snow = movies

Since watching Withnail and I, a comedy about two young men on a ragged weekend in the country, I have been pondering so-called "cult" movies- not those that are loved for their poor quality (e.g. Troll 2), but rather those that are actually impressive in some way, as Withnail and I indeed is.



Cult movies of this persuasion:
-consider scenes more important than plot.
-consider style more important than themes.
-do not need to be taken seriously to be enjoyed, but paradoxically, have a sense of freedom and cockeyed humor that win them more respect than many movies that do demand to be taken seriously.

I could be wrong about this, but does it seem to you as though fewer movies of this kind are being made than ever before? I fear that there is almost no one left who does not demand to be taken seriously somehow, and that the appeal of perhaps wasting a bit of time, money and/or pride with experimentation is at an all-time low.

Withnail and I is an experience I would repeat any time. I find myself imagining that this was, in the minds of everyone concerned, the high point of their careers (even Richard Griffiths- when was he ever more fun?).

A round of ice skating with my girl...




...and we had our courage up to watch the film event of the season (maybe the year), Blue Valentine.

What a vast realization has been achieved here. I can't imagine the amount of work this represents. It's so beautiful and so real. I wish it had been on a stage so I could have clapped for them. (I'm never one of those people who claps in a movie theater.)

We had a lot to talk about after such a rich experience. You may know how this movie ends. I won't write what happens, but I may spoil it anyway because I'm going to write what Jamie and I think is going to happen to the characters after the ending. So... we can tell you that they're not done. They've spent years running up against the hard surface of their dilemma and have never gotten past the first step of acknowledging and articulating, together, the nature of it - how they hurt each other. In real life things are rarely as final as they are in the movies, and this movie wisely leaves things undecided at its teary conclusion- at least, no one really decides anything out loud. So most likely, one of these people is going to wind up at a library and find a Terrence Real book, and maybe then they can start working at it. The work never stops, after all.

Then the snow came back.



















The Market Basket Red Box was pretty well picked through but we managed to get Please Give. Never transcendent, but comforting. Its campy, angsty quest to wrestle truth out of pedestrian life made me think of the talkative, slice-of-life Miramax movies of the 90's. I used to head out alone to see two of them in a row. There's a pantheon I carry in my head of the best examples of that decade and that style (Ruby in Paradise, The Brothers McMullen, Chasing Amy...) Please Give was made by Nicole Holofcener, whose early film Walking and Talking belongs to that list. I wouldn't say she hasn't progressed, but Please Give still gave me that old feeling.

Another night out had us giving Black Swan a try. The night was cold and slippery and presaged some of the cross-country skiing we'd be trying 36 hours later. You know, sometimes I don't mind living here at all.

Black Swan has some decent moments of horror and plenty of cringes, mostly from icky makeup effects, but that gets old. It wants to be a stylish thriller about a girl who swings from an unnatural level of innocence- coddled in a New York apartment by her mother, who traps her, creepily, in girlhood- all the way to unrestrained sexuality and danger. That premise would make a nice springboard for a film with higher ambitions than what we're afforded here. Black Swan feels too lazy, especially after witnessing the enormous effort of something like Blue Valentine. The only way it avoids a completely predictable journey from A to B is through manipulative plot twists, all of which depend on the fact that the girl can't trust her own perception or her memory- that every experience she has can later turn out to have been just a dream, or a hallucination. You can't coast on that. You need truth to sell a story, and when the very end of a film smells like bull the way this ending did, that's how you know they didn't find enough truth along the way.

What I'm saying is, I would rather just watch Jamie fall down. Faire du ski!