Got a brief e-mail from my friend out in Yuba City, California. A couple of sentences, not much longer than the question in the SUBJECT slot: “So where are your May movie reviews?”
Let me tell you about Yuba City Guy. He and I were in the Peace Corps in Morocco together. I was there for three years. My first year coincided with his last year in a small town in a Pre-Saharan wasteland or rocks and dust. He and I and two other volunteers weathered the isolation and boredom by playing Scrabble. After the Peace Corps, he and I went into fulltime teaching and about the extent of our communication was an exchange of Christmas cards.
For the past four years, however, since he retired from teaching and licked a bout of cancer, we have kept up a consistently regular and often prolific e-mail correspondence which consists mostly of me responding to the items on his numbered list of comments – many of which berate me with mercilessly sardonic diction - because I'm not reading the books he's reading, or because I don't follow
Downton Abbey, or because I didn't post on
Philomena, or because I didn't like a movie he loved or I loved a movie he thought was trash.
Thus, I had better respond to his question, or I am in trouble.
Why haven’t I written my May movie reviews? I’ve been busy. No, that’s not why. That’s a lame excuse I detest. This is my sixth year writing this blog, and in the past years I have always found time to post, meanwhile being married with two kids to raise, meanwhile teaching full-time, meanwhile pursuing a number of personal creative projects.
Yeah, I’ve been busy with the end of the school year, but I haven’t been too busy to post. It’s just that my soul has felt kind of bruised, and while I’ve mustered the spirit to teach enthusiastically, devote time to family, and even work on my fiction, I’ve relegated the blog to the neglected last item on my list of priorities.
What's caused the bruises? Life. It could be worse. It could always be worse. But it started in February when I flew back to San Mateo, California, to meet my two brothers so that we could get power of attorney and take my mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s or some other sort of dementia, out of a reclusive situation and put her in a “Memory Care Community” in Belmont, California. There, my 92-year-old mother - who immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1925, who lived on a farm on the Canadian plains during the Great Depression, whose father was interned for most of World War II, who visited war-torn Germany in 1946, carrying suitcases full of food, wearing multiple coats to give to her relatives, who traveled all over the world in her days of leisure - gets up in the morning and takes the clothes out of her drawers and packs them in her carry-on every day because - even though she has stubbornly refused to accept this community and refrains from participating in activities and excursions - she wants to be ready just in case she decides to go on the outing to Paris or London.
After being called “Judases,” my older brother flew back to Oregon, and I flew back East. Since then, there have been other blows and bruises within my family and at the work place, but those factors are too complicated to address here.
Amidst all this, I haven’t found the meaning in posting on the movies I’ve seen. I'm just happy to go to the movies. Since my last post, I have seen
Captain America (even too much noisy violence for me),
Transcendence (a nifty sci-fi premise that goes nowhere),
Bears (oh, how they lumber along looking for salmon, and looking for salmon, and looking for salmon, and when they find them, they catch them and eat them, one after the other after the other),
Spider Man 2 (dreadful; I do have taste, Yuba City Guy),
Neighbors (doesn’t approach the hilarity of
Superbad or
40-Year-Old Virgin),
Godzilla (weak beginning for a monster movie; not enough Godzilla), X-Men: Days of Future Past (I wish superhero movies would go away, and I'm not a big X-Men fan, but this is a well-constructed movie that stands on its own and doesn’t require pre-knowledge of the mythology),
Million Dollar Arm (excellent, touching movie about India and baseball), and
Maleficent (enchanting in the beginning; visually stunning at times; Jolie is just okay; falls flat).
Posting on movies is not so important to me anymore. What’s always been important to me is just going to the movies. Most any movie. If you can’t go to
Godzilla or a Disney movie and let yourself go, I’m not sure you love movies enough. Yuba Guy berates me for wasting my time on trash. He likes those PBS-esque little English dramas with Judi Dench. But I see indies and foreign films he never sees. In December, I often drive up to Cambridge to the Landmark to see three of them in a day. I finally did see
Philomena, just to get the man from Yuba City off my back, and I admitted that I liked it, but I have to admit that I’d rather see an X-Men movie than a quiet, sensitive film with Judi Dench. I was all poised to drive to the Cape Cinema on Friday to see
Belle with the usual audience of Dennis intelligensia, but I realized that
Maleficent had opened and my daughter wanted to see it, so she and I went, and I was glad for the reprieve. I will probably like
Belle well enough when I catch it later on pay-per-view, but I have to say I was looking forward to the big battle and the fire-breathing dragon more than I was to the sentiments of outrage voiced over tea and crumpets in a sprawling English manor. Sorry, Yuba Chap.
My work-week routine includes going to the movies every Friday. Friday night is busy with end-of-year functions at school, so I will take in an advanced showing of
Edge of Tomorrow tonight. When I sit in the theater and the lights dim, I breathe a sigh of relief. I feel like I’m taking a hit of opium or something. I am programmed to feel an immediate sense of detachment from my worries whether the film I am going to see is a summer blockbuster or a high-brow art-house film.
Thinking of PBS shows like
Downton Abbey and movies like
Philomena, I must confess a preference for MOTION pictures. Earlier this week I watched
Zulu (1965). It has the elements that first made me love the movies with an indelible passion. It transports you to another time and place; it includes panoramic location shots; it involves gripping drama, action, motion. In an opening shot, a carriage pulls away from the kraal of the Zulu king. It is an exquisite extreme long shot with the village set in the middle of a beautiful landscape. No CGI here. I yearn for films like this. Nowadays, unfortunately, those grand vistas are rendered by means of CGI but, for the most part, they take my mind away from my problems and me. I need movies to get me through.
In regards to posting or not posting, it’s not just that I’m busy or I’m worn out.
In the recent film
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), which I enjoyed for how it takes Walter and the viewer on an adventure to memorable outdoor panoramas that are not CGI, Walter (Ben Stiller) pursues famous
Life photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) to the Himalayas where he is attempting to locate and photograph a rare snow leopard. O’Connell tells Walter to keep quiet as the leopard reveals itself. But he doesn’t take the shot. When Walter asks why, the photographer explains that sometimes you just have to experience the moment. Sometimes you should just see it and feel it and not record it. When the snow leopard leaves, O'Connell sees more meaning in seizing the moment and joining his Sherpas in an impromptu soccer game.
That's how I feel about going to the movies these days. Like a junkie, I need my fix, but I don't really feel like recording my opinions. Opinions are all over the Internet, and right now I don't really care what anybody thinks. Right now, I just want to watch the movie.
