Weeknight movie night.

Weeknight movie night is just asking for it. Asking for what, you say? I'll tell you: weeknight movie night is asking for

• fat traffic all the way down the freeway spine of the valley, from south to north.
• once you get downtown, no place to park WHY.
• people waving their leisurely online ticket printouts at the ticket taker, all please scan this in a leisurely fashion while I am waiting with my fuming IRL ticket that I just bought with money at the booth LET ME IN, dammit!

Okay, weeknight movie night, maybe I was a tiny bit too stressed for your action packed lifestyle.

On the other hand, I did get to see Spotlight for the second time with one of my favorite work friends, and she did wear pink velvet shoes, which I totally coveted and simultaneously renounced in my mind because you can't really buy pink velvet shoes when your friend bought them first, it just wouldn't be right. AND the movie was just as brill as I remember it being, maybe even more so, AND I totally recognized the voice of an actor who only did voice work in the movie (he was talking to a reporter, in several scenes, on the phone), even though he was uncredited! 

When I got home, I had to collapse in front of my laptop and do the following:

• respond to panicky student emails
• send my manuscript to a competition
• send a packet of poems to an illustrious journal that's just going to reject them anyway, and probably after a freaking leisurely period of time 
• make several lists
• etc.

"I shouldn't have gone to the movie," I said to the historian, as I was getting on my take-the-dog-for-a-walk-in-the-wintertime boots (they are so choice, but they are NOT pink velvet). "I actually knew I shouldn't go before I even went. But I went anyway, so."

"Well," he said, without drawing a conclusion, at least not explicitly. But, you know. I kind of got his gist. 

And then we went for a walk in the wintertime. And now I shall complete the remainder of my agenda, deferred because of weeknight movie going shenanigans, but hey, it was worth it! Probably! Draw your own conclusions!

Amy.

The documentary is devastating and heartbreaking. Made entirely of an astonishing array of photos, videos, and voices, you get a closeup view of her from the time she was a teenager, already with that incredible gift of a voice.  So, you know, if you're up for that on a Thursday night.

But the music--well, the music is better than I even knew.

She's only 20 years old here.

 

 This, with Tony Bennett, was closer to the end--gorgeous and knowing and full-bodied:


 

 When we went to Dublin in 2008, one of the first nights we were there, when the bars closed, weheard a man on the street singing this song, at first far off, then right under our window, then fading as he passed:



And this will never ever fail to undo me:

 

Lurid excess.

Wednesday night on my way home from a very very long day, I heard a rebroadcast of Q's interview of Baz Luhrmann. The interview was originally broadcast last August when plenty of professional reviews of The Great Gatsby had already come in of the film in the United States (perhaps it was only at that point opening in Canada?). Sample review from David Denby (also cited in the interview):

Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

I saw the film two times, once last May right after the semester had ended, with friends, once with my oldest friend in Northern California a month later. In between, I read the novel on the plane back to America, in one sitting. It was beautiful.

In the case of both screenings, I liked the film a lot more than almost everyone I saw it with. I have not had a special attachment to the novel, although I was very glad to read it again, and admired it very much. Its narrative delicacy in contradistinction to what its narrator witnesses is the source of its great beauty. I loved the vividness of the film, its sense of a life careening out of control, the material greed that was almost an innocence as enacted by the eponymous hero, the way it horrifies and enthralls, how appalling and how tragic. I did not mind that the film took liberties with the book, perhaps egregious liberties. I appreciated, really, that the film was not the book, that as an adaptation it was aggressively its own thing, bad taste or not (Stephanie Zacharek: "The Great Gatsby is both too much and what Luhrmann wants, less a movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel than a movie version of Jay Gatsby himself. It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.")

Because the lead of both films is Leonardo diCaprio--apt, no possible better lead in my opinion--there's an almost eerie connection between TGG and The Wolf of Wall Street, another film that is excessive in so many ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. (Daughter, to me: Are you going to see TWoWS? Me: Yes, probably. Daughter: I don't know, mom. Do you want to see Leonardo diCaprio snort cocaine from a hooker's ***? Me: [laughs] Daughter: No, literally, mom, that's like the first shot of the movie: Leonardo diCaprio snorting cocaine right out of a hooker's ***.)

(Let me state parenthetically that I occasionally find myself demurring at the prospect of film-as-ordeal: the kind of film that has the overt, explicit design of putting you through the wringer. This includes most war films, action films of all stripes, horror films, and very, very long films. Sometimes I think, yeah! I want that and the fact that there is more of it makes it even better! bring it! And other times, I think, NO. And that is all.
The historian and I had many a brief conversation over a period of weeks about TWoWS:
"What do you think?"
"Well, don't you want to see it?"
"Yes, I do, but what about you?"
"I want to see it if you want to see it."
"Okay."
... "but maybe you should read some reviews, just to be sure."
(I will leave it to you to guess who played which role in this short little documentary film entitled TWoWS: To See or Not to See.))

Anyway.

We did, finallly, see TWoWS. It was approximately 30 minutes too long. If Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker had wanted to take to time to sit down with me, I would have helped them figure out which 30 minutes to cut (suggestions: cut that dumb, so-called "hilarious" Quaalude scene, about 30% less cocaine/hooker scenes, approximately 25% less insane shouting, particularly that which occurs either poolside and/or on boats. Also, and it pains me to say it, maybe 15% less Jonah Hill.).

But that said, the film gets something a little terrifying right about America, about hyper-capitalism, about who we are. Today, I read this in an article in Esquire:

We have been pagans since the sixties at least. We revel in the force of ourselves and the forces of nature. The mysteries we worship are the mysteries of science. We're obsessed with football and UFC--sports in which men undergo pain and encounter the reality of death in order to amuse us. Our feasts are elaborate, undertaken with extreme seriousness and a willingness to scour the globe for the most extreme ingredients, including an exciting powder, taken through the nose, that tens of thousands die to supply. We consider total sexual promiscuity a basic human right. One of the most common mistakes in American intellectual life is the idea that the country is in the middle of a culture war, with Christian traditionalists on one side and atheist socialists on the other. The soul of America is up for grabs! Except the soul of America belongs to neither side of that highfalutin intellectual debate. We live in a world of flesh and numbers, pain and tolerance, a world of might--all of us. (Stephen Marche, "Finally, We Pagans Get a New Pope," Esquire March 2014).

Yes, that about sums it up.

These may not be fully great films, or completely finished works of art. But I am thinking that they are both necessary. Or at least completely of our moment. They are both talking to us, right now, and telling something like the truth.

[update: see this essay (by A.O. Scott) on diCaprio in the Sunday Feb. 23, 2014 NYTimes.]

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Personal Cinematic History: The Traumas.

obviously terrifying, right?

I have often said that I am the person that The Scarers in the movie industry have me in mind when they devise their movie scares. I am perfectly calibrated to jump at the thrill of atonal strings, at the sudden, loud noise, at the lurching close-up. Blood and gore that other people categorize as cartoonish seems very bloody indeed to me. I trace it all back to Don Knotts and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

 It was 1966 and I was, therefore, nine. We were living in Japan, because I remember the house we returned to after the movie, the house where I was terrified. Have you seen the movie? It is terrifying! I'm pretty sure that it could scare me still today, if it caught me in the right mood, because there was

• a haunted house
• a murder (with blood in it). A possible murder (with possible blood).
• a scary, ghostly organ/organ player in the organ loft (very scary)--an organ that seems to be playing itself! or being played by a ghost! the ghost of a murderer!
• and so on.

listen: the screaming
has already started.

Well, it was all supposed to be hilarious--Don Knotts is, or was, the signifier of that--but all that dried, ancient blood on the organ keys just sent me around the bend. Also, it may or may not have been at that same time that the previews for Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte were on at the theaters--I know we were living in that same house, because I remember sitting on a fence and talking about how scary it was with one of my friends. Just the previews of that movie were the stuff of my nightmares: Bette Davis as Charlotte is haunted by the murder of her young love. As an aging woman, living in a terrible old Southern house, she keeps hearing harpsichord music (terrifying, obviously) and hallucinates the decapitated head of her lover. That, the people, is way too scary for a child! But this was back in the day when there weren't a million movies at a time, and especially not on an Air Force base, so everyone saw all the previews, scary or not, and therefore all the little children had nightmares. In Japan. I think you can see where I'm going here: this is how I learned to loathe scary movies.

Well, in The Ghost, Don Knotts/Mr. Chicken vanquishes his trepidations, and the mystery of the long-ago murder is resolved in a fairly twisty denouement. But no big deal, just as things are getting all happily ever after-ish, the organ keys start to play by themselves again. I suppose that little turn was supposed to be witty and charming and lightly scary. It sent me around the bend all over again. I had to whimper my way through the "it's only a movie" explanations of my parents, who, I'm sure, were baffled and slightly annoyed and maybe just a little bit amused that the kid can't sort her Guignol from her Knotts, her ghoulish from her comic.

Also, Charlotte went insane, in case you are keeping track. So: murder, inexplicable musical shenanigans, insanity. Bette Davis gets driven away while Patti Page sings that song that is more terrible than anything, because insanity and murder and so forth.

I've never actually seen Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. I think I might be able to laugh at it now, maybe. Maybe if I saw it on television. I would rather keep, I think, the power of that particular terror in memory. It is not a pleasure I seek, or seek rarely, to be terrified by a movie, but the memory of having been terrified is in the bones of my movie history, and thus of my movie love.

Notes from my personal cinematic history.

I wanted to be her.

1. Nanny.
2. Neglected children.
3. Nun.

The three N's, the people, which lead us inexorably to The Sound of Music, where, indeed, the hills were alive with the sound of

4. Nazis,

(and also music, of course).

Were there neglected children in this story? Indeed there were--their mother had died. Did they need a governess, aka nanny? Indeed they did! And who better to be this nanny, aka governess, than a nun, or novice, or Julie Andrews with the hairdo of a boy five weeks past his haircut appointment? No one, that's who.

The Sound of Music, too, was in the heavy rotation of the Saturday chore-doing music of my growing up years. So it goes without saying that I knew all the words and could sing all the parts to each and every one of the songs. I don't know if anyone ever actually caught me singing all the parts of "So Long, Farewell," but I certainly could, whilst cleaning the mirror tiles on our entryway wall. And it is also true that I mustered a superb Mother Superior voice for "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," like a champ, epic and heartfelt, with the heavy vibrato that she pulled from the depths of her wise, epic soul.

But the secret "N" of The Sound of Music is nuptial, as in that spectacular wedding scene:

I wanted my wedding to have that much veil in it.

Holy amazing veil! and stately music that reiterates an earlier theme about how she was kind of a troublemaker but still lovable! And all those adorable Von Trapp children fluffing her trappings prior to the processional! Well, that's a wedding, is all I can say. Also this was pretty good:

YES.

Not too long ago, I went with friends to the sing-along Sound of Music at The Tower. It could not have been more wonderful. There I was, singing the second and third verses with rawther perfect recall, but softly, because most people had dropped out after the first verse. (That was probably good sing-along etiquette on their part, if you want to know the truth.)

But Christopher Plummer, the people! His faintly--and not-so-faintly--disdainful air. His patrician bearing and his way with a guitar. His courtly and--it must be said--sexy way with the choreographed Ländler:

Hell yes.

Good heavens. I'd forgotten that, but there it was: hot Captain Von Trapp, dancing his way into a confusing but very gratifying declaration of love to Maria. She runs away, the Mother S. tells her to quit her mousing around and meet her destiny. Awesome veil, cathedral wedding, Nazis, and a daring escape.

I guess Christopher Plummer didn't much like the movie when he was working on it. "The Sound of Mucus," he acknowledges now having said at the time. But that hauteur actually worked for the role, I think. And those songs are undeniably splendid, and Julie A. never looked more lovely, even working marionettes or wearing a dress made out of draperies, or glowing next to the super-refined but unlucky-in-love Baroness. Julie the Nun was the star, even wearing an unlovely dress.

"You brought music back into the house. I had forgotten," the Captain said to her. Yes: his heart beat and sighed with it, the hills alive with it.

Just say no to scary movies.

It's time again. Time for the previews for scary movies. I know, because I just saw one on late-night television.

The people, scary movie previews belong to a special category of repugnant. There you are, in the movie theater, waiting to see Premium Rush just because--because it looked fun, and had Joseph Gordon Leavitt in it--sitting in the multiplex, semi-digesting the Mexican food you just ate--because it is delicious, and it is enchiladas, one of God's most perfect foods--and the previews come on. And terrible things are in the previews.

Is Premium Rush a horror movie? It is not. It is, sort of, a thriller, with awesome action sequences involving bicycles, with a special set of thrills because one of the bikes in question has (a) just one gear and (b) no brakes.

So the multiplex has set you up. You think the previews will be bicycle-chase-thriller-movie-esque. So you're humming along pleasantly and then all of a sudden, unspeakable evil has possessed a child. Or something. You're not going to un-see that, and you didn't sign up for it, no sir.

And while I'm at it: does watching The Daily Show signal to the universe that I'm in the market for a horror show? It's not like I was watching the Republican National Convention or something. Speaking of horror shows.

Dance movie.

Today, my daughter and my son's girlfriend and I went to see Step Up Revolution. I must say, it did not disappoint. Well, only a little, and only at the very end.

As you no doubt already know, the Step Up movies are all dance movies. All of them involve--as most dance movies do, I guess--a challenge for the protagonist, which s/he must meet by dancing. But not just ordinary dancing: dancing that evinces originality, authenticity, and, not coincidentally, it must also be dancing that can win.

I loved the first  Step Up, the one with Channing Tatum, who can dance for real, and I really loved the second one, which had no movie stars (that I can remember, anyway), but had awesome dancing. The third one, in 3D, had good dancing, but was 3D-gimmicky and mostly forgettable. This one had a name star, Peter Gallagher, playing a supporting role, and a couple of people from So You Think You Can Dance, or so I'm told. But mostly must a bunch of new dancers and some pretty terrific choreography.



The plot of this movie has the crew dancing not only to win a big competition and prize, but ultimately to save their community. There was some class consciousness and some lite critique of corporate greed, which I liked and which became thematized in the dancing. There was also some talking--aka "dialogue"--about these ideas, but the dancing was more persuasive and more articulate. The crew in the movie staged their dances as flash mobs, and that was also awesome--showing up in various public locales (some of them class-marked, such as a fancy restaurant and an art museum) to dance and film and tag and post to YouTube.

My daughter remarked as we walked out of the theater, high on popping and locking and modern/contemporary dance moves and crunk, "I resent the Step Up movies, because I always walk out of them believing that I can dance. And then I try, and I remember: I can't." We all laughed.

It's true: you feel like moving when the credits roll, and that, the people, is what a dance movie is all about.

Short movie review.

Prometheus: take a sexy yet clinical robot; a dead guy as hologram--or is he?; one of the bad cops from Red Riding; Stringer Bell playing a squeeze box; a chilly Charlize Theron; the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as an ass-kicking scientist who can also perform surgery on herself; sundry other disposable characters...and a super-sick, ambisexual, slurpy-looking, squishy, implacable and relentless alien (is there any other kind?) = a jumpy, slightly absurd yet undeniably fun-in-the-summer movie-going extravaganza.

NOTE: my son said, as an advisory before seeing Prometheus, "just tell your brain to ask the questions after the movie's over." Let me just add: scientists--what a wild, wacky bunch!

The Megastore recommends.

an internet reenactment
of my breakfast.

1. Eggs for breakfast. Eggs and I had a parting of the ways, early in life. I had been a happy scrambled eggs girl, then one day I looked at my plate and the eggs upon it and thought, never again will your scrambles cross my lips, you curdled thing. And they did not, lo, not for many many years. Custard, yes. Quiche yes. Souffle, even--yes. But frittata, tortilla, omelet: no. Until one day I saw a plate of frittata pass me by at a restaurant, and I thought, okay. And from then on, eggs and I were friends again after forty years. I can't explain it, but this morning, after yet another long week, I dallied around in the morning with some juice and crackers--why crackers? because they were left over from a big event, and they were sitting on the table. But the moment came when actual breakfast had to materialize or the day would be compromised. There were green chiles in the refrigerator and cheese--leftover from the same event as the crackers--and a tortilla. Eggs, chiles, cheese scrambled up, the tortilla placed on the warm pan. That is a good breakfast, my friends. A breakfast like that will stand you in good stead all the day long.

lettuce. for a salad.

2. The contemplation of salad. Over the last month, I made and/or ate fattoush several times. It was so delicious. The first time I ate fattoush was at a lady-style luncheon at the Nieman Marcus on Union Square in San Francisco. It was as perfect as you might imagine a salad that Nieman Marcus would make, and so easy--a lemony dressing, lots of lettuce, this and that and feta and pita and olives and so on. Mint, cilantro, parsley.

Well, I happened to have a fair amount of leftover fattoush on two separate occasions, leftovers which I took to work and ate with relish. So today, when I was at the store, I thought about that fact, and bought lettuce and this and that and feta and pita and olives and so on. Mint, cilantro, parsley. Contemplating this future salad, which I will take to school and eat with relish, is highly satisfactory.

Talmudic scholar dad.

3. A very good movie. Tonight we saw Footnote,  an Israeli movie that hinges on a national award for Talmudic Studies, and a father and a son who are both Talmud scholars. This movie was mordant, funny, and sharp, and also startlingly sad. It was fully of great characters and two very fine performances. There's a scene, set in a very small conference room full of Talmudic scholars and a billowing argument, that is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It also has a startlingly ambiguous and unsettled ending that the historian and I talked about all the way home. That's how good the movie was.

snippet of my freewrite.

4. Finding a weird freewrite that might, just might, become the basis of a poem. The actual writing of poems during this academic year has been so very sporadic it could make one weep. But here and there, a little writing got done, and tonight, the night before my writing group, stumbling upon this one freewrite I did back in the fall may prove to be the stumble that nets me a draft. Or not. The freewrite hinges on a story I heard on NPR about how bats and horses share some small piece of DNA. Morning will tell if it can be turned into something other than a piquant mess.

Important Ongoing List: Dancing in the Movies

Best Dance Scenes in the Movies

1. Napoleon Dynamite. After this movie's static first hour, when Napoleon busts a move to save his friend Pedro's election chances, it's EXstatic (I was going to say "dy-no-mite," but I thought that'd be cheesy).

2. Peewee's Big Adventure. Big shoes, tiny suit, on the bar in a biker bar, to "Tequila."

3. Something Wild. This underappreciated Jonathan Demme film [note bourgeois/middlebrow knowledge of film director] features Jeff Daniels adopting the loveable larcenous ways of Melanie Griffith. At her high school reunion, Daniels does some truly great spastic voguing on the dance floor. Must be seen to be appreciated (also requires a subtle mind).

4. Big Fat Liar. Since I am a mom, I see many, many, many movies like this one, and this one's pretty good. In it Paul Giamatti plays a mean, snarky movie producer who, in the morning before he swims his laps, dances to "Hungry Like the Wolf" (prett funny right there, okay?) in his bathing trunks. Tiny bathing trunks. He dances like he means it, man. He's hungry. Like the Wolf.

5. Hitch. Kids, for the dancing alone, it must be seen, and one must concede its greatness. Kevin James demonstrating the white man's funk is priceless; predictably, the movie features a sequence at the end of the real movie with various configurations of the main characters dancing down a corridor of guests. You gotta see Will Smith pay homage to his past as the Fresh Prince.

I will add to the list as things come to me. I'm not putting obvious stuff, like Gene Kelly in anything, or Fred Astaire, or John Travolta/Uma Thurman, or any of that. I'm acknowledging that any list of movie dancing oughtta contain these, but it's no fun. Wait for future eccentric gems.

'Kay, I'm traveling today, so I've got better things to do than blog. Which is why I'm about to do them . . . right . . . now.

CompDroid Speaks

I'm deliberately using the offensive term to be provocative. I'm chairing a search committee, and I have been very diligent in finding lesser known venues for advertising the position; working with the various offices at my place of employment (H.R.! Shriek in horror! Avert your eyes!), getting a flyer together to take to the CCCCs, blah blah blah. This does feel like droid work, and it's harshing my gig, man.

Moreover there's a big pile of preliminary portfolios waiting for me to read them with sensitivity and care, the better to offer pointed formative comments for students to use as they make their sensitive, careful, pointed, formative revisions.

And it's spring break.

I've decided to offer any and all readers (readers? Oh, readers--) a daily conference blog. You'll get my CCCCs Greatest Hits compilation starting Thursday. So we've got that going for us, which is good.

Lastly: we saw Hitch over the weekend (yeah, from Gothic demon/angelology to Will Smith--that's what's great about America), and as a conoisseur of romantic comedies (read: indiscriminate pleasure hound [read: promiscuous movie slut]), I give it a big thumbs up. At least the first two-thirds of it. (Minor complaint: how come any moviegoer in the world can sense a comedy grinding to a halt as soon as the characters have to start embracing their fears, undefending themselves, learning the truth about themselves, blah, blah, blah, but almost no actual moviemakers, apparently, can?) Back to brief unprincipled review: the movie was charming and hilarious. I really mean the hilarious part--I love romantic comedies, but I never joke about whether a movie is actually funny or not. A truly funny movie is a joy forever, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I find quite disreputable films truly funny, and will defend them to the death. Case in point: Encino Man. But that's a post for another day.

Ode to Keanu Reeves

My post for today was going to be entitled "Pleasure and Mastery," but breaking news has made that a story for another day. I saw Constantine tonight. My husband's review was "boring, uninteresting, and distasteful," and I concur--I defy anyone not to. But he said it like it was a bad thing, whereas I found myself strangely absorbed by this film, in that way where you notice you're absorbed by something--not really absorbed, but absorbed enough to startle yourself into noticing . . . Okay, enough of that.

The still center of the movie was Keanu Reeves in his black suit and black raincoat. Doesn't sleep, eats once, drinks, smokes a lot--a lot!--and casts demons and angels out of "this plane," which is to say, earth.

His is a dry performance, which is not to say stiff. People have wrongfully misinterpreted his performances, I believe. Wooden? Stiff? Why not "stylized"? Why not "conceptual"? Why not "postmodern," even? I don't want to start a fight with anyone, but I must say that that half whispered performance balanced out the florid, excessive imagery of the film. At one point, a spider skitters across his kitchen table. He inverts the glass he has just drained (whiskey) over the spider, takes a drag off his cigarette, then lifts the edge of the glass just enough to blow smoke under it. The spider draws back as if in horror against the far wall of the glass; Constantine whispers, "Welcome to my world." Supercool. Or not, I'm not sure. All I'm saying is it gave me a smile.

Add to this Tilda Swinton as a Jean-Paul Gaultier-style Gabriel--like Peter Pan in bondage gear, but all white, if you can add that up--and Peter Stormare as Lucifer (also dressed in white, but with tarry feet; when Gabriel calls him "Little Horn," he sucks in his breath and says, "how I miss the old names!"), and you've got a really good bad movie. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good bad movie--and honestly who among us does not?