Two films that were non-starters - or actually non-finishers

Started and abandoned two very different movies for two very different reasons this weekend, so can't comment fully on either - maybe we missed the crucial moment when everything fell into place - can give a sense of why sometimes 45 minutes or so is more than enough. First, the 1952 John Ford "classic" The Quiet Man, with John Wayne breaking stereotype and playing a middle-aged American returning to family homestead in Ireland, buying up the near-abandoned family farm, falling in love w/ the hot-tempered beauty (Maureen O'Hara) and wining over the natives of the village including. The scenery is beautiful, and Ford has a light touch w/ the antic Irish (and includes a kind of funny trope in that the local pub seems to be owned by Jewish guy: We pronounce it Co-han's, says one of the locals). That said, the pace is glacial and the story told in such broad strokes and the characters so close to stereotype that 45 minutes in I was sure I had no desire to see how J Wayne wins the girl. Reading the liner, you learn that he's an ex-boxer, and there are a few hints of his prowess, but Ford holds onto that "secret" forever. Fro the heavy-handed musical score to the languid pace to the corny dialogue - this is clearly now a period piece for those interested in deconstructing the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster from the Eisenhower years. The other non-starter (or non-finisher): La Sapienza, with the subtitles unhelpfully translated as Sapience, a Swiss-French-Italian mishmash about supposedly award-winning architect and his think-tankish wife who, each frustrated in their careers - he especially, as he believes his many public projects have not made life better for anyone - head off for Italy - where they encounter a young man and his sickly sister. The young man wants to become an architect, and he and the protag - Schmidt - travel on to Rome and engage is some of the most stilted, tortured dialog imaginable on the purpose of architecture and design (while wife stays with the sickly sister and they talk about - I don't even know what - basically nothing). The movie is arch and self-consciously stylized - characters often standing shoulder to shoulder and addressing the camera rather than each other - a cheap Godardian effect - and it all would be bearable, perhaps, if the characters were likable, dynamic, funny - think, just by comparison, about how Owen Wilson learns about writing in his midnight journeys through Paris in the Woody Allen jaunt - but these characters are stilted and lifeless and seem to be nothing more than vehicles for the director to espouse his or her theories on art. Cut!