This long-dormant cineblogger has reemerged to ogle film in the shadow of how everything and nothing has suddenly changed. Last known as the mistress of The Broad View, Lisa Rosman has written for the likes of Premiere, Flavorpill, iVillage, and Us Weekly (yup). Expect her to opine roughly once a week--whether you like it or not.
I have come to the entirely un-revelatory conclusion that George Clooney is the new Sydney Pollack.
Pollack came into the public eye in the ‘60s and effortlessly bridged a burgeoning counterculture movement with big-studio Hollywood; he produced, directed, acted; he worked nearly equally in TV and film and he even bridged the never-narrowed divide between European and American film, appearing in the French Fauteuils d’orchestre only two years before his 2008 death from stomach cancer. With zero fanfare, he shifted between indie and big-budget films to produce some of the best films of the last decade, including Ira Sach’s Forty Shades of Blue, Michael Clayton and the underrated Breaking and Entering, directed by the also recently deceased Anthony Minghella, with whom he exec-produced No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. And let’s not forget his pivotal cameo in the last season of The Sopranos, which I prefer to pretend was his last role. (His actual last role was in the one-for-them Made of Honor.)
I cried when he died. He was my kind of tall, gravely-voiced hero: a cool nerds who was so comfortable with himself that he made you comfortable. We need more people who don’t get distracted by the us vs. them game if standards are to truly improve.
And now there’s George Clooney, with whom he often worked. True, George is distractingly, suspiciously pretty. Couple those good looks with the tics that distinguished his early acting (the lowered lid gaze; the eternal head-rolling) and it’s no wonder he once seemed the unlikeliest of candidates to take up Pollack’s mantle. He languished forever in TV: Facts of Life, Roseanne and then as Dr. Ross, the rake with the Roman haircut, in ER. (Amusingly, he also had an early stint in an ‘80s sitcom called E/R.) But late blooming lent him the complexity that those good looks never could—his real-deal clan also may have helped along those lines—and suddenly the way he worked his jaw spoke of longer, more compelling shadows.
So while he floundered in the franchise-halting Batman & Robin and painful Michelle Pfeiffer romcom, he made his celluloid name in less likely projects: the QT-written Robert Rodriguez genre-fucker From Dusk Til Dawn and in Out of Sight (to date, my favorite Steven Soderbergh movie). These days he works in TV and film; speaks both indie and big-budget; produces, directs, acts; plays nicely with both the boys and suits; wags his tail and his brows; shifts beautifully between comedy and drama; and serves as a regular player for nearly every interesting American director. He’s a secret nerd, someone who relishes roles that render him the butt of the joke, whether it’s as the wheeler-dealer who’s no longer doing either effectively, or as the handsome buffoon whose vanity keeps landing him in hot water to great comic effect. He also channels a downtrodden watchfulness in roles like Michael Clayton. But the serious side—the gravitas as opposed to aw-shuckness—emerges best when he’s behind the camera, when his only real flaw can be death-by-earnestness. And let’s not forget his politics, as in: He actually has them. Not knee-jerking grandstands, but long-tail, deeply considered values that he brings to bear in a grip of projects. Like Pollack, Clooney seems to believe in the power of the medium to not only move people but to stir them to action. Is he the best actor, producer and director around? Not yet, and he may never make the robust, nearly infallible crowd-pleasers that marked Pollack’s career. But for all the clatter that always surrounds Clooney, the breadth of his contributions still go oddly unnoticed. Along with a handful of others, he is steadily laboring to raise movies’ bar, and arguably ours in the process. He seems to hold America itself to standards that we’ve largely scrapped or, worse, forgotten.
And speaking of swoony Clooney, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is so much better than I had hoped, largely because of baby George. Based on its surrounding flap—the reputed crew animosity toward their largely invisible director; the ridiculously masturbatory New Yorker profile (naturally, since Anderson shares its twee sensibility)—I had feared it would be a self-involved jumble. It’s not. It’s clever and endearing. Stop-motion may be the ideal medium for detail-obsessed Wes, and the voice actors do a wonderful job, especially Streep, whose voice proves downright sensual separated from her hyper-gesticulation. But the real star is Clooney. Disembodied from his actual physicality, he is easier in his skin, freer to express a rakish, indeterminate sexuality that falls in step with an old-Hollywood tradition of the impossibly dashing leading male. Ahem.
The film’s only real weakness is that, even at 88 minutes, it lags near the end. Ever since Anderson started cowriting with Noah Baumbach, his films never have a decent third act. That is because Baumbach simply cannot write a good script. He can hatch a decent premise with well observed characters, but he cannot actually plot. Words I never thought i’d utter: O Owen Wilson, where art thou?
Tis true: After nearly three weeks of bloggy silence I assault you right out of the gate with not one but two puns. What can I say? This is the New Deal. See Sally run.
To wit:
1. I really dug Where The Wild Things Are, even more so a month after screening it. I’ve never fancied Spike Jonze’s films before; his meta navel-gazing always seemed a squandering of his wholly original talents. But this project channels a purity that his previous ones only mourned, abjectly. It’s not really for (or explicitly not for) children so much as it is about childhood and how it never ends. How we never scrap those little-kid raw feelings so much as obscure them, developing coping mechanisms that morph us into what Sherwood Anderson called the “grotesques.” Even the occasional scenes that dragged evoked the pleasurable, painful restlessness of childhood that is never as comfortable as we remember later. The voice actors nailed it, especially raspy, tender James Gandolfini, my forever crush. And the film looked so great, though I could have done without the overkill of Karen O’s indie-cred soundtrack. I hate soundtracks more and more.
2. The Jews are back this fall. For years the only representation of actual Jewish America onscreen has been the never-ending onslaught of Holocaust flicks and Judd A(pa)toners. (That’s three, I know.) It’s enough to make a girl long for the likes of Barry Levinson, Rainman aside. But this year, not one but two films featured in NYFF culminated in a bar mitzvah: Todd Solonz’s Life During Wartime (one word: OMAR) and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, which may be their first somber movie of merit. No Country for Old Men didn’t work for me because their odds bodkins, Yiddish sensibility didn’t marry well with the sere-sky, ultimate-gentile subject matter. Here, literally on their own turf, The Brothers C bare their existentialist fangs. I’d never really considered it before, but Judaism filtered through the superficial ‘60s that made it to the Heartland defines Coen—though usually with a whiff of pre-Code Hollywood whimsy. Grim and glacial, Serious Man never equivocates as it swoops around big questions. Namely, how to secure meaning in a dank present that lacks a fairytale myth of afterlife.
3. Also. How funny that there are not one but two Jobs floating through theaters right now: Serious Man’s Jewish Job, Larry Gopnik, and the gentile Precious, who admittedly prays at the altar of pop culture rather than Christ. Job has always surfaced as a cinematic device throughout film, though he’s usually redeemed, whether it’s in It’s a Wonderful Life or Scorsese’s oft-forgotten After Hours. He also typically grates, and I’ve trying to sort out whether Precious and Serious Man grate less because they are never really redeemed.
4. And speaking of big, unanswered questions, I have become obsessed with Swedish detective novels. It started with Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequel, and now I’ve moved onto all of the gloomy Wallander books by Henning Mankell. They’re not the most expertly plotted of mysteries; The Wire may have set the bar too high for detective fiction in all mediums. But the genre’s existentialist despair, the uncompromising work ethic, the acceptance of how sad life can be when you try to live it as an adult, and the undying conviction that people can do better by each other—it’s all so Swedish, so unadorned, so oddly comforting. I recommend.
It’s a sign of the times—at least, my times—that I didn’t attend as many of the New York Film Festival screenings as I would have liked this year. I’d been enthralled by nearly the entire press screening schedule but welcome to another episode in New Deal Sally Wears Too Many Hats. (Other episodes: “Say It Isn’t So: Four Weeks Without Laundry” and “Suitor, Realistically I Will Call You Back Next Month.”)
So I missed the Grass entries—Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass and Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, both of which I’d anticipated hotly—and hit the big-ticket items. A mixed bag, as were the corresponding press conferences. Suffice to say I met Michael Williams, The Wire’s Omar Little, glory be, who stars in Todd Solondz’s unessential Happiness sequel. More on the festival may come later this week, but right now, I am too busy worrying over the screening of Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. My problem: how to acknowledge the problems of this film without pandering to what I view as a possibly knee-jerk dislike of it.
Let’s start with the unwieldy title. Enough of a mouthful to put off marketers had Tyler Perry and Dame Oprah herself not stepped up with financing, but necessary to distinguish this project from Push, a sci-fi thriller opening this year. Incidental or not, the nod to author Sapphire feels apt. Her book may be one of the most unforgettable, unblinking American works of literature to have been published in the last 20 years. It is also one of the most redemptive, if you can soldier through its first half.
For Sapphire doesn’t fuck around. I’ve been studying her trajectory since I majored in identity politics (not officially, but I got my degree at a women’s college in the ‘90s so you do the math). Back then, she mostly generated hot, ragged doggerel that infused a sly sexuality into such womanist anthologies as This Bridge Called My Back and put the rest of the now-defunct slam scene to shame. Then Push came out. It makes as its beginning a human subsisting in the kind of primordial ooze that only modernity can really achieve: A 16-year-old, illiterate, HIV-positive, Welfare-dependent, pregnant-with-her-second-child-from her-drug-addict-daddy, black, obese, daughter of a physically and mentally abusive invalid woman who treats her like a slave rather than kin.
Precious cannot write. She cannot read. She can barely talk. She cannot formulate even to herself what her reality is because she has been installed in an emotional and intellectual Helen Keller zone by the very people who should have rescued her. Girlfriend has no tools but her own innate humanity. But this, Sapphire reminds us, is quite a lot.
The trajectory of the book is a steady, stream-of-conscious incline in which Precious is saved by her own resources as well as by the very bureaucracy that helped imprison her. As her writing sharpens into focus, so does her soul. When her second pregnancy gets her ousted from her regular school, which has allowed her to matriculate to the 9th grade despite her illiteracy, she enrolls in an alternative GED program. Her teacher, the gorgeous lesbian Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), as well as social worker Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), gradually usher her to autonomy from her clan and to consciousness. It is a Buddhist koan in its own way, this book. It shows us how being present for and in our lives is all that is required to truly appreciate them, no matter how dour they seem.
But this is not the stuff that films are made of, even indie films—and I use the term loosely, yes. Forget about the double negative introduced by Toni Morrison’s Sula (“black and female”): Precious’ initial reality is so unremittingly dark that it is hard to imagine it translating to film accurately without a large measure of melodrama. It frontloads all its misery so convincingly that her burden becomes the reader’s burden, and then systematically, blissfully lightens it with every page. This does not exactly translate into an ideal cinematic arc, which Sapphire must have felt that as well. Word is she always resisted a film adaptation, and, upon finally signing off on this script, stepped away entirely.
So does the resulting film actually work? I am aware that many of my colleagues adamantly think not, but my answer is: mostly. Director Lee Daniels, best known for producing the wholly grim Monster’s Ball, has found the dramatic tension in Sapphire’s story by staging increasingly explosive confrontations between Precious (Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe) and her mother Mary (Mo’Nique). It helps that it’s set in 1987 Harlem, when an HIV positive diagnosis was still a death sentence and when hiphop culture still demanded something besides hypercapitalism. It helps too that Daniels has settled on a visual style that is vivid and punchy without being glib. The bright hues of that era—reds and violets and royal blues and lemons—careen at us, lightening without lessening Precious’ load. And the use of voiceover, which consists of her mumblings, proves more useful than grating (that’s twice this season counting The Informant!) as it casts the discrepancy between her internal hypervigilance and the 300-pound, small-eyed zombie seen by the world. Less compelling are the strangely pat fantasy sequences she dips into when her reality grows intolerable—when her mother goes after her, when boys in the neighborhood push her down, when she looks in the mirror. The performances themselves are extraordinary, particularly Mo’Nique’s. As the malodorious Mary, she hovers right at the edge of plausibility but, thrillingly, never jumps over that cliff.
Thus far I’m ignoring the elephant in the room. It has long been my policy to not posit or respond to other critics, and I am ashamed of my impulse to do so now. But during the screening in the Walter Reade theater, I looked around at my shrinking and shrugging colleagues and tried to recall a time I’d been more alienated from this crowd while viewing a film. Certainly not Antichrist: Watching Charlotte Gainsbourg hammer Willem Dafoe’s genitalia a tutti induced a gallows camaraderie. Maybe during Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which I felt spoke of a once-American impulse for social-spiritual improvement that is now unapparent and unwelcome. That film invokes a similar discomfort as Precious does. I will say it bluntly: Both films require of its viewers a greater sense of context than most Americans can handle or even are capable of comprehending. We are no longer a country of generalists. We are a country of willful amnesiacs who stick to our niches and refuse to connect any dots.
Precious’ stakes are vast. To be fair, some may believe these stakes have been achieved falsely. That it suffers from the And And And Syndrome. Obesity and AIDS and illiteracy and teen pregnancy and physical abuse and incest and the lesbian plot? It just kept coming, I heard one person complain.
To a degree, it comes down to where you’ve been. Some find Precious’ plight implausible or even inconceivable. Other people who have a chance to view this film may find it just another day on the IRT. In the interest of semi-disclosure, I acknowledge that the slow-stirring violence of Mother Mary sitting on her couch, her hot-and-cold manipulation, her dark, unwelcoming house lit only by a flickering tv and her self-rationalizing anger, and the film’s overall matter-of-fact attitudes about poverty and resignation and danger, gave me a start of recognition. I identified more with Precious’ savagery than I do with most stories about families, more than I ever feel I can let on in the liberal-arts world I now inhabit. Especially now that the post-‘60s guilt has lifted, we as a country seem to be expected to disavow just how horrible daily circumstances can be for many among us. Normal is a lot more relative than what makes some folks comfortable, in other words.
But there has never been anything gained from the “keeping it real” game, that battle of who has suffered more, of who legitimately can claim authority on hardship of any sort. All that matters is that some may find aspects of this film frighteningly familiar in a way very little on celluloid is to them, and others may not. And even those who can identify with aspects of Precious may find all her problems and experiences a bit much. May find this film as cheap and manipulative a bag of tricks as I find Spielberg’s.
Rest assured I’m not so earnest as to think that Sapphire, cool customer that she is, did not deliberately create a modern Job in Precious. She locked her in a place so dark that very little light could initially creep in, and then showed that even someone in that circumstance could use language and internal strength to escape into joy. As a literary device, it worked, partly because as readers we’re forced to live inside Precious so her limited self-expression is ours. She writes phonetically so that we can barely understand what she is conveying. As her writing improves, her ability to recognize and communicate her world expands and thus ours does as well. The relief granted by that process is the Buddhist principle incarnate. The coming awake.
Daniels does a good job of acknowledging Precious as Job. That the sum of her circumstances bowl over even the “institutionalized,” the people working in the system who typically think they’ve seen it all. We see it in their widened eyes and second takes. (Mariah Carey as a social worker wearing a ‘stache and a stunned expression alone may be worth the price of admission.) Even the other students in her alternative learning program, fellow Sister Outsiders, know Precious has had it bad. So to my mind, the true way to gauge whether the film works is not to determine whether her circumstances are feasible so much as whether her redemption, her coming-to and coming-out, works. Do we feel attached enough to experience relief when she comes alive? Do we believe that she has? Given what a catalog of modern woes she represents, can we find enough specificity in her redemption to care? Do we feel redeemed?
Yes, I admit I am invested enough in this story to want to give it a pass. And, like I said, my answer is mostly yes. But the reality is that when you make a film that asks so much of its viewers, you have to come correct. Hot colors, hot performances, hot music comprise a good start. But this film was bungled post-production: It bears the choppy, uneven exposition of an editor who killed the wrong babies. It is not just because I am perhaps her biggest fan that I think we see too little of Mariah. As Mrs. Weiss, she functions as an important medium between a system that fails to recognize the girl’s humanity and one that does. But the few scenes that take place between she and Precious refer to more that were clearly cut, and that absence looms large. It even undercuts the climactic confrontation between Mary, Weiss, and Precious—which in itself is edited very badly. In its final version, this scene only includes Mary’s testimony and the other two women’s response to it, but long speeches from Precious and Weiss have so obviously been omitted that you can practically glimpse the scissors. (At the NYFF press conference, Daniels acknowledged that they did make such cuts.) The result is still devastating—Mo’Nique brings it home—but fails to provide the real catharsis that Precious and we deserve at this point.
The worst I can say about this film is that it proceeds as if that catharsis has been achieved although it has not. But the best I can say about it is that somehow I did not mind. Her pain and courage had wormed its way to me despite its problematic packaging. It is a testament to the spirit of both this film individually and to the process of making a film that takes such risks that it can sprawl this far, make this much of a mess, and still generate so much good faith in at least some of its viewers. For upon its completion, I did feel redeemed. Mostly yes.
I hope it’s all right if I call you Drew. To tell you the truth, I feel like I’ve been your cigarette-sharing babysitter ever since I suffered through the intolerable cuteness of ET. At this point, it’d be tough to muster anything but a first name. So let me get down to brassy tacks here. I’ve never outright disliked you— except maybe when you threw your titties at Dave Letterman in 1995—but didn’t grasp your appeal when you were younger. I had sympathy for the baby act: the tiny, raspy voice and extra-widened eyes. Clearly, you’d not been nurtured enough by your boozy, narcissistic Hollywood clan, and shedding the preciousness of the child actor is notoriously difficult. Just look at twee Natalie Portman. But I found you a bore. Then you busted out with the strange, floozy subversion of Poison Ivy. You were frizzy-haired and puffy and, well, interesting. And after that, I kept a closer watch.
You possessed strong, secret internal resources that hustled you swiftly past a bevy of ugly stages: neglected-child Drew, rehab Drew, Playboy Drew, (pre-)Paris Drew, bad-marriage Drew. You even bypassed the traditional movie-actress eating disorder and obstinately carried 10 more pounds than anyone else in your town for a while. Best, you seemed like a real girl’s girl. You had female friends, business partners, even lovers—and not solely for the camera’s pleasure. I started to view your ditziness as pure screwball dame, the highest of compliments from this New Deal Sally.
But the fact remained you were never much of a performer. Always endearing, sure, but in role after role you emitted the same sincere, soft silliness that wore thin by the end of the film. Invariably there was some moment when you had to mine a real emotion, and your face would nearly collapse from the strain. Mine too.
It was when you produced Charlie’s Angels and cast yourself as the snarly Dylan that I finally got it. You made more sense on the other side of the camera. Sure, you didn’t exert enough Hollywood power to override the layers and layers mandated to strategically cloak your normal-sized body. But as the badass in that trio, you seemed so much more at ease if still more awkward than funny. The film itself, as well as its sequel, was my kind of big, dumb studio movie—sarcastically sexy and good-naturedly game, with plenty of kickboxing and lipgloss and oddbot cameos. As for Donnie Darko, I may have loathed its meandering numbness, but I respect what foresight producing that sleeper required.
Though I didn’t know from roller derby and view Ellen Page as the worst thing to happen to indie film since Quentin Tarantino, I was curious about Whip It, your first feature. Excited, even.
It was so much better than I’d hoped. You cast it brilliantly and then coaxed strong performances from actors who, in some cases, had been phoning it in for a decade. You brought out the rarely seen warmth in Kristen Wiig; the subtle notes in the often-braying Marcia Gay Harden; a convincing redneck Daddy from nebbishy Daniel Stern. You even extracted three dimensions from the typically monotonical Ellen Page and went to town with Juliette Lewis’ hard-faced survivor streak, neatly sidestepping her indecipherable yowling. And you gave yourself, wisely, a snack-sized character role as Smashley Simpson, an elbow-jabbing hippie chick.
The storytelling took its cues from the performances, gliding between a coming-of-age story, an indie romance, an ass-kicking sports saga and a girl-girl extravaganza without faltering in pace or tone. You drew in broad strokes without devolving into caricature, mostly because the big heart we all knew you had ensured no hollow malice or hipster hollow ever snaked its way onto the screen. Sure, you still haven’t found your way when it comes to shooting action sequences; I couldn’t always tell what was actually happening in the rink. But, you managed to provide unguilty fun—such a rarity these days. (I think Elf was the last film that gave this particular kind of good time.) Also, the fact that you invited all the real-life NYC roller derby queens to rouse the critics’ screenings made my experience about a million times cooler. Those chicks would make a dentist appointment a million times cooler. Imagine what they did to a room full of dour-faced men in black glasses.
Really, I just want to say, Lady Drew, that I hope you aren’t taking your opening weekend numbers to heart. I know they were not even in the ballpark of spectacular, but your movie on wheels will have legs, I promise. Long after the flat-faced, faux-feminist folly of the likes of Jennifer’s Body has been forgotten, you’ll be making movies I am relieved to watch. You done good, kid.
It’s been nearly three years since I blogged about film regularly. I fell out of practice ahead of the curve, before Twitter rendered what once seemed like undigested blurts positively Odyssean. I did not shut up not because of the old adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” but because of a variation on it: If you don’t have something worthy to contribute to the conversation, keep mum, mum. Not exactly pithy, but you get my point. I prize silence unless something really needs to be said and, over these last several years, what contemporary cinema has inspired in me has better suited a book report than a fully considered essay. The 100-word film reviews that comprise my bread and butter have done the trick. Quel new millennium.
Around the same time I shut up, I started Screwball Dames Sundays. My girlfriends and I would rustle up an improbable meal (think peach-sea salt salads and whiskey ice cream) and plant in front of a celluloid fast-talking broad from some other, better era. Some of us were dykes, some of us straight, but all queer for these women. O, Barbara Stanwyck! O, Rosalind Russell! O, Lauren Bacall! O, Jean Arthur! The kind of ladies whom you only find amongst European women or drag queens these days. Nothing like those pigeon-toed tabula rasas smeared instead across contemporary silver screens. Indie girl Barbie! Action star Barbie! Rom-com Barbie! MILF Barbie! Cougar Barbie! Hip hop Barbie! Thank you, doctor, but I require a stronger prescription.
The dames of yesteryear were my kind of ladies. Idiosyncratically gorgeous, each one radiated a beauty that was cultivated rather than inflicted. Not one of them were traditionally drop-dead by today’s standards—not Bacall, once you parse out her long-lady features; not Marilyn, who’d be written off as a chubby hausfrau; not Mae West, who’d be mistaken for an actual drag queen. Nay, these women doctored up their dame personas themselves, donning crooked grins and lowered lashes and fabulous hats and skinny shimmies riding dangerous curves. And their films arranged themselves around that fact, supplying clever dialogue and snappy editing if sometimes staid cinematography.
After a month of these Sundays, I stopped referring to myself as a biologically female drag queen. How I talked, ate, laughed and wept, even how I strode down a subway platform, had felt so robustly feminine compared to what slouched around me that I’d come to feel I belonged to a different sex entirely. But the films reminded me that I was not a biological sport so much as an anachronism: a grown-up lady. I live at the top my 30s and have counted among the tall bottle blonds of this world since I was 11. I strap on tall pumps, tight skirts, and red lipstick, and am not known to suffer fools gladly. I’m that old-time broad with a wisecrack and a broken heart. Someone who earned her face—for better and worse. A woman rather than a girl in a town, a country, an era that does not embrace growing up.
And grownups are what contemporary American film lacks: the snap in the spine that you typically only find in adults, or people who actively aim to become adults. There is so little grown-up lady energy on big screens these days that the only semitalented Julia Roberts is a relative grand dame. And I’m not just talking about the actual ladies. I am talking about films with grace and wit; big brains and big hearts; forms as glorious as their function; standards; risks. Movies.
I don’t see the world I wish for -–which is what all my favorite movies have always proffered at their core—anywhere but in European film these days. I can admire a Bujalski film for its deliberate, careful work, but his characters and their small stakes, their passive-aggressive proddings masquerading as interrogatives, their underdog-as-overdog aesthetic just ain’t my thing though it prevails everywhere I look. Neither is that parade of earnest docs that don’t boast enough cinematic value to merit the large screens they’ve migrated onto from PBS and premium cable. Neither, obviously, is the muddled tyranny of the (un)proven formulas big studios keep churning out with a willful blindness.
So what’s changed? Why am I blogging, apparently at some length, now?
It’s too easy to ascribe it to what I persist in referring to as the new economy. When the bottom fell out a year ago, a spate of articles posited how a recession might positively affect art. And though those halcyon days have yet to arrive, I remain hopeful that higher stakes in real life will beget higher stakes in our films. We’ve all sobered up in the last year, realized that a theoretical daddy doesn’t loom who will bail us out of all of our financial and creative malfeasance. But have we accepted it yet? Ideally, only the filmmakers passionate enough to persist by any means necessary, old-school 40 acres and a mule style, will survive. The early-aught dilettantes fueled by cheap new technology and never-ending credit lines may now fade away. At the least, we have all been reminded that it is a privilege to make and view films.
This fall’s slate—the prospect of discovering what, if anything, has really changed—has helped to rouse me out of Greta Garboville. But the real reason this lady has stirred has very little to do with such lofty, sociological reasons. It comes down to my trip to mid-coast Maine last month. Away from the Assburglar exchanges that comprise New York social life, I climbed back to my real self for the first time in a really, really foul year. No movies, I swore. No screens of any sort. Instead, I swam in the cold, Northern sea; feasted on lobsters trapped at the end of our dock; read expertly plotted British and Swedish detective novels; flea-marketed; kayaked; cooked increasingly baroque meals; slept long and hard. At night all was quiet; no one else’s lights or chatter punctuated the black sky looming outside our windows.
‘Twas wonderful.
One evening it grew cool and we could feel Fall nosing into our cottage. We pulled quilts around us on the couch after dinner and surrendered to our long-dormant television. Like a beacon, all the reds and shadows of The Godfather whooshed into the blackness of our cottage. Suddenly I was transported from Maine and the unhappiness I’d only semi-escaped to the ritualistic underworld of mid-century Manhattan and Long Island. I had forgotten just how much a movie could move you from here to a there. I was captivated, in love again. Finally.
To be clear, I still think that a lot of what’s appearing on silver screens is largely not worth the 12 bucks most Americans have to pay to see it. I sometimes prefer the new genre of strong television serial introduced by the likes of HBO (and expect to see me discuss it here from time to time). I am uncomfortable with the critical chatter that falls so frequently below the belt. But alone in the dark, as Ebert would say, I realized I wanted to share where I’d been. Selfishly, I miss completing the journey films always launch. The only way I know to complete that journey is to write my way to you.
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