Nothingcanstoptheblob

So it’s probably no secret if you’ve ever asked me about Ordinary People, but here it is: I always cry at some point in the film, and yet I always find different moments. Admittedly this last weekend it was no different. I can try to cover up my vulnerability  and say: hey uh you know it was um, a tough weekend and uh, you know I had other stuff going on and oh man, you know, just some of my own insecurities were coming to a head, and like I was projecting, you know it was more me and some of my own issues. Still it was really none that, and yet the eyes welled up again. Seriously every time.

I guess I always had it in my mind that everyone I know is at some point the embodiment of Conrad Jarrett, probably more than any other literary character. Feeling lost, ignored and the worthlessness of life; but we are pretty intellectual about it and we balance our angst with affably distancing commentaries and jokes. We are in a constant state of battle for what we think are deserved amounts of recognition we need from those that we admire. Maybe we will learn more than we think from Donald Sutherland about admiration and disappointments. There are moments inside us that happen while watching Robert Redford’s Ordinary People that feels close to home in any, no, in every American home. It’s unlike almost every other movie, the tag-line is like a challenge to the audience to just try to disassociate with the film. “there are some movies your watch, others you feel.” It’s honestly not our fault that we become part of the Jarretts’ emotional plight. We are try so hard with them, emotionally squirming, repositioning on our couch; and like a little kid again, playing a video game using our body to will Mario safely over the flying turtles, press B to jump while our heads nod up and back down in synchronization. We try to will the on-screen relationships to back to life with the same intensity of those little childlike squirms and nods.

It’s kind of an odd sensation to grow and connect with a film differently based on different points in your life. Sure you may watch Seinfeld now and you get way more of the jokes than when you were in high school, but to me this is different from that, I can honestly make the following statement without a stammer or stutter. Ordinary People is so personal and touching that I have grown emotionally and actually feel more human and closer to people because of it, not once, but multiple times.

When I saw the movie the first time I was probably about 19, and my emotional experience at that time was tied to two things. First, the intensity of Conrad and Dr. Bergers’ therapy sessions. This was a first for me to see something so emotionally strong and simple like this in a film. Now after multiple watches, Judd Hirsch’s performance feels more and more like a sitcom therapist, but these moments are filmed in such a personal way, as with most of the film, to almost try to make the audience feel intrusive on these lives. More so my connection as a 19 year old, was to the distance and desire for love and approval Conrad felt with his mom, and the similarities I felt with her incessant need to keep up appearances. So yeah I guess like any 19 year old, I was having some mother issues.

When I was was about 24, the connection had changed. I understood the distance and inability to move on after losing a family member. I understood not knowing how to go about life again. My father had died about a year before to esophageal cancer. It happened so fast it was like it wasn’t happening. We had bits of hope then things got worse and then smaller bits of hope and even worse and then all again. Even though this was merely weeks not years, I had felt so relieved about him moving from what his life had become,  that I didn’t even think to worry or care about what pains I was going to have to now deal with. So after Buck dies in the boating accident, the way the family was portrayed as a group all falling into different stages of grief, so far so, that they fall apart from each other so completely, felt so devastating and honest that it was like it was written for everyone who goes through this to learn from.

“Anyway,” I’ve been working on that transition for a while now. Last weekend as my wife and I watched Ordinary People, I was struck more by Donald Sutherland’s character. His determination, they way he holds it all together despite his feelings of helplessness. His son Buck is gone, his other son Conrad is a mess and just needs a love he can’t give, and he can’t understand why his wife won’t give that attention to Conrad. He stays so strong and wise and easy about it all, he tries so hard and is the heart of the failing mother-father-son dynamic. And then, Does it matter what shirt you wear to your sons funeral?

We would have been all right if there hadn’t been any mess.

Vince sits in his chair on the porch of their Michigan home. He rocks back and forth on the rocker and relates a very wise yet modest maxim about his wife Angela, he has a north western simpleton-like dialogue about him, and at this point he is unaware of what is unfolding around him. His maxim is something like this… Some while back they used to ship live fish around in these big vats by truck or boat or something I’m not sure. Thousands of these bass fish in these moving across the world in big vats, but when the fish arrived the the skin would soften and everything all fused together, So what should have been fresh became tasteless. One day this guy got this idea to put a few catfish in the tank to chase the bass and stir things up, this kept the fish lively and fresh. He goes on about how there are different kinds of people in the world, the ones that sit and become tasteless and those who stir things up. Angela to him is the Catfish in his world. This not only explains the films title, but it might be one of the most oddly memorable moments in film this year.

Yaniv is a photographer living in New York and one of his photos is published in the New York Times, weeks later he receives a painting from 8 year old Abby from a small town in Michigan. They develop a simple and heartwarming friendship on facebook and through exchanging packages as he takes pictures for her to paint and she sends him his work. Yaniv soon develops a relationship with this whole amazing family and even has a more intimate relationship blossoming with Abby’s 19 year old sister Megan. Megan is a musician and starts writing songs for Yaniv and publishing her recordings on her facebook page. But Yaniv, soon finds that Megan is posting stolen songs and claiming it is her own. What was a feel-good story in Yaniv’s life soon becomes a real-life mystery that unfolds in this poignant and simple documentary.

I can see why this is on so many top ten lists this year and it’ll probably find it’s way onto mine once I actually get to watching all the 2010 movies on my list. I don’t want to give away too much about this film because that is why it works so well. What is amazing about this film is how the emotions of the situation are handled, it’s not over-the-top at all, there is a lot of subtle dignity to both Yaniv and Angela as the mystery unfolds. Angela is surprisingly graceful in the end, and there is a beautiful sense of care and great empathy that Yaniv was able to display in this odd and amazing story of friendship and technology.

The social networks and modern communication and the all of the RGB pixelated relationships that we all now have in our lives is something that is new to us, it does have it’s place in our society and we are all testing the waters of it, as technology grows so does the social ramifications of it. Through all this there is still a simple human grace in life that we often forget about as we sit alone behind our computer screens. Social networks are the jungle in which paper tigers become what I call LCD lions. LCD lions are far more dangerous, because there is so much anonymity and falsification, there is no limit to what people can do without shame and consequence. Fortunately, Catfish is the world where these felines get stirred up and learn to swim together, and people become human again.

Last night I had nightmares, it was a rough day filled with anticipation, then tension followed by an ostensive feeling of weight. Sometimes you find things don’t get resolved.

It’s amazing to me to see people out and about living their lives with a simple grace that makes everything look easy. You usually can’t see the disappointment in a person’s eyes until you have a real and intimate relationship with the emotional being of an individual, until you can relate to the thoughts that drive them and the fears that break them down. We all walk around and see the parts of other people’s lives that tell us “it should be easy.” But there will be in each of our lives a few people that we connect with much deeper than we know is possible, and it’s glory and horror at the same time. We are all the Atlas’ of our own worlds, and we hold steady, we endure, and do everything we can; we are strong willed even when we don’t feel like we can be brave. Rarely do we grow anemic and weak; but the worlds we carry change so fast and breathe and expand into immeasurable spaces. I am proud and happy with the life I have, including every imperfection.

Last night I had nightmares, into them flashed the images of death, and then that look in his face, burned into my mind. I awoke disoriented and unsure. It’s a moment that happens to us all the time when we hear a song on the radio and it weaves itself into your sleeping subconscious thoughts and your dreams start to follow melodies. My unresolved day had fused with the connection of resolutions in Joon-ho Bong’s Memories of Murder.

There was no technique to the initial investigation, and rather subtly hilarious; frame by frame gaining steam by combining two opposite emotions laughter and a dark mystery. Kang-ho Song (the Host) was the first detective, the big shot in the small town, he is led only by his instinct. He thinks rather naively that he can see guilt just by looking into the eyes of a suspect. Sang-kyung Kim plays his opposite, a detective transferred from Seoul with a sharp eye and careful technique. They are the classic detective odd-couple, working against each other in all matters as they investigate a terrible serial killer. There are some amazing shots in this film and they appear naturally and without pretension, offering some very quietly memorable moments inside the tension of the unfolding mystery.

Joon-ho Bong slowly moves this film from out-of-place laughs to an odd unfolding intensity. It’s almost as this movie understood the emotional process of my life that very day. From lightness, anticipation then crashing into tension, then the weight.

Sometimes you find things don’t get resolved, but sometimes that is alright. It can become the vehicle that helps us move into the next part of our life. We sometimes hold on to that thing or moment that is left unresolved and we will even revisit it in reflecting moments later in life, hoping for something new to happen.

Sometimes you find things don’t get resolved, and maybe we can find out that it’s better that way.

I’ve hit a moment in my life where I’ve really been thinking about moments in film that reflect life with such poignancy that just experiencing the film, we have these moments of clarity(for lack of better terms), transcendence of an idea or emotion, the moments that changes the way we think and feel about life.

This is the basis of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Let me give you my quick take regarding this idea and hopefully it’s not too convoluted to follow: Inception is about the idea that we are watching a world that may or may not be a cinematic reality or a dream in the cinematic reality. In this reality/dream state the characters go into dreams to create the inception of an idea. They go into the dream state, and then take the dreamer deeper into a dream inside of a dream, and further into a dream inside of that dream; this is where the moment exists that is supposed to create the inception of an idea. Overall, I think Nolan is concentrating on the leaps that the human mind can make while experiencing a film. Think of the leaps that our minds allow, Nolan’s notion is that while sitting in the theater we experience our own understanding of a moment of emotional breakthrough inside of a dream, that is inside of another dream, that is inside another dream, that yet still may or may not be inside of another dream (depending on your perception of the film) inside of a movie. Complicated right? But the idea is that we still have that moment, and emotionally and intellectually it’s just as real as the discussion it ultimately stimulates while walking out of the theater. Our lives are rarely as grandiose as in movies and we rarely have these monumental moments in our daily lives, but because we have the mental capacity to make the leaps like Nolan is suggesting, the art of film shares these experiences and moments all the time.

While Nolan wants the audience to follow along as the movie drops deeper and deeper away from reality but still creates a real response. On an opposite level, Noah Baumbach’s recent film Greenberg does this in a more direct manner. His world is a mirror of ours; his characters feel like people we could know, he achieves a poignancy with this film where they feel like a reflection of the writer/director. Baumbach and fellow writer Jenifer Jason Leigh explore the real fears and anxieties that people go through, the imperfections and eccentricities of our personas. The film feels real, Ben Stiller is a very pleasant surprise, finding himself far from his normally wacky likability, and  as Roger Greenberg. Roger is a downright asshole; he lives in a state of prolonged post-adolescent angst confused with his intellectualism and arrogance. He’s the lost cause in his family who transfers all the condescension he receives from them onto Florence, his mind is set on not liking her, he’s hung up on his ex, and his friends/ex band mates don’t know how to act around him. Opposite Roger is Florence, played by Greta Gerwig and she is as sad as she is likable, Florence and Roger spiral into this awkward relationship that unfolds nicely, but not until after Baumbach and Leigh make us suffer all the uncomfortable moments they can conceive. Florence is the protagonist that at once you kinda hate her, but you really pull for her. She is sweet and trusting and you pull your hair out watching and hoping that she’ll wise up. I think it’s a smart way to get the audience to see her like Roger sees her, the only difference is that the audience can also perceive who Roger is while he cannot.

The moment in the film that is probably the reason I wanted to write about it comes between Roger and Ivan (Rhys Ifans). The quick backstory is they were in a band that had a chance to get signed. Roger pretty much ruined the opportunity for the whole band, due to his own social rules and eccentricities.  Ivan is recently separated from his marriage and Roger is under the misconception that they can just start from where they left off years earlier. Anyway Ivan makes a statement that is somewhat along the lines of how he had never been able to accept that his life turned out to be the way it is. I think that it is not only the key moment for Roger and Ivan but it’s a moment that a lot of our generation, at least a lot of people I know, are missing.  Highly educated people are walking out of universities, degree in hand, with no clue as to what lies ahead. Were we not always taught that this is the way to pave your future? So here we are, a generation of people who have been lead through high school, on into college, then into a life that does not resemble our parents or what we thought. We fall into jobs that we need but not really want, we struggle with accepting in between the small joys in our relationships or career, and we search for the little victories because we feel that that is all we have. It gets overwhelming, anxiety, confusion, and detachment. This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife. “You may ask yourself, my god, what have I done?”

Then one day you wake up and you think about Ivan’s dilemma and you think about your wife or girlfriend, maybe your kids or pets, and your home. Then you think about your job and maybe it’s not what you expected, most likely it’s far from it? You recount the struggles and the little victories. Your life is lying behind you in a trail of conversations and images it gets rocky and then smoothed out, rocky again. You accept that your reality is in fact, reality. You accept life is nothing like what you thought you wanted.  Inception…

You then realize that a line, a moment from a fictional film has created a yet another real moment in the intellectual and emotional status of your life. And it’s pretty cool.

It's from Casablanca, and I've waited my whole life to say it.

I’ve been a Woody Allen fan for pretty much as long as I’ve been a movie fan, so I start with this…

I think you can go anywhere to read … Play it Again Sam, 3 of 5 stars, here’s why… but for me I hope this blog will not only lead to a better understanding of film, and more-over, some self-discovery through the art we try open ourselves to, but also begin to read more like a personal journal about the connections, experiences, and emotional responses that we have while watching.

My new theory, I’m tossing out without information or research to back it, is that all normal people, those who are not the perfect creatures we dream up in our books, movies, and plays; that all normal people are all just like or have had moments like Woody Allen in pretty much any movie he has ever made.  In as much as, the cooler we try to look, the more absurd and embarrassing the following moments become. I know I have been that guy who gets cocky and tries to show off my limited basketball skills only to split my pants on one occasion and then sprain my ankle on another.  Think about first dates, first impressions, when most people try to be the smooth we end up knocking our wine onto our freshly cleaned whites. When we try to give the smoldering “I want you” look, people want to know what’s wrong with us, “Is that a twitch?”

My wife and I watched Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam a few nights ago, (a film written for the stage but not directed by Allen) and it got me thinking aren’t we all that same person who lacks confidence in certain things especially with the opposite sex? We all put our feet in our mouth time after time, and we are all full it most of the time. There are parts of the Allen world that not all people connect with, but I think that universally we can identify with this aspect the Allen persona, just maybe not as neurotic. We laugh at his antics and we slap our hands to our forehead in angst; we want so badly for his characters to get it right as he keeps bumbling into one absurd blunder to the next.  Neurotic, condescending and always self-serving yet honest, but on most occasions Allen finally makes the decision that we hoped he would make in the end; and we are right there with him, pulling for him.

Don’t forget how charming he can be, as my wife said “You just want to put him in your pocket.” Allen is usually very close to the same or at least similar in many of his male leads, but what really gets us is his sensibility, the sociological genius of a person that can at once be brazen and confident, intellectual and egotistical, but these qualities no more define them than the whining wit and outrageous neurosis. Ultimately we love him for his romanticism,  unlike others it feels so real and honest in his writing. He’s sensible sure, but very much a man in his comical sexual urges. He handles situations of the most honest and intimate desires equally as well as the most absurd of sexual fantasies.

As DG mentioned in his opening about how much our lives are shaped by movies, to me Allen brings us more life than I think we realize. His films are rarely big events, he has a rare smallness in his films and it emanates  a charm that most writers and directors miss. Allen is able to breath life into the viewer with something as small as the intercuttings of film during which each character is falling into an unexplored but inevitable relationship triangle. We become a part, if only for moments, of Allens’ world of romantic dreamers. The smart reality of Play it Again Sam and other Allen films, is that his world is filled with the cheaters, perverts, adulterers, misfits, heartbreak, mouth-breathers, and the all weird social and political trends that have such strange effects on our relationships and sex lives. This world is way more interesting than the fairytale romance.

His writing, to me has always been interesting because he is amazingly simple and human. The brilliance Allen shows in Play it Again Sam and throughout his career, is his ability to mask the all the intimate human moments of his stories and characters in not only the complexities of his intellectualisms, but in combination slapstick humor and stand-up shtick. Then, with the cinematic moment equal to a great magician’s reveal he unveils his secret, the moment of clarity, down to the most basic and relatable emotions. These are the moments that, in his better works, end up wrapped nicely into smart iconic moments in film.

Ah… movies. Always on my mind. Always popping up in
conversation, usually branching off from an unrelated
beginning. The first naked woman I ever saw was in a
movie (uh, you know, not counting my mom and sister – gulp).
Our dreams are shaped by the movies, directed, in a
way, by the people who created the conventions of filmmaking
– people who’ve taught us how to view the world.
It sounds crazy, but I believe that the relatively short
history of film has had an effect on how we interpret the
images that flash before us. “But everything has an effect,”
I can hear the reader thinking. Yes, but I think that the
filmic language has a special place here because of the
direct line from camera to eye. The camera sees the world
as we see the world (sort of), but the camera, through the
technical guidance of a director (or cinematographer, you
choose), gives us other ways of seeing. That’s a pretty
cool trick.
Because I have a strong, long-time interest in film, but a
pretty shallow understanding of the history, technique,
impact, and power of the movies, this blog will hopefully
become a vehicle for discovery and education. Writing
about things forces disciplined, organized thought, and I
need that. Otherwise I stay lazy. So this blog will be
motivation to not be lazy. Action. I’ve never attended a
film criticism course, so that’s a plus.
These are my opening thoughts. Josh and Lindsey may
have some as well. Maybe not. Check back soon.

COMING SOON!