NOOOOOOOooooooo!

This unsubstantiated rumor might not be true, but that won't stop me whining.
http://nearwestendnews.net/2011/08/09/westhampton-theater-to-become-upscale-restaurant

Note: the Westhampton theater, especially upstairs, is very small and very cramped. Even I feel like the seats are too close together, and I am very short-legged. I don't care.I still don't want it to be converted into another restaurant I will never go to. 

I would actually sort of like to see our NTC participants post about their own pivotal movies or movie decades.

I tried recently to come up with a big list of "the movies that made me love movies" or something like that. I was thinking of making a movie-themed redwork quilt. (I'm probably not ever going to do that.)

The first movie I saw in a theater was Annie. My grandmother took me to see it, and I was pretty scandalized by all Carol Burnett's bad behavior. Confession: I still think of Tim Curry as Rooster before Frank-N-Furter,  or Wadsworth or whatever else you think of him as. This guy probably:



Labyrinth. The first movie I bought myself on video. Followed closely by And Now For Something Completely Different. It is a very reassuring feeling, owning a movie, knowing that you can see it whenever you want to, and pause it, or start over when it's done. It seems so obvious now, but it was a revelation in 1990 or so.

It's a Wonderful Life and Harvey. I had a record of Jimmy Stewart reading Winnie the Pooh stories when I was a kid. He was the first movie star I felt a personal attachment to. Celebrity culture is one of the weirdest aspects of being a movie lover/watcher/fan. You come to feel as if you know these people, and it's rare (and sort of a relief) to see the occasional movie without familiar faces in it. On the other hand, sometimes you like a movie just because of who is in it...

Dead Poets Society. The first time I remember loving and hating a movie at the same time, which is a really important part of my experience of movies. I fought with people about what was left out (e.g. any women, any poet born after 1900), but I also toted around my mother's copy of The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World all that summer while I worked at my first job, selling dried flowers to tourists in an alley in Kennebunkport. Parts of Leaves of Grass still remind me of the aggressive scent of lemon verbena and rose potpourri.

Heathers. The first movie that I watched so many times I could recite most of it from memory. It is hard to watch now, because..well, because it's kind of bad. I don't remember why it was so great then. Speaking of things I no longer understand my adolescent fondness for (I'm talking about Winona Ryder), I saw Edward Scissorhands at The Movies on Exchange in Portland, and I was sad for days afterwards, thinking about...you know, mortality and stuff.

The Fisher King. Oh how I loved The Fisher King. I saw other Terry Gilliam movies earlier, and others are better, but The Fisher King is the one that got inside my head, made me incredibly sad, and made me keep thinking about it. I was fifteen when that movie came out. Amanda Plummer's mean, novel-reading character was named Lydia. That alone would probably have won me over.

There were a whole series of sort of smarty-pants movies that I rented and watched by myself, in the back room of the dance studio where my mother was working, or in my room on a tiny black and white TV. These are movies that made me think, made me feel smart and stupid in turn. The Seventh Seal, Mindwalk, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Jesus of Montreal. I am not sure I understood all of the issues raised in these movies. They made me realize that watching a movie can be hard work, and that it can be worth it.

Finally, I remember going to the Nickelodeon theater in Portland, where they showed second run movies for $2. It was a hot day, and I watched Scent of a Woman then immediately went back and watched Benny & Joon. That was the first time I went to see a movie alone, and I loved it so much I did it twice in the same day.

The funny thing about my list of movies that mattered to me is how many of them are not movies I ever need to see again. Even Harvey, which I would have named as my favorite movie for many years, seems a little trite these days, if I'm honest. Does everyone feel this way? The stuff that made you who you are, do you still love that stuff? Are you embarrassed by it? Do you cling defensively--or proudly--to nostalgia for terrible things you loved when you were thirteen?

Horror isn't just...

Horror isn't just for perverts and lowbrows anymore. Whether the undead pose a threat to serious art is unclear. What I'm more concerned about is the danger serious art poses to the undead.

Jason Zinoman in Slate

TEAM CARDIGAN FTW

Honestly, this picture, from this i09 article, made me want to see the movie (and the last one, which I haven't gotten around to either) more than anything else has. I'll have to dig out my "Team Neville" Tshirt...

Quick thoughts on Inception...

So I just watched Inception nearly thirty years after its release (or so it would seem in some circles). The plot was predictable and kind of uninspired, but I do know that I want all future films to star Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (and Lukas Haas), Tom Hardy, and Cillian Murphy. Or James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender and the aforementioned 4-5 actors.

Tree of Life, Thor, and Gustav Klimt

As a welcomed break from all films blockbuster and lackluster, Lydia and I went to see The Tree of Life. Bizarrely, this is the second mention of yggdrasil in theaters as Thor deftly renders physics unnecessary with some folksy, religious descriptions about how all things are literally connected by the branches of the tree of life. Little did we know that Kenneth Branagh and Terrence Malick were making the same film using different source materials.

I'll only make one more reference to Thor before moving on to spend what could be possibly days talking about The Tree of Life and my desire to make a top ten list of Malick's films (he only has six to his credit if you don't count his student work). The stuff that Thor is made of is really quite simple. It's the comic book and Doris Day and Rock Hudson films. Everyone smiles, everything works out in the end, and it's all because of their plucky outlook on life.

For Malick I think there are two primary sources that feed into the creation of his film. The first one is Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life, which I think speaks to the film's sense of all things being connected. What is a joke in Adaptation about where to begin a story, for Malick is the big revelation about the interconnectedness of all things. Klimt's painting is perhaps the film zoomed out to capture everything in a single frame. As we zoom forward we perceive individual moments part of the larger whole. Malick conversely focuses on the branches (no, there will be no puns about forest for trees, etc.), and rarely gives us any clue that what we are seeing (until the end) is all part of something much larger. The sun, water, grass, dinosaurs, bb guns, and death are all connected and are all a part of some thing. In some reviews I think this is being misconstrued as an argument for religion and the existence of God, but Malick is more complex than that. This leads me to my second source.

The search for God is here more a search for the narrative of existence and our desire to put some order on all of the things that have happened. After all this isn't a story about the development from nothingness to man, but from nothingness to the death of a man. In this way I think Malick is borrowing heavily from the ideas and aesthetics (less heavily) of Andrei Tarkovsky, specifically Solaris (not Solaris or Sunshine). The camera pauses for long periods to study the movement of water, nebulas, and snakes which leaves you awestruck with the beauty of it all. For both directors, the point seems to be not to focus on the why and how, but on the is. Life is full of wonder, beauty, chaos and pain, but this is enough. We don't need to find out what lies beneath because the majesty of it all is on the surface. I think this also speaks to the voice-overs which are at times redundant, obvious, or incoherent. Ultimately, the attempts by the characters to provide some sort of insight don't actually provide anything. And with that, I will stop my insight and leave you be.

Wedding Movies 1: Something Borrowed

Jessie and I have resumed our semi-regular movie nights, and we have seen a series of weddings. I'm going to try to think of something brief to say about each of them. 

Something Borrowed is a dull movie, senseless and unconvincing, with almost nothing to recommend it. The best thing I can say about it is that it reminded me a little of a feeling I had when I watched The Switch, that this movie was the fraternal twin of a sadder, quieter movie I would have liked more (which is to say, at all). There were moments when I could imagine this was supposed to be a sort of bitter-sweet, sentimental, romantic movie that might have starred Barbra Streisand in the 70s. But then right away it gets back to g-rated wiener jokes and physical comedy.

It is in the first ten minutes of the movie that Rachel, played by Ginnifer Goodwin, has an impulsive, one-night affair with her best friend's fiance. What follows is a series of bad decisions, and there is no possible redemption for the unpleasant people who populate the film. John Krasinksi's Ethan is a fugitive from that better movie I was talking about, in which there are characters with human feelings, like compassion and humor. Apart from him, everyone is secretive and dishonest and heartless. As I watched, I could not envision a happy ending for the movie, but I was comforted to realize that I didn't particularly want a happy ending for any of the characters. I walked away asking a series of questions: Why do the country club parents prefer the party girl over the sensible lawyer? Why doesn't Rachel ever say to Darcy (Kate Hudson), "I was into this guy, and you knew I was into him, and you got engaged to him, and that's a kind of a betrayal."? Why does she like the pretty boy and not the much more interesting, funny, and decent Ethan? Why did the pretty boy get engaged to Darcy in the first place, when they clearly have no chemistry and no affection for each other? When in fact the only thing they really have in common is that they both enjoy betraying and ignoring Rachel? Finally, why, why, why does anyone expect me to believe that Ginnifer Goodwin is so unpretty that strangers would stare in judgment and disbelief at the sight of her with a handsome soap actor?

try not to throw up when you look at this hideous monster

p.s. I just remembered that Something Borrowed is a very famous and popular book I know nothing about. That's something it has in common with The Switch, although I have a feeling that the book Something Borrowed is not as much less cheerful than the movie as Jeffrey Eugenides' story is less cheerful than The Switch. I can't be sure, having not read either of them.