If Roman Polanski had directed "The Social Network"

The best part of The Social Network is its opening titles, with Jesse Eisenberg hurrying silently through the Harvard campus at night. Nothing is spoken for several moments as we watch and the music plays. The music is very good at building anticipation. It paints optimism and warmth in one moment, and danger in the next. It suggests a rich inner life for our protagonist. It made me feel as though I were peeling away the first layer of a mystery- not one with detectives, but perhaps an emotional mystery that would even teach me something new. It said "you have no idea what's coming, but it's going to hit you, George." It more than earned my keen interest.

I am a needy movie watcher. I need to be emotionally involved in the art I am experiencing. What followed in The Social Network didn't completely fail to engage me in this way, but hardly to the degree that this opening- not to mention the film's commercial and critical success, and the opinions of people I know- had led me to expect.

There were moments I liked, and they all belonged to Eisenberg. He really was excellent at bitterly zinging people while looking deeply wounded himself. And the ugliness of that "glottal stop" scene was an interesting surprise. And sure, I get that he's got barrel vision- he's "wired in," to cite a well-used metaphor from the film- and only gets deeper in that mind frame the more he fails socially, which is a big paradox. I get that, and it's something. It places this material a notch above "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy."



At its best, The Social Network is an uncompromising film that doesn't pander. Yet for each thing this movie has in spades- and snotty dialogue about business, law, and computer code is definitely one of those things- it comes up short somewhere else. Most of all, it just takes itself too seriously. "I wish someone would slip on a banana peel," lamented my wife. A moment later, one of the characters seemed to take her recommendation and gave us a throwaway pratfall. But it only made us sad, like when you order blueberry pie in a diner and the filling is that gooey compote from a can. We just needed to laugh, preferably with the movie. Many, many lines were served in the manner of your favorite bad-good tv drama. Volleyed breathlessly in shouting matches. Left to hang in silence just before a character turns to exit. Or on at least two occasions, delivered after a character actually swivels around in a chair after having faced a window in reverie. Does anyone acknowledge the whiff of Dawson's Creek here? No. They're too busy trying for knock-out punches.

That brings us to Roman Polanski. Had he been in charge here, he would have owned every bit of this hamming. When his films are silly, he knowingly opens a whole can of it. Don't ever see Bitter Moon or Frantic if camp puts you off. Those two films, which Jamie and I once paired in an ill-advised double feature, are on the more guilt-inducing end of Polanski's work. (For those of you who have seen Frantic, Jamie said one of the funniest movie comments I've ever heard at the very end, when you see the garbage truck roll away: "Did he throw her in the trash?")

Think about it: this movie is so serious that it can't even wink about the fact that Justin Timberlake is in it. Polanski might have used him the way they used Paul Reubens in Blow. Come to think of it, he might have fired Timberlake and hired Reubens to be Sean Carter. Then he would have played that business with the chicken- which I think was supposed to be funny- for laughs and creepiness, and scored both. And that pathetic tantrum by Eduardo's girlfriend? Hopeless melodrama needs a good home. That scene would be so much happier in a Polanski film. He might have even let that girl burn Eduardo's building to the ground.

Polanski's new film, The Ghost Writer, is some kind of incredible trick: it seamlessly winks in one moment and throttles you in the next. There are some pretty stunning voyeuristic shocks here, and they're no less powerful for standing next to the tongue-in-cheek moments (example of the latter: that news helicopter scene was pretty silly). And how about the contrast between acting styles? Ewan MacGregor speaks at a clip, and seems to be acting lines straight out of a pithy novel; Tom Wilkinson is darkly methodical, as though directed by Kubrick; Jim Belushi appears finely tuned and rehearsed; and the amazing Eli Wallach comes out of nowhere with a bracing naturalism that shouldn't have any business here. Yet Polanski somehow waves a wand and nothing ever feels stitched together. I don't pretend to know how he does this, how he sells a story that can be comical or outrageous- but it must have something to do with his gracious acknowledgement of those very elements.

I suppose that The Ghost Writer is more traditional as a screen story than The Social Network, and that making this material so hugely cinematic was a more straightforward exercise than trying to make cinema out of the Mark Zuckerberg story. My hat goes off to the effort- it really isn't a bad film. But I'd see The Ghost Writer instead any day.

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!

True Love in the Movies

I have clawed my way to New York and back four times in the last two months. Our return on the penultimate occasion was a beat-the-blizzard action thrill ride, with cars sliding into guard rails and rolling backwards into the snowy woods. We were 20 miles from Boston when night fell and the blizzard began in earnest. Perhaps only 100 yards ahead were visible, and the mess of snow on the highway surface ruined any chance of us drivers seeing the paint that makes possible the crucial process of organizing ourselves into lanes. Yet the effort was well rewarded by a grocery store found still open upon our arrival, and by hot vegetable soup and crusty bread. That was the same trip when we won a wreath on Christmas Eve, tossed to us for free by a vendor getting ready to scrap a tragic heap of trees (as he hula-hooped with a four-foot diameter wreath himself).

On one of the earlier of these adventures, I insisted that we make for the Anthology Film Archives to see a show of Robert Breer short films. Breer made the short film 69 which had haunted me since I'd seen it in college, and I'd never bothered to learn more about him but always meant to. His work is abstract and experimental, and I've always recalled that 69 first interested me because without directly offering a narrative or even a recognizable image, it evoked a series of feelings that in a way added up to a story.



The program was difficult, and I give Jamie a lot of credit, first for sitting through it, and then for not pretending to have enjoyed it. The opening short, Blazes, is a low-tech assault, three minutes spent staring into a strobe light while you attempt to discern what colors and shapes are moving around in front of you. Even more of a challenge was the cruel Fist Fight, with its incoherent soundtrack and rapid cutting among images that tremble and fall out of focus. The gentle and lovely Fuji, with rotoscoped footage of the mountain seen from a window of a passing train, let us come down a bit from the high seas of avant-garde animation before we were dizzily deposited on the curb once more. I still contend that 69 is excellent, and I found that I feel about the same about Breer's material now as I did then: that while it's opaque, its energy is right there in front of me, and it really inspires me to make something.

The best Christmas film we saw this year was The Shop Around The Corner, which I picked based on an outstanding list that I found on Wikipedia that organizes not only movies that have Christmas itself as their subject, but movies which, to various degrees, incorporate Christmas into their plots, or simply use Christmas as a setting or backdrop to their stories. The film is essentially a romantic comedy, but the romance between the two leads, although sweet and well acted, is not its most interesting or memorable thread. What I loved more was the bigger picture of the shop and its employees and customers. The boss, the salespeople, the porter and the bosses' wife who never appears, but whose image is painted by the faces of the other characters as they speak of her (or to her on telephones)- each character is an individual that I cared about and wanted to follow. The world of this film is so lovingly realized, so vibrant and full of stories that even if you took away the main love story, the rest of it would carry on just fine.

Nevertheless, it reminded me of how much difficulty I have believing in love when I see it on a movie screen. Of all the hundreds of movies you've seen about two people in love, how many of them find a way to transmit a small piece of how love feels, what it is, why it happens in the first place- some glimpse of it that allows you to empathize with the characters and understand what they're experiencing? Love is usually presented to us the same way that Godzilla or a tap dancer is presented to us- as a fantastical object of entertainment, something to make us smile, but not for us to understand, think too much about, or believe in with any seriousness. Does it feel as though the filmmakers themselves really understand, or want to understand, the love they're selling? If I can't imagine that they do, how am I supposed to care about it?

I don't know how a great love story is written or told successfully, but when it does happen, it looks criminally easy to do. We reflected on this recently after seeing The African Queen. I believed in Bogart and Hepburn's characters- they were both insufferable nerds who appeared to perfectly deserve each other, and that is worth celebrating. Yet why should this be so simply and naturally true in one film and not in another? When they face down the Germans at the end and wind up in a tight spot, there really seems to be a lot at stake. The cartoonishness of the film allows you a bit of distance (we both remarked at how many moments felt exactly like a cartoon, not excluding the goofy jungle soundtrack), but in spite of the comic tone, my investment in the characters and my wish that they succeed were profound. I can only think of a few films that really bring a blossoming romantic connection to life for me, and this is one of them (also coming to mind right now are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Before Sunrise).

Yet a love story doesn't even have to be so deeply convincing for a movie to completely succeed. Take Moonstruck, which we recently watched for the hundredth time. I certainly believed that Cher didn't love Danny Aiello, but her and Nicolas Cage? It was too whirlwind, too larger-than-life, not on a scale that I recognized. But do I care? The real subject of that film is not the romance between the leads, but the romance of being in New York City, and that feeling is burning madly in every scene. And it easily provides you with quotes to repeat endlessly while tramping through that city with your wife. The winner: "I seen a wolf in everyone I ever met, and I... SEE A WOLF... IN... YOU !"

Other movies we saw recently, all recommended:

True Grit, about which has been written, at this point, everything that could possibly be said (I'll just say I enjoyed it a lot);

Secret Sunshine, which is emotionally exhausting, but strangely thrilling in its willingness to explore novel questions about religion, grief and acceptance;

The Kids Are All Right, which we'd been meaning to see for months, and which is a plenty smart family drama, in spite of its plot mechanics;

and Toy Story 3, which winds up one of the only movie trilogies in history (how many are there?) in which all three films are pretty much great.

Pee Wee (and Kurdistan)

Since we had so much fun with the windows on Halloween, I brought out the construction paper again. Here are some views of the Thanksgiving windows:



































The shadows are really convincing, I think...















And here we are enjoying our leafy neighborhood.















Our Thanksgiving mission is to see The Pee Wee Herman Show on Broadway. Whether this happens is up to the TKTS fates, whom will invoke the morning of.

To prepare, we rented the original Pee Wee Herman Show - the HBO special from when the show was at the Roxy in L.A. It occurred to me that this was the very first video my family ever rented, when we got our first VCR, and that I hadn't seen it since.

If you want a wave of nostalgia, watch Paul Reubens jump through that puffy jagged door, around 25 years old, and commit every ounce of his energy to a character that few people had yet seen or heard about. You instantly know why he was a hit. It's not just how funny and original he was- it's the energy. He's dancing a comical little ballet, painting each emotion with the full extent of his body. It's infectious, it's full of truth, and you can read it from the back row. The audience almost sounds like they're laughing too much, but they probably couldn't help it.

While I'm here, I need to tell you about a film I saw a few weeks ago: Half Moon. I have to admit, when I picked up the box and saw that it's a festival darling about Kurdish musicians making a bus journey through Iraq to get to a gig, I had certain expectations right away about the style of it, the message, and so on. These assumptions were mostly incorrect. There is a refreshing element of chaos in this film, and it enhances it in every direction- it makes richer the unfolding of the story, it brings mystery and realism at once to the experience, and it binds closer the characters who must negotiate it. I doubt that you will guess how this film ends. You might guess some of the events, but the way they happen, and the way it will make you feel- you won't anticipate it, and you'll want to talk about it later.

Jamie brought up some excellent points about Half Moon:
1. The bus is awesome. It has wood benches. And it's painted with images that mean something to the characters but not so much to us- one of many ways that the film reminds us we're only peeking in on these people's lives and we're not allowed to (nor could we) know everything about them.

2. We love Kako, the bus driver. His character is so big, and dominates so much of the first act, that we assumed the film would center on him. He becomes less essential as the film continues and we began to miss him.

3. Even though the story takes us across cold mountains, Half Moon has a warm feeling, coming from the cozy bus, from the family huddled together inside it, and from the personalities of the characters- watching Kako placate his angry wife was the moment I knew I loved this. You might say that this film gives you a Thanksgiving feeling. It's about strength in family and in togetherness. Have some hot apple crisp handy, as we did.

Thanks, Jamie, for finding this clip. We see here the old musician walking into a village of exiled Iraqi female singers. The woman of his dreams lives there- she has a voice with no equal, he is convinced- and he needs her for the performance. Notice the ominous cloud eclipse (best since Bonnie and Clyde).

Happy Halloween!

First of all, check out our lovely window treatment...













...and the resulting shadows in the room.


















And now, a look back.


On Halloween of 2002 I wheeled a clunky tv many blocks through Fort Greene so I could watch The Exorcist with Jamie, my future wife. It was the one-year anniversary of our first meeting. We probably made beans and things from the French grocery and had a floor picnic with wine. (There wasn't much furniture.)

A few years later, in Philadelphia, we began our annual tradition of a Halloween film festival. The first was modest- Repulsion, Halloween, and Vertigo- but it established a rule that the films do not necessarily have to be considered horror films- anything macabre, or suspenseful, or dark in some way is good for the mix. The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, has excellent horror elements, but might not be found on the same shelf as Sleepaway Camp at your video store. Or "thrillers" like the original Stepford Wives or Alien, which really should be called horror. Or Batman Returns, which will just make you want to put on a costume.

This year's series was prodigious and perhaps the best yet. Here now are our Halloween movie adventures of 2010:

Drag Me To Hell
Easily one of the best films of 2009. This was our second time. Sam Raimi has a strong identity as a filmmaker, but you wouldn't know it if you'd only seen Spiderman. Compare him to Tim Burton, a stylist who mostly succeeded in bringing his own ideas into the mainstream. Evil Dead fans wonder why Raimi's ideas should be less adaptable- where in his current work can we find a trace of that horror/comedy blend that launched his career in the first place? As if in reply, Drag Me To Hell reminds us that he's still here and he can still blow our minds if he wants to.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space
This will make you nostalgic for HBO in the 80's (along with Innerspace and Overboard. Hey, that itself sounds like a good film series idea...) Deserves every ounce of its cult status. I really admire the creativity of the premise, as well as the fascinating special effects. (My neighbor informs me that the film was made by brothers who had worked as special effects artists.) Jamie has good memories of watching it along side her sister when they were... probably too young even for this. Adrienne remains a devoted fan and owns the film. I loved seeing the chamber inside the spaceship before and after it got filled with cotton candy pods. And, of course, the shadow puppet scene. That would be legitimately cool in any movie.

Children of the Corn
What walks behind the rows? What the hell was it? We saw this one with the neighbors, who are well-versed horror fans. Not the best selection of the year. Despite a couple of good scares, it seemed to have unrealized potential- especially the supernatural element that came out of nowhere at the end.
By the way, when you google "children of the corn image" this is what comes up:












Return of the Living Dead
Now this is what I'm talking about- this movie has everything! What a riot of horror ideas crammed into one busy plot! The opening sequence is the best part, though- it builds to the precipitating incident in a gradual and often oblique way that seems to presage Tarantino's entire career. There are of course zombie films in every flavor, but I'll bet this is the most playful and delightfully wacky of the lot.

Let Me In
Powerful from beginning to end. The emotional complexity of the film is more than I even want to deconstruct. I'll just call it brilliant and let it live as a raw experience. We saw this one at the spooky throwback "Entertainment Cinemas" at Fresh Pond, under a full moon, part of a most excellent Friday night date.



The Worst Witch
We usually find a place on the program for this gem. Inflatable skeletons, pink pentagrams and hopeless green-screen special effects with no irony in sight. I dress as Tim Curry's character and sing and dance along. We treated the neighbors to this spectacle (some dancing, too) and they were surprisingly appreciative. What I realized this time around is that I love the attention to detail - when the girls are in potion class, there's a poster behind them with formulae explained in pictures; in the hallway, there's a sign with a broom crossed out (no flying in the hallways).

The House of the Devil
After The Worst Witch, the consensus was that someone needed to die, brutally, in the next feature. A search through Netflix brought us to The House of the Devil. This, in spite of the excellence of Let Me In, wins first prize in our little festival.

As we watched the opening minutes of The House of the Devil, it began to sink in that I was watching a scary movie- an actually scary movie, Hitchcock scary, Kubrick scary. Nothing scary at all had happened so far in the film, but still... there was a hushed yet unmistakable skill in how those first moments were handled, and when you see that, you think, if we're in the hands of craftsmen who can do that, what else can they do?

As it turns out, it seems that they could probably do anything. This is one of the most suspenseful and intelligent horror movies I have ever seen. The plot is simplicity itself- it's the delivery, which mounts the terror so patiently, not playing a single note that hasn't been earned, that is so exquisite. Even in a group of people joking and laughing all the way through it, the tension was almost unbearable.

Kuroneko
Finally, Jamie and I made our way to Kendall Square for a matinee of Kuroneko, a 60's Japanese ghost story (samurai and such), perhaps not as masterful as Ugetsu but worth checking out. Kuroneko means "black cat," and apparently the Mexican title of the film is El Grito del Sexo, which Google translates for me as "The Scream of Sex." Now that is a good movie title. Why don't we have movies like that in the American multiplexes? Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star in... The Scream of Sex.

When a character named Raiko showed up and told a story about how he'd slain a demon, Jamie started jumping up and down- she'd recently read the legend to which the film was referring. No fair, I want to be told something I know about. It's exciting, right?

Don't Hate the Cute

Scanning the quotations on Rotten Tomatoes can be a fascinating exercise, especially when there are many fair opinions that differ from your own. A quote filed under Paper Heart, the movie about Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera, calls them "...a pair of mumbling, inarticulate boobs who have no discernible personalities apart from a shared taste in hoodies" (Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress). To better understand Mr. Hanke's meaning, I googled "boob," which led to not the correct type of website, but I eventually found Merriam-Webster, in which "simpleton," "boor," and "philistine" were used as synonyms. Proceeding, I did not personally find Yi and Cera to be boobish, nor did I fail to discern qualities of their personalities that distinguished them from other hoodie enthusiasts, such as Theodore Kaczynski, pictured here in a forensic sketch.









Yet, I consider this a fair opinion- I believe that it reflects the true feelings of its author. (And I often enjoy Mr. Hanke's flights of language, like his description of Bad Boys II: "...(erupts) every few minutes with overblown action set pieces as if they were some kind of cinematic flatulence.")

A good example of an unfair opinion (pertaining to Paper Heart) can be found further along: "...twee animated segments featuring paper dolls, which should fill any right-thinking person with disgust" (Jake Wilson, The Age). I must object, sir. You cannot tell me that my failure to be put off, nay, disgusted by Charlyne Yi's puppetry is a summary indication of my general incorrectness. It is quite possible that we may disagree and both be sensible and delightful people. (And even both be correct.) I am reminded of John Hurt's quote about The Elephant Man, in which he played the lead role: "If you can get through this film without being moved, I don't think you're a person that I would want to know." That's borderline. It just feels hostile, like he's warning me not to disagree with him. Here's an older and much more egregious example, from the Chicago Post, about Kahlil Gibran's book The Prophet: "… If there is a man or woman who can read this book without a quiet acceptance of a great man’s philosophy and a singing in the heart as of music born within, that man or woman is indeed dead to life and truth." Thank you, Chicago Post. Now I have to read it thinking how if I don't like it, you think I'm an asshole.

Paper Heart was okay. It was a whole lot of wide-eyed sweetness. The only moments that make a true impression are the several interviews of non-actors, each of whom has something important, and not banal, to say about love. Many of their statements are hauntingly simple truths that are not articulated often enough. It is never explained how these people were located, but the filmmakers were happily welcomed into their homes and workplaces. It seems to me that either the footage represents the best of many hundreds of people who were approached on the streets of the heartland towns Yi visited, or that maybe it's easier than you think to find people whose brains you can pick for this kind of excellent material, and it's just that nobody ever does it.

PS: Come to think of it, this movie may have actually achieved its goal completely. Watching this with Jamie was indeed romantic. If I were on a second or third date with someone, I would want a movie like this- dreamy and naïve, and not too intense.

A Taste of the Old Underground

George Kuchar, the fabled amateur filmmaker, appeared at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday night. Dressed down and with an old Bronx whine as thick as Bugs Bunny’s, he introduced a series of his early underground classics in 8 and 16mm. These were mostly incoherent, but their sense of humor was wonderfully individual, and they incorporated dark themes, as though Kuchar had sought an outlet for his own feelings in all of that melodrama and silliness.

The funniest part of the program was “I, an Actress.” As Kuchar explained, a young woman in one of his classes at the San Francisco Art Institute once told him of her acting aspirations, and he encouraged her to do a screen test for him. He wrote a scene for her to read and set another student up with a camera. The film is simply the 400 feet from that camera.

The screen test begins with the young actress pacing around and shouting like an early Diane Keaton (but far less assured, and perhaps nervous). Just when she seems to find a bit of focus, Kuchar begins a series of director’s interruptions. In each of these, he enters the frame and demonstrates what he wants. What he wants is so ridiculous that the actress, who makes every effort not to laugh, is transformed from a shaky but determined starlet into a raving lunatic.

The rest of the evening was short narrative subjects, and as inescapably amateur as they were, it became difficult to ignore the many moments of clearly deliberate, Warhol-like subversion of the language of film. During the often-praised Hold Me While I’m Naked, these moments are particularly strong, as is the final line. At some point, it seems not so naïve anymore: self-aware, and maybe even greater than its parts.

Because the program included pieces in widely different formats, there were dead spots for equipment changes. Kuchar, whom the audience was surprised to find was lurking around the gangway of the theater, filled these silences by volunteering more information about the films from wherever he happened to be standing. These stories usually ended with a punchline that set us all roaring just as the next film was beginning. In reference to a scene of a raging inferno we had just seen at the end of one of the films, he recalled how for some reason, he had been denied permission to use his original fire footage. “So I needed another fire, and then one day, the house across the street went up in flames, and so I ran out with my camera and got my fire.”

Kuchar, as became increasing clear, is an unstoppable storytelling machine. His filmography is famously long, and includes not only films but untold hours of video documentary. During the Q and A session, which was the best I have ever been a part of, he explained how a neighbor might ask him to make a documentary film of a dying pet, in commemoration, or any number of other requests he’s had (and has happily granted). There was no question the audience could ask that would make things uncomfortable (which is not usually the case at Q and A sessions). Kuchar was so sweet and generous, and used each question as a springboard for a slew of stories and memories from his wide-ranging life. Someone asked if his film The Naked and the Nude had ever been seen by Norman Mailer, whose work it appears to parody. “No, I don’t think so, but I met him once. He was like a baked apple. Hard of hearing, too.”

Another astonishing thing about him- perhaps astonishing only to my generation- is the way he refers to pornography as just another part of cinema and of daily life (including his own life, and his own cinema). Part of what makes his films like Hold Me While I’m Naked so enigmatic is the way they incorporate sex (is it there to challenge convention, to tittilate, to shock, some combination of these?), and his casualness in discussing it only deepens the mystery. He told numerous stories of amateur porn filmmakers and actors he’s been connected to over the years, and they seem to have been his friends and neighbors. “There wasn’t any shame in it. Porno was the way to break into the movies back then. And back in the 70’s, everybody was good looking.”