Sunday, December 28, 2003

I've been keeping this weblog for over a year now, and I've decided to keep it for at least one year more.  My entries will most likely remain sporadic, tangential, and of interest largely only to myself.  I don't think much of the quality of writing or thought on display here, but occassionally this site does serve to remind me of an interesting idea or activity, long abandoned.  That's good. I was talking to my mother on the phone this morning - we've been planning to go to a movie for a few days now, and finally decided that today was the day.  We were making our plans, deciding what to see, when finally I just told her that I don't like movies.  I don't know why I feel embarrassed when I finally come around to admitting this to people, but I always  do.  Of course, I have to put all sorts of qualifications around that very absolute statement before proceeding.  Of course I like some movies: I particularly enjoy documentaries, and saw three very good ones this year: Spellbound, Capturing the Friedmans, and Bus 154.  I also liked Lost in Translation quite a bit, but in many ways it was an anti-movie, of sorts:  It was emotionally ambiguous, character rather than plot-driven, etc. The characters in this movie don't have that terrible externality that so many movie characters display: their motivations remain partially closed to us, the viewers, as well as to themselves.  Film seems to rarely attain this sort of lovely opacity.  These features, not coincidentally, also describe (in some ways, at least) the sort of fiction I enjoy.  Plots really are for gardeners, you know. Contemporary movies are, in many ways, comparable to opera.  They are bombastic, simplistic, spectacular, and loud.  Like opera, I suspect that one film out of every one thousand or so will survive to be appreciated in the future.   The rest of it?  Vulgar entertainment, not worth remembering for even one hour after the experience is over.  This is not to say, however, that the time spent watching a movie cannot be terrifically fun.  I recently watched Finding Nemo, and I just enjoyed it immensely.  After it was over, I forgot about it.   This is not a wholesale dismissal of popcorn movies - just the bad ones, of which there are far too many.  It is instructive to note here that film is one of the few sites of cultural production in which the concept of the "so bad it's good" object exists.  There exist websites, books, and film festivals devoted to the "bad/good" movie (Showgirls, Plan 9 from Outer Space, etc).   There is nothing similar in music, popular novels, or video games.  We learn, from a very early age, to approach popular movies with our sense of irony fully enabled, and our cynicism at the ready. For the past three Decembers, I've kind of dutifully attended screenings of the Lord of the Rings series with my girlfriend.  I think I said last year, regarding the Two Towers, that I liked it as much as I possibly could a movie with a elf, a dwarf, or a talking tree in it.  I did like certain things about it, though.   The final, and most recent film, The Return of the King - well, I did not like it at all.  I felt terrifically manipulated, and it was far, far too long and far, far too bombastic. Yesterday, I rented Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film Don Quixote.  I haven't watched it yet.  I also rented the most recent Werner Herzog film, Invincible.  Long-time readers of this journal will know that Herzog is my favorite director, so I'm very much looking forward to watching this tonight.  This film was never screened in Austin, Texas.   I could write paragraphs about why Herzog consistently transcends the troubles with film that I have mentioned above.  I don't have time for that, but here are two:  the successful blurring of reality and illusion (on many, many levels), and an absolute honesty and morality.  And by morality, I certainly don't mean the emotional punishment and puerile "life lessons" Hollywood films feel they must inflict on their characters after they engage in precisely the activities we have all paid to see: sex and violence.  Many of Herzog's films are extraordinarily violent, but it is the violence of nature (I will come back when I have time and unpack my meaning of "nature" a bit) and there always follows an unflinching depiction of pain and death.  That is at times unpleasant, but it is true. 10:37:56 AM