The Reasonably Good Movie (an endangered species)

We just watched Fatal Attraction. It made me sigh with longing for a bygone era.

Not that it was a masterpiece. The worst thing about it: they spend so long fleshing out the character of Alex (Glenn Close consulted multiple psychiatrists to make her pathologies as real as possible) only to destroy her remorselessly at the end. Even in a monster movie, there is occasionally a tear shed for the monster when he dies. Why should King Kong get a little empathy and not this messed up girl?

And there are plenty of aspects of the plot that make you slap your forehead. Dan and his wife are made completely aware of how dangerous Alex is and that she could be lurking outside their home at any moment, yet they fail to take the obvious steps to prevent her from entering their home for the big suspenseful climax.

It's as formulaic as any thriller you could think of, but there is at least some amount of intelligence in its construction. You can imagine that the writer at least broke a sweat in his effort to craft a genre piece. There is enough room for at least a couple of surprises, and there are sequences which, though not much more than compulsory checkpoints in the plot, contain believable dialogue and performances, and bring us to a respectable level of interest and investment. The way Dan meets Alex, for example, is commendably subtle; not only does it not bludgeon us with the significance of the meeting, it avoids doing anything beyond what is absolutely necessary. And the scene that really feels alive is in the restaurant, where Dan, the fly caught in the web, gradually relents to Alex's flirtations.

What I'm getting at is, this is what genre films used to be like. There was plenty to criticize them for, but they weren't simply imbecilic. At least you could tell that everyone involved actually cared about what they were making, had some amount of skill and creativity, and gave it a good try.




Now watch these clips from the new Captain America movie.






Genre movies these days feel as though they are parodies of the genres they supposedly belong to. Why are female characters required to prove how no-nonsense they are all the time? Why do they employ such primitive means- shooting at the protagonist, and then strutting around, for instance- to drive this point home? Can't we all be given credit for understanding that women aren't weaklings? Isn't this whole routine cliche enough already?

And how about that Tommy Lee Jones? "The sumbitch did it." The only thing lazier than that line was the decision to cast Tommy Lee Jones to read it. I can't stand it when a good actor is commodified like that.

Okay, so it's only two minutes total out of a whole movie. Maybe it's not fair to write these things after only seeing these clips. Maybe this isn't a trustworthy sample of the quality of the entire experience. But… I doubt it.

What Stephen Baldwin said in Threesome about pizza- that even when it's bad, it's still pretty good- once applied to most genre films. Going to the movies was kind of like going for pizza, or at least Taco Bell. It was even comforting in that way. But no longer.

I don't know, maybe it's just me. I can't really tell if I'm losing my taste for fast food, or if the food is really getting worse.

Porchlight Cinema: A Big Success!

We love our porch.


In the daytime, the sun, the fecundity…


In the evening, the breezes, the fireflies… (not so many, but I totally saw one last night.)


One evening last summer, as we sat out there watching Pillars of the Earth on a laptop, we were struck by the idea of projecting a movie onto a screen for friends.

A year later, the plan finally came together- Jaws and Quint battled on our porch, with a full cinema attending!



Snacks were popcorn in these sharkbite novelty bags, with Old Bay seasoning; drinks (brought by friends) were Narragansett Lager and whiskey, both endorsed by Quint in the movie.










It's not uncommon for people to want to manufacture a movie theater experience at home- by making popcorn, turning the lights down, or shelling out for a big screen or lots of speakers- but we figured we could take it another step with the theatrics and really pretend that we were at a screening in a park or a drive-in. (Showing vintage commercials before the movie helped a lot with this.)

We worried about a lot of ways that this concept might not work- rain, people not being comfortable enough, etc, but as far as I can tell it was a home run. Everyone squished in and really got in the spirit.

The movie also jibed nicely with the season and our travels (we were on Cape Cod for a couple of days).

And it was also great to return to Jaws after waiting so long to see it again, and consider the ways one's perceptions of a movie can change over time. For instance, there's a scene with a grieving mother that I once considered excruciatingly protracted; now, it seems to me about the right length. I once considered it cold and distancing that a child is killed essentially to move forward the gears of the plot, but now I feel appreciative that such a gutsy move was made at all.

There's at least one thing I never liked, and still don't: it's the shot meant to signal Roy Schieder's horror that a beach swimmer is being attacked by the shark. Spielberg uses the field-stretching effect of simultaneously trucking in and zooming out, a technique supposedly invented by Hitchcock for his masterpiece Vertigo. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but I still find myself wondering: did they really think they nailed that shot, or were they as put off by its execution as I am, and just couldn't bear to leave it out?

My favorite aspect of Spielberg's technique- what I consider his hallmark innovation- is on full display in Jaws. Let's call it the Dog At The Front Door Effect. Consider: when a group of people in a house are getting ready to go somewhere, and there is a dog in the house, the dog, a highly attuned observer, will see people walking from room to room, gathering things for the journey, exchanging brief sentences in passing ("Have you seen my scarf?" "What time did you say the show starts?" etc.), and the dog will understand more or less what is happening. The dog will wait at the front door, growing more interested and excited. He doesn't need to understand the details that are all over his head anyway; all he needs is the big picture, and he's quite happy to be involved at that level.

This is how Spielberg has made me feel time and again, by presenting various scientists and specialists barking at each other in jargon and busily accomplishing vital tasks that I understand partially or not at all. (Close Encounters of the Third Kind has more of this sort of activity than you can shake a stick at.) An important part of this technique is to provide us with a character who is along for the ride and is just as naive and clueless as we are. In Jaws, Roy Schieder's character is the ear for Quint and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss)'s squabbling (and bonding) about fish; in Close Encounters, Dreyfuss is the one who shouts "What the hell is going on here?" to a mysterious and all-knowing Francois Truffaut. Ironically, the more Spielberg goes over our heads in this way, the more populist his movie gets. We don't need to, and aren't meant to, understand everything, and we know that; we can just enjoy being foolish mutts prancing around because something cool is happening.


The Cape was gloriously foggy (there's the Chatham light house). Just as anyone who blurs movies and life together would, I expected that I'd link the experience of going there to Jaws, but instead I wound up with a much stronger connection to Red Desert, the latest from Jamie's Netflix queue.



I was really in the mood for Antonioni, but at first Red Desert was a bit disappointing. It opens with dazzling style, like a collage of the best moments from a dream diary: two men are made to seem the size of ants; a sheet from a newspaper is briefly anthropomorphized; a cargo ship seems to charge straight through a forest. But I never felt invested in the story until the characters found themselves in a wee pier house, full of cheerful drunk people, a charmingly partitioned bed nook and a black wood-burning stove. Outside the window the pier is engulfed in total fog, out of which great ships silently materialize. There's even more at this point with which Antonioni can create subtle visual confusion and wonder, but this sequence has something else going on that I could finally sink my teeth into: a rich interplay of small human moments and emotions that are not so opaque or mysterious as what the long first act had comprised. For once, it's easy to understand the characters and what they're all feeling and thinking, and that is a relief. Sometimes you just need an entry point like that. I didn't want that sequence to end- I would have been delighted to stay in that shack for the rest of the film. The sequence ends in a way that plunges us back into mystery, but, lo and behold, I didn't mind that at all, because now I was invested in a way I hadn't been before.

One more recent cinema adventure to relate: we had a lazy afternoon watching two indie classics, Sex, Lies and Videotape and Gas Food Lodging. My fascination with this era of cinema is as rabid as ever. Sure, there are thousands of turkeys that came out of the film school gold rush, but the good indie films are amazing because so many of them threaten to become turkeys, are just as campy as their bad siblings, and yet succeed anyway; they verbalize something rare or unexpected, and they end up actually moving you. Some movies are obviously great, but a movie that succeeds in spite of various obnoxious qualities can be just as interesting to study, if not more. Check out Gas Food Lodging. When you get to the part where they're making love in a cave, with bits of rock inexplicably sprinkling on their heads and janglin' singer-songwriter guitar stylings on the soundtrack, you'll know what I mean. And when you get to the part at the end when that guy from Dinosaur Jr. tells Fairuza Balk the untold story, you'll know what I mean again.

We're definitely doing another porch movie this summer and we're deliberating on the next one. Current possibilities are:

Pinocchio
Sweet Smell of Success
On the Waterfront
The Thief of Bagdad
Rio Bravo
LA Confidential
Night of the Hunter
The Dark Crystal
My Neighbor Totoro
Nights of Cabiria
King Kong
A Hard Day's Night
Switchblade Sisters
Terror Planet

What do you think?

The Joys of Marriage

I wanted to soak in Another Year the way all the critics did. It's great food for thought, they all said. I wanted to nod appreciatively at how it keeps its few plot mechanics quiet and sometimes abandons them entirely. Mike Leigh tells this story by accumulating what seem to be loosely related bits of wisdom, an incidental ball of wax to which each scene has something to contribute. I wanted to gratefully accept this tangle of quotidian truth and experience and awaken to its themes and its purpose, and articulate my own correlatives to its characters and situations.

Because I really love doing all those things.

But Jamie simply could not sit still. She obviously was extremely bothered by something, and my solemn contemplation was constantly interrupted by her fidgeting. At last, she blurted out: "I'm sorry, but I can't take this seriously- I can't stop thinking about The Dark Crystal! Don't you see it? Every person in this movie looks like a character from The Dark Crystal!!!!"

I made a photo montage to represent what was going on in Jamie's head:




As a quick search reveals, the practice of comparing various famous people to characters in The Dark Crystal is already rampant online, so I won't make any attempt to point out who looks like whom. But I did want to note that I put Mike Leigh in there too, because he kind of looks like Aughara.

Jamie and Alex's Memorial Day Drive-In of Mayhem

Memorial Day is for Americana. For me, a drive-in movie theater- or at least the idea of one- is as good a piece of Americana as anything. They're somehow wholesome, yet… seedy.

I am captivated by the certain melange I assume was once the traditional programming at these theaters (I've only actually been to one about 4 or 5 times in my life): monster/alien movies with unconvincing costumes and/or models of buildings and vehicles; slasher films in which the blood is a cheerfully bright red; stunt-based spectacles in which car chases, martial arts and gun play were used for visual effect (I believe they used to be called "action movies"), and generally anything that exploits or aims for sensationalism, centered on something never previously captured on film, or seen before perhaps in any medium.

The closest I think I ever came to this experience- don't laugh, or groan- was when I saw Grindhouse. I hear it was overhyped, but I never even heard about it until the night it opened, which I consider one of the great film-going experiences of my life. I'm not kidding. It's not that Grindhouse was actually that great from beginning to end. It's that by attending it, I somehow fulfilled all the unrequited need I'd had to go back in time and have an authentic, raunchy drive-in experience. I didn't see it after dinner at some dull suburban multiplex with stadium seating. I saw it from 11 PM to 2:30 AM at the Roxy Theater, the stickiest, grubbiest cinema in Philadelphia, where the seats line up in a narrow shotgun file before a tiny screen, and where on that night, a full house of crazed kids was making it the event of the season. It was one of the most complete and convincing time-warps ever. I wished the filmmakers could have been there to see their creation achieve its true potential, on and off the screen.

So this Memorial Day, now that the porch is officially open for business...















...we decided we would fire up the outdoor movies, and let our selections nod as much as possible to the spirit of those old bat-shit drive-in classics.

Basket Case
This is not a horror movie. It's sweet, it's goofy, it has faith in the basic goodness of most people, and all its attempts at horror- the vehicle for this is a lump of flesh with a face and two arms- end in pure comedy. Its finest moment is a stop-motion animated sequence in which the little guy trashes a hotel room; all we could think was, this is exactly how our cat behaves at 5:30 every morning. Awww. And how is he supposed to be killing his victims, anyway? It looks like he just rubs his hands on them and then they yell and fall over, pretending to be dead so he doesn't feel bad.

Best Worst Movie
A where-are-they-now documentary about the director and cast of the fascinating bomb Troll 2. Last summer, the Village East was playing both Troll 2 and Best Worst Movie, and Jamie and I attended the former, although by then the cult frenzy had long since died down, and we were joined by just a handful of die-hard fans. If you haven't seen Troll 2, you should consider it. It fails in a way that is singular and, I am now convinced, impossible to describe. Best Worst Movie couldn't do it justice. Even with all the interviews of everyone from fan club organizers to theater owners to the cast and crew themselves, all describing this turkey, along with plenty of clips from the film, this documentary will not make you understand what it actually feels like to watch Troll 2, or how you will feel the next day or two after watching it. The director of Troll 2, who is one of this documentary's tragic figures, assesses his disaster majestically: "Making the worst movie is just as good as making the best movie; it means that I've made an impression." I'm not sure that it's "just as good," but the words certainly resonate, and come closer to explaining the phenomenon than any other statement in the film. People who love movies don't want to leave a theater unscathed; they want to be deeply affected by the experience, one way or another. And there is simply nothing comparable to how Troll 2 affects you.

Jamie and I had a lively debate about Best Worst Movie directly after watching it. We disagreed on how successful it was in providing a story arc for its main subject, the actor who played the father and whose actual profession is dentistry; we mostly agreed that the saddest parts of the documentary were unnecessary and even exploitative; and we agreed that it didn't hold a candle to Bill Cunningham New York (she bristled when I began comparing the two films).

Deep Red
I’m not really an Argento fan, so getting the director’s cut of this probably wasn’t the way to go, but I loved the way the actors would switch without warning between English and Italian, with the latter done in distinctly unconvincing ADR by other actors who had lovely voices, but who made no effort to match to the sound of their screen counterparts’ voices. The effect is that every character is apparently possessed by an Italian demon who can only take control fitfully of its host.

It struck me that the music choices for the different scenes were so unexpected- in the scenes of violence, some of which are memorably horrifying, the score jumps to life with what might have been chase music from an "A-Team" episode- and that Troll 2, essentially another Italian film, has a similarly unusual sense, although even more outrageous, of what music would be appropriate for a particular scene. Coincidence?

Something else I didn’t expect: Deep Red predates 10, one of my all time favorite films, by four years, and I think 10 must have drawn inspiration from it. There was almost never a moment that I could watch David Hemmings without thinking of the songwriter George Webber (Dudley Moore), and that of course made me think of Sam (Julie Andrews) every time Daria Nicolodi made an appearance. Hemmings’ character is crotchety, peevish, defensive, stubborn, and often pathetic in the precise way that Webber is. There’s even a scene in which Hemmings and Nicolodi face off in a “battle-of-the-sexes” argument that sounds just like George and Sam fighting in the bedroom. At least, until the demons make them speak Italian again.

Tokyo Drifter
I loved many moments in this handsome crime saga, including a brawl in a cabaret that was equal parts John Ford and Blake Edwards. Yet it flags just before the end, as do all films centered this much on style. In the DVD interview, director Seijun Suzuki says that inspiration strikes his actors at two moments: the costume fitting, and when he sets them loose on a stylish and dramatic set. These are the points at which they realize who their characters are, and how they are supposed to act. He’s almost saying out-right that he made the actors part of the scenery- which directors do at the risk of a cold and impersonal product (e.g. The Hudsucker Proxy). But what the hell- this is the kind of movie that drive-ins (and the Roxy) were made for. If I had seen this at the Roxy at midnight with a bunch of crazy kids, it would have been brilliant.

Ray- Maybe the Greatest Filmmaker, Ever

Our hero Apu, a young man who lives in poverty and has never been in a relationship, is unexpectedly married to Aparna, a woman he barely knows. Her betrothed has gone mad, and she will be cursed unless she is married by day's end. Apu gallantly volunteers his hand. The sequence is humorous, tender, as elemental as folklore, and like everything else in Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu, absurdly beautiful. Every scene is blinking with dewy eyes at the possibilities of its environment. Apu stretches on his porch in a drenching monsoon, and we see distant trees bowing in the downpour, so lovely in monochrome. Or when he and his new wife later emerge from a car, and Ray's camera, instead of paying attention to them, fancies a little bird that hops in a corner of the frame, as though gently welcomed to live there.

When I was in college, I talked to a professor after seeing Pather Panchali, and we wondered: how does he do it? How can these effortless and even accidental details mean so much in a Ray film? I feel that after last night, when Jamie and I trekked through this cold Boston rain to see the Apu trilogy's last chapter, I know the answer a little better: these moments are beautiful because we can sense that they're an extension of Ray himself, and the "elaborate serenity," as Bosley Crowther described it, with which he unhurriedly honored everything he filmed.

One morning soon after the wedding, Aparna wakes up before Apu and busies herself with chores. As Apu gradually gains consciousness, he finds one of her hairpins in the bed, and gazes at it with delight. It is a foreign object in his world, and it is wonderful. I can't help imagining what the characters are thinking in these quiet scenes. Could this be the moment that he falls in love with Aparna? Perhaps only half of what's dancing in my head was actually intended by Ray; he is always taking us somewhere, but at some point he stops telling us what's going on and lets us imagine. It's a sign of how invested I am in the story that I'm so keen to bring my own interpretation to these moments.

I'm not sure why, but I was expecting the film to end without much resolution, much the same way that Pather Panchali leaves its characters staggering in the uncertain aftermath of tragedy. Yet it finds an ending that finishes off the narrative in a satisfying and not overly-convenient way, and almost makes this feel like one of Di Sica's realist parables- The Bicycle Thief, or Umberto D- the kind of film narrative that reaches out to everyone, with something universal to say.

We also recently saw La Doppia Ora (The Double Hour), a new thriller which I highly recommend. One of my favorite things at the movies is a genre film that actually works. Giuseppe Capotondi shows us one way of achieving this: if you're sincere enough, the conventions you use can actually seem fresh. (Matchstick Men is another excellent example of this.) As a mystery, this film plays its hand daringly, pulling a series of rugs out from under us, each time risking our investment in the story. Yet I never felt manipulated, exactly. A bad plot twist is one that negates everything you've been led to believe. You might say the plot twists in this film update and modify what you already know but don't send you all the way back to square one.

I was too tired to really focus on Fists In the Pocket, considered a landmark of '60s Italian film, and I don't think I was in the mood for it anyway, but that's okay, it'll always be there when I'm ready for it. It had the kind of broad performances that get your attention and are obviously great (as opposed to the understated Soumitra Chatterjee in World of Apu), and I loved the score by Morricone.

Finally, I recommend The Last Laugh, a silent film about the decline of a lonely old man. I thought the ending was poorly paced and too obvious; the darkness of the man's decline, which takes us through the first two acts, is far more interesting. The acting is fascinating, too- they look like puppets on a stage.

A (Humble) Champion For Kurdistan

A week ago I talked my wife and our out-of-town guests into an evening at the Harvard Film Archive. The film was A Time For Drunken Horses, and was followed by a Q and A with filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. When it opened in New York, where I was living at the time, Horses ran for a mere two weeks, and I missed it before I'd even read that it was "like a blast of cold, fresh air," or something like that - a goofy notice, sure, but then I let the idea of the film grow in my mind, a masterpiece that got away from me, something to track down later. Then I forgot about it. Then Jamie and I saw Ghobadi's later film Half Moon, and that was so unexpectedly good it got me building the legend of Horses again.

It didn't disappoint. It felt very much like the debut feature it was- less polished than Half Moon, energetic, unfiltered yet uncluttered, and unrestrained in pursuing a simple ambition, to evoke sympathy.

Like Half Moon, Horses is about the importance of family, but Horses is almost unbearably poignant in this respect. The children in this film, who work with smugglers bringing tires into Iraq on horseback, care for and fight for one another in astonishing conditions. Every moment seems to embody the children's struggle to survive- fighting hypothermia, escaping narrowly from the guns of the border guards, or negotiating to get treatment for their disabled, terminally-ill brother, Madi.

The Q and A was long and enlightening. At least half the audience apparently spoke Farsi. Mr. Ghobadi's translator patiently scribbled and summarized his discursive answers, but there was plenty of laughter before she had the chance to deliver each translation. Isn't Cambridge something?

My mind keeps returning to a scene early in the film. Border guards stop a truck carrying at least twenty children; the children, who are forgotten as the truck is confiscated, leap through the snowy wasteland in a single file, clearly with a plan, although I for one wasn't completely sure what it was. That basically sums up what I consider most memorable and unique about Horses: the quantity of moments that feel so natural and effortless, and so outrageous at the same time. It's hard to say whether it would be more amazing to learn that the scene had been staged, or that it hadn't.

I thought of this again when a young man asked Ghobadi if he is influenced by literature, and he replied that a film influenced by a piece of literature, though with its own merits, would be far more contrived that what he aims to create. As he describes it, his method is to write pages of notes, but not a script, and then let the film coalesce naturally from the location; the people who live there become his characters, and their lives, and the situations he encounters, become the story. In fact, one can simply go to Kurdistan and start filming, he said, and one will have a movie. Now I was more unsure than ever whether those children in the snow were acting or not, and then it occurred to me that it didn't even matter- they may have played out the scene one day as actors for Ghobadi, and on another day, lived it.

I think this is the moment when what we call "documentary fiction" finally does its job: the questions of what was staged and what wasn't become irrelevant. It's an unusually powerful kind of investment you experience when you start really accepting everything you see, and I won't be convinced that it didn't require enormous skill and creativity to make a true narrative film that accomplishes this.

Yet Mr. Ghobadi goes out of his way to downplay his own role in this process. The film opens with a full-page letter, from him to the audience, insisting that everything we are about to see is real, and that the characters are "not figments of my imagination," but Kurds he knows who actually live in the manner the film depicts; and after the film, he continued to insist that his own hand as an artist had little to do with what we'd just seen. But he'd made us see a bit of what he sees himself, and in the way that he sees it, which is what most artists are trying to do all the time, and what only good artists can actually do.

The Beautiful Loner

I don't know, I just thought it would be another one of these slight, straining-at-feature-length documentaries, with some chuckles and a late attempt at profundity. An easy movie about Bill Cunningham, the fashion photographer whose scratchy, giddy voice you can hear on the Times website. It would be passable for an evening out, I thought.

Yet my hours are haunted still, days later, by Bill Cunningham New York. I kept thinking I had finally determined what the film was really about, what it was trying to do me, and I bracketed these answers several times for myself, only to see it take another turn, expand in its ambition, and bore deeper into its subject, Cunningham, the happy-go-lucky aesthete, the lifer street artist. There is something wonderful and something terrible going on behind his twinkling eyes and disarming giggles. As we find out, Director Richard Press's patient determination to crack these things open is itself both wonderful and terrible.

Only after some percolation did I see the complete design of this film: so many of the subject's remarks and telling facial expressions are inserted along the journey that bear significance you can only appreciate afterward. Even as I write this, more of these details I made too little of at the time are drifting back to me. Press's craft, then, is uncanny, but so is his luck: there are perfect New York moments in this film, one after the other, that seem to drop into his lap. These are no doubt skimmed from hundreds of hours of footage, but so is the best stuff you see in any documentary, and it's rarely as good as the incidental material used here.

I really like Bill. Getting to know someone you like can be an intense experience. As I watched this film, the intensity of spending so much time with Bill, though vicarious, was more than I was prepared for. He is so individual, so seemingly happy in his perfect solitude. I wanted to rejoice in his purity as an exception, but one simply can't do that without feeling sad at the same time. A scene late in the film shows him seated at the runway of a fashion show, marveling, snapping pictures and hurriedly winding and changing rolls, completely immersed in what he loves. Press uses a song for this scene and I don't want to reveal what it is, but a local radio station (here in Boston) once played a parody of this song that was so funny Jamie and I still mention it and laugh, so when the song came up in the film, our first reaction was more chuckling and nudging each other. But by the end of the scene, it had easily been the most moving occasion of hearing that song I could remember. It perfectly captured the bittersweetness of his independence, and his questing after what he loves.

Which brings me to another loner, who I feel like I met last year, around this same time. Here he is:





Daniel Johnston and Bill Cunningham seem to me to have a lot in common, but Daniel's art is actually about loneliness. Daniel sings about the heartbreak of being himself, while Bill just waves it off and laughs. If Bill were a singer, would he sing "True Love Will Find You In the End"? (Perhaps, but only if he played with the meaning. He has found true love, in a way.)

Not long before I started this blog, I saw The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Cunningham is this year's Devil for me, yet although each left me somewhat transformed, Devil was the one that had me so emotionally wrecked after the first hour I needed an intermission.

I don't think it can be explained why Daniel's music is so good, but Kathy McCarty of Glass Eye gives it an excellent go in one of several incredible interviews that drive the film. That's the biggest difference between the two films: whereas Bill Cunningham New York is very much a documentary witnessing a moment in time, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a history, a lot of digging up painful memories (which brings visible stress to the interview subjects, Daniel's family and friends). The fact that Daniel himself is essentially never interviewed - the middle-aged Daniel of today appears only occasionally, and mostly towards the end- makes the telling even more forlorn and almost funereal.

I think I like these guys so much because they do absolutely nothing but search for beauty. One way or another, they've lived on that and nothing else. And the contradiction is, here I am, the movie watcher, seeking thousands of vicarious experiences, and one of those is to have such a simple life as they do.