Yes, I know. That’s an oddly generic (some might even say silly) title for a post by someone who has been scribbling about film here for 18 years. Obviously, I love movies. That said, I am about to make a shameful confession (and please withhold your angry cards and letters until you’ve heard me out). Are you sitting down? Here goes: I haven’t stepped foot in a movie theater since January of 2020. There. I’ve said it, in front of God and all 7 of my regular readers. *sigh* I can still remember it, as if it were yesterday: It turns out that it is not just my imagination (running away with me). A quick Google search of “Seattle rain records” yields such cheery results as a January 29th CNN headline IT’S SUNLESS IN SEATTLE AS CITY WEATHERS ONE OF THE GLOOMIEST STRETCHES IN RECENT HISTORY and a Feb 1st Seattle P-I story slugged with SEATTLE BREAKS RECORD WITH RAIN ON 30 DAYS IN A MONTH. Good times! February was a bit better: 15 rainy days with 4.1 hours a day of average sunshine. But hey-I didn’t move to the Emerald City to be “happy”.
Saturday Night at the Movies
As it applies to vintage cinema, it could be argued that “forgotten” ain’t what it used to be. From the advent of video stores in the 1980s to the glut of streaming platforms available today, the idea of an “obscure film” has become, well…obscure to several generations of filmgoers now. However, for those of us of a certain age, there was a time when the options were more limited. As I wrote in a 2017 piece about the death of neighborhood theaters: Some of my fondest memories of the movie-going experience involve neighborhood theaters; particularly during a 3-year period of my life (1979-1982) when I was living in San Francisco. But I need to back up for a moment. I had moved to the Bay Area from Fairbanks, Alaska, which was not the ideal environment for a movie buff. At the time I moved from Fairbanks, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on first-run features (it took us nearly a year to even get Star Wars). Keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and VCRs were a still a few years down the road.
Joy Reid opened her MSNBC program tonight with a clip from one of my favorite episodes from the original Twilight Zone series, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, which she posited to be analogous not only with the recent demonizing of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrant community by the Trump-Vance campaign, but American politics in general. She’s not wrong. I used that same Twilight Zone episode as the impetus for this piece from 2020. I was commentating on the sociopolitical climate of the early days of the pandemic, but I think many of the points I was making remain salient to this rather tempestuous election season; hence, a rerun. Picture if you will: (Originally posted on Hullabaloo on March 20, 2020) The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill…and suspicion can destroy…and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn.
(I am re-posting this piece from 2016, in commemoration of 9/11) No Words (Originally posted at Den of Cinema on September 11, 2016) I don’t get out much. In 60 years, I’ve yet to travel anywhere more exotic than Canada. That’s me…born to be mild. Oddly enough, however, I was “out of the country” on September 11, 2001. OK, it was Canada. I was enjoying a 3-day getaway at Harrison Hot Springs, a beautiful Alpine setting in British Columbia. I was booked to check out of the hotel on Tuesday, September 11th. I woke up around 9am that morning, figuring I had enough time to grab breakfast and one more refreshing soak in one of the resort’s natural springs-fed outdoor pools before hitting the road for the 3-hour drive back to Seattle. I was feeling relaxed and rejuvenated. Then I switched on CNN. Holy fuck. Was this really happening? I actually did not understand what I was watching for several minutes. It was surreal. It was especially discombobulating to be out-of-country at the very moment the United States of America appeared to be under attack. My first impulse was just to get back to the U.S.A.
Raise your glass to the hard-working peopleLet’s drink to the uncounted headsLet’s think of the wavering millionswho need leaders but get gamblers instead -“Salt of the Earth”, by Mick Jagger & Keith Richard (from the album Beggar’s Banquet) “It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.” ― Studs Terkel, from his book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (Shame mode) Full disclosure. It had been so long since I had contemplated the true meaning of Labor Day, I had to refresh myself with a web search.
In my 2011 review of George Clooney’s political drama The Ides of March, I wrote: The art of seduction and the art of politicking are one and the same; not exactly a new revelation (a narrative that goes back at least as far as, I don’t know, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar). Politicians are seduced by power. However, a politician first must seduce the voter. A pleasing narrative is spun and polished, promises are made, sweet nothings whispered in the ear, and the voter caves. But once your candidate is ensconced in their shiny new office, well…about that diamond ring? It turns out to be cubic zirconium. Then it’s all about the complacency, the lying, the psychodramas, and the traumas. While a lot of folks do end up getting ‘screwed’, it is not necessarily in the most desirable and fun way. Once again, we are ensconced in a political season chockablock with pleasing narratives, promises, and sweet nothings.
Not that you necessarily asked me for it, but since we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the 2000s, I thought I might offer up my picks for (tympani roll, please) the Top 25 films of the 21st Century (so far). So here for your consideration, edification, or (most likely reaction) eternal damnation, is my list, subjective as hell (you might want to bookmark this one for movie night ideas). As per usual, they are presented in alphabetical order, not by preference. Amelie -I know this one has its haters (?!), but Jean-Pierre Juenet’s beautifully realized film stole this reviewer’s heart. Audrey Tautou lights up the screen as a gregarious loner who decides to become a guardian angel (and benign devil) and commit random, anonymous acts of kindness. The plight of Amelie’s “people in need” is suspiciously similar to her own-those who need that little push to come out of self-imposed exiles and revel in life’s simple pleasures. Of course, our heroine is really in search of her own happiness and fulfillment. Does she find it? You’ll have to see for yourself.
I thought I’d catch you up on a few recent and notable Blu-ray reissues. All aboard! Peeping Tom (Criterion) – Michael Powell’s 1960 thriller profiles an insular, socially awkward member of a film crew (Carl Boehm) who works as a technician at a movie studio by day, and moonlights as a soft-core pin-up photographer. He’s also surreptitiously working on his own independent film, which goes hand-in-glove with another hobby: he’s a serial killer who gets his jollies capturing POV footage of his victim’s final agonizing moments. The film is truly creepy, a Freudian nightmare. The solid supporting cast includes Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, and Maxine Audley. Powell, one-half of the revered British film making team known as The Archers (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) nearly destroyed his career with this one, which, due to its “shocking” nature, was largely shunned by audiences and critics at the time (thanks to Martin Scorsese, the film enjoyed a revival decades later and is now considered a genre classic on a par with Psycho).
I feed the pigeons, I sometimes feed the sparrows tooIt gives me a sense of enormous well-being -from “Parklife”, by Blur I know this is kind of a personal question, but…have you ever bathed in a forest? I have, many times. Now, I’m not talking about “skinny-dipping” (get your mind out of the gutter). The Japanese have a term for it… shinrin-yoku, which roughly translates to “forest bathing”: Whether you call it a fitness trend or a mindfulness practice (or a bit of both), what exactly is forest bathing? The term emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise called shinrin-yoku (“forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere”). The purpose was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests. The Japanese quickly embraced this form of ecotherapy. In the 1990s, researchers began studying the physiological benefits of forest bathing, providing the science to support what we innately know: time spent immersed in nature is good for us.
Dee: Jane, do you ever feel like you are just this far from being completely hysterical twenty-four hours a day? Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day. — from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. — from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy! — from Tootsie, screenplay by Murray Schisgal I’ll be honest. This has been a particularly rough week for news junkies and/or anyone who cares about the future of our democracy. As Howard Beale once said, I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. Of course, we’ve “been here before”, seemingly on the brink of sociopolitical collapse (I’m old enough to remember 1968).