out.  

What I am sure of is that if it hadn’t been Alice Munro, it would have been someone else – Marcel Proust, perhaps.  (I’ve been planning to read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time for years.  Better late than never!)

And if it hadn’t been classic French films, it would have been Japanese films or finally getting around to watching all five seasons  of The Wire (which I’ve been saving like a squirrel saves nuts).

*     *     *     *     *

The problem is that it doesn’t matter how many of these self-assigned labors I complete – there are infinitely more books to read and movies to watch than I have time for.  

Nonetheless, something is driving me to accomplish as many of these tasks as I can.  

At the same time, something is making me waste a lot of time every day – by lying in bed scrolling on my phone . . . or worse.

I keep hoping that writing about this stuff on 2 or 3 lines will help me figure things out.  But I think that what ends up happening is that I just dig the hole deeper and deeper.

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“Finish What Ya Started” was released on Van Halen’s 1988 album, OU812.  That was the band’s second album to feature singer Sammy Hagar instead of David Lee Roth.  

(Having trouble figuring out what the album’s title means?  Think about it, people.)

Click here to listen to “Finish What Ya Started,” which has nothing to do with Alice Munro stories or French films.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.