Image of the Day

from Fritz Lang's Spies (1928)

Image of the Day

from Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956)

American movies, 1970-1979

from Robert Altman's MASH (1970)

Image of the Day

from Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned (1963)

Image of the Day

from George Romero's The Crazies (1973)

Images of the Day: Labor Day Edition

From the top:
Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967)
Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto (1961)
Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne's The Son (2002)
Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977)
Mike Judge's Office Space (1999)

Image of the Day

from Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

Image of the Day

from John Ford's Donovan's Reef (1963), which includes one of my favorite lines in any movie: "The fact of the matter is that neither of you remember what started this ridiculous annual birthday brawl."

Image of the Day

from Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1953)

Image of the Day

from Noel Black's Pretty Poison (1968)

Image of the Day

from David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981)

Images of the Day

Carpenter/teacher/critic/painter Manny Farber died this week at the age of 91. Here are five stills from movies he admired and one of his paintings. From the top:
Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946)
Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana (1971)
Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Farber's My Budd (1978)

Image of the Day

from Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely (2007)

Image of the Day

from David Gordon Green's Snow Angels (2007)

Image of the Day

from Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Image of the Day

from Elaine May's A New Leaf (1971)

Image of the Day

Joan Crawford and a "half-man, half-ape with the strength of twenty demons" play with a doll in Crawford's final film, Freddie Francis' Trog (1970)

Image of the Day

from Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003)

Image of the Day

from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)

Image of the Day

from Robert Altman's California Split (1974)

Image of the Day

from Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Image(s) of the Day

Two meals, from Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time (1978)

Image of the Day

from Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985)

Image of the Day

from Richard Quine's My Sister Eileen (1955)

Image(s) of the Day

From the top, Jean-Louis Barrault as:
Himself
Baptiste in Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945)
Dr. Cordelier in Jean Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959)
Opale in Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier
Opale in action #1, #2, #3

Everything that ever happened to me (abridged), Part 2

To refresh your memory, Part 1 can be found here. On to the timely follow-up, har-dee-har!

The initial idea for that post was a recollection of the first night I realized movies could be something I loved. I got sidetracked, and the post turned into something else entirely, which is perfectly OK and something I welcome. I feel like telling that initial story now. However, the possibility that I will get sidetracked again remains. Don't worry. It won't devolve into another hectoring screed about how you shouldn't see the new Indiana Jones movie. (By the way, I completely failed to get across my real point, which was that the people going to see that film with "low expectations" seemed utterly dejected about having to see the movie. Low expectations aren't anything to be ashamed about if you're also going into the movie with an explorer's attitude of what- the-fuckitude/I'm just there to find out whether it's good or not. But these people approached seeing The Crystal Sanitary Napkin as if they were attending a funeral or on-the-job training or a juvenile court date. A horrible chore that must be done out of a sense of cheerless obligation. Attendance at summer movies as capitalist public service. The free market as stern authority figure. How can you not see this movie? It is your duty as a citizen. Full disclosure: I saw Hellboy II today, with SLIGHTLY DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS.)

Summer 1985. My parents are still married. Not only that, but happily married. My dad's dad is still alive. My mom's mom is still alive. My aunt is still alive, and she hasn't started drinking yet. My cousin is not yet married to a guy who builds McMansions in Colorado. My dad is not yet married to a manipulative psychopath. My disinterest in sports and weightlifting has not yet become an absolute turnoff to every girl I find attractive. I've still got three years of happy childhood before adolescence starts and brings on a decade of unhappiness, frustration, awkwardness, cynicism, and negativity. I'm still several years away from having to fill out a job application. John Cassavetes, D. Boon, and Kurt Vonnegut are still alive, though those names don't mean anything to me yet. My hometown seems like an open, welcoming, happy little world of possibilities instead of the limited shithole full of ignorant cowards it mostly is. My mind is open, alert, naive, silly, and ready to be blown. Thank god for the mainstream success of Pee Wee Herman.

When VHS rentals first became widespread, every business hopped on the bandwagon. Every convenience store, pizza place, gas station, etc. had a shelf of videos for rent. I remember my mother and I (and maybe my brother or sister) picking up some root beer and ice cream to make root beer floats at the convenience store on a Friday night. This particular store had just begun carrying VHS tapes for rental. I noticed a copy of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and I asked my mother if we could rent it. She said yes, and one of the most memorable nights of my young life began. Even in stupid-little-kid world, my aesthetic was remarkably similar to my aesthetic now. I liked character, atmosphere, mood, and images more than plot. Prior to this particular evening, I enjoyed movies as entertainment, but I didn't think of them in the same way as I thought of music or books. I've been a music addict since I was three, and a lover of books since I learned to read at age 5, but movies always followed the same pattern. I loved the first half hour or so, then I got bored when the plot machinations took over. I knew every movie was going to end with all the characters in the same location fighting or yelling. Since I grew up in a small town and only Hollywood blockbusters were available, I was pretty much right in that observation.
Everything changed when I saw Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. First of all, I was simultaneously thrilled and confused, which thrilled and confused me. Pee Wee acted like a kid, but he was clearly a grown man. His house was full of kid stuff, and his bike was clearly a kid's bike, but he had no parents. His rival, Francis, was another grown man, but he also acted like a kid, and lived with his father, who was an old man. Like I already said, this thrilled and confused me. I remember clearly going over these opposing feelings in my mind. Heretofore, when I was confused, I felt bad or angry. But here I was, confused and thrilled. How could this be? Why did I like what was happening onscreen even though I had no explanation for it and clearly wanted an explanation? Later, after Pee-Wee's bike is stolen and he interrogates everyone in his neighborhood, I noticed that an old man in the crowd had a multi-colored mohawk and was referred to by Pee-Wee as Amazing Larry. This blew my fucking mind! "What is going on here," I remember thinking. "I have no idea, but I think I love it." Shortly thereafter, Pee-Wee goes on the road to find his stolen bicycle, which was a riff on the common American road movie genre. However, this was my first ever exposure to the American road movie, and I loved it. I still love road movies, even the shitty ones, probably because I love characters and character actors. The first character Pee-Wee meets on the road is an escaped convict, on the run for tearing the tag off a mattress. The two get past a police roadblock by impersonating a husband and wife, with Pee Wee in drag as the wife. This scene seriously disturbed me and made me feel dirty on that initial viewing. Another seemingly incongruous conflict in my young mind. I felt disturbed and uncomfortable while still feeling completely excited by the movie. How could that be possible? I remember thinking long and hard about that while watching the movie. I was confused, again, by my contradictory feelings, but I was also starting to learn what movies could do when they weren't constrained by genre or studio interference or audience expectation. Later, when the Large Marge scene changes tone from comedy to horror, and Marge's face turns into the crazy 3-D animated jump-out-and-get-you shock scene, I felt this overwhelming feeling of exhilaration. "Oh my god," I remember thinking. "Movies are capable of anything. Why aren't there more movies like this?" It was an important, and fun, lesson to learn, and it started me on my lifelong fascination with the movies. Later, when my love of Beetlejuice led me to discover that Tim Burton made both of these films, I started to get interested in directors, too. I learned that paying attention to directors' credits led to better choices at the video store and the theater and let me know what mediocre, boring schlock to avoid. I had a similar revelation a few years later when Pee-Wee's Playhouse debuted on Saturday morning TV. Goddamn, I love Pee Wee Herman and everything he's done to make loner, misfit kids feel great. From Pee Wee Herman, I learned that anything is possible. Maybe not in life, but at least in art.

You know who should get some of my hard-earned money? The obscenely wealthy!

I spent a large portion of the last two weeks gazing at the sky, looking for the all-seeing puppeteer/ventriloquist who had been employed by Steven Spielberg. Okay, I'm being a dick. However, in conversation with five people who don't know each other (including two people I don't know who I was chatting with at a friend's party) in the last two weeks, I heard these two almost identical sentences. It freaked me out. Here are the sentences:
"I went to the new Indiana Jones movie. It wasn't very good, but I went in with low expectations."
"I'm seeing the new Indiana Jones movie this weekend, but I'm going in with low expectations."
I don't know if I'm still being overly sensitive from dealing with the deaths of two of my favorite relatives a few months ago, but I do know that life always gets shorter, never longer. If you have low expectations, and you're under no obligations, DON'T FUCKING BOTHER!!!!!
Rent Raiders of the Lost Ark if you need some Indiana Jones in your life that badly. Otherwise, do something you actually want to do. Read a good book, listen to Motorhead, have sex with the wife, go for a stroll in the neighborhood, call an old friend, eat a hoagie, challenge a street tough to a best-of-three-falls no-rules bare-knuckled brawl, savor a delightful pastry. Life is short. And if you're looking forward to the movie, by all means go see it. We all deserve as much pleasure and as little pain as we can rustle up in this horribly unfair life. Why willingly invite dissatisfaction and boredom? I don't understand it at all.

This seems related, but I don't know how to relate it. I'm taking a summer class right now called Overcoming Reading Difficulties that teaches us strategies to get poor readers, kids with reading disorders, and kids who just hate to read engaged with texts. For the last two Fridays, instead of class, I met up with my "reading circle" group and we discussed a novel. I liked everybody in my group, and I enjoyed our conversations. However, one member of my group is also a Radio, Television, and Film major, and her descriptions of required classes made my head explode with rage. She said that in her Intro to Narrative class, the professor told the (impressionable) students that Citizen Kane was the only Orson Welles film worth seeing (though they never watched it in class) and that he declined after that. Then the professor spent three weeks "deconstructing The Matrix." I'm glad she didn't mention the professor's name, because I would have egged his house (I originally wrote this as "I would have carved his obituary on his chest" but I should really be more honest). He's certainly entitled to his incredibly shitty opinion, but his attempt to pass it off as fact to a bunch of 19-year-olds without offering them any evidence, and then spending a ridiculous amount of class time on an entertaining but not very important Hollywood trifle, points out the destructive effect of most university film programs. This doesn't happen in any other discipline. English professors (even shitty English professors) never say, "I'm not going to teach it, but The Naked and the Dead is the only valid Norman Mailer text. For the next three weeks, please open your Anne Rice books to page 12." Or try this one out: "Pythagoras was a one-trick pony. Now for some astrology." Hey, Professor Moron, here are some Orson Welles films to check out during your next sabbatical: The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Lady from Shanghai, Mr. Arkadin. I could keep going, or you could consult the 98% of film scholars who think that at least one of these films is vitally important to film history. But you're probably watching Speed Racer. Fuck.

The TV show, the movie, the review, the blog post

I'm always a little bummed out when people complain that a particular magazine's or newspaper's critics are bad because they don't like the same movies as the complainer or they don't supply reliable recommendations. Critics should be read for the quality of their ideas and their writing, not for their particular tastes and opinions. I think this used to be the case almost exclusively, until forty years of critics on TV, blurbs, star and number rating systems, weekly box office tabulations, hyperbole, fanboy pantswetting, infotainment, the uniquely American sense of entitlement, the capitalistic demand for the victory of the majority consensus opinion, aggressive advertising hype, the intermingling of advertising and journalism, overpaid stars, the dumbing down of nearly everything, and a consumerist approach to filmgoing turned most American criticism into an offshoot of Consumer Reports. Every film, from the latest McIndiana Jones Mcfranchise to the latest from Bela Tarr, is written about the same way. Comparisons to recognizable brands (or real artists reduced to brands), plot descriptions (careful not to reveal any spoilers), a brief sentence about how good or bad so-and-so was in the lead performance, and a recommendation of whether you should spend your money or wait until it comes out on video. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars. 8 out of 10. 13 screeching owls out of 15. 9 Jon Benet Ramseys out of 10. And don't forget some clever puns! ("Bee Movie" is an A!) Or hyperbole (The best, and only, film I've seen since brunch. I don't think I will see a better film for the rest of the day, though I will be visiting my aunt Judy so I probably won't see any other films today anyway. 75 thumbs up.)
I like to read critics who are good writers, know a lot about their subject, have some interesting ideas, and focus on a variety of films, not just the overhyped business as usual. I usually read their reviews after I see the movie, not before. I don't particularly care whether they share my opinion or not. In conclusion, my way is the best, and the other way is ridiculous. (Not to disavow the importance of a recommendation from somebody who shares your sensibilities, however. That's a little different from 50 critics telling you about a movie you've already heard about 50 times. Still, it's the least important part of a good critic's job, in my arrogant opinion.)

I meant to write about something completely different and got sidetracked on an only slightly related rant. I'm thoroughly enjoying reading some of my favorite critics write and talk about a movie I have no intention of ever seeing, Sex and the City. In fact, two interesting posts are by critics who also have no intention of seeing it. Jim Emerson contemplates the film's popularity and its reviews at this link. Glenn Kenny, who was recently fired from his editing and writing job at Premiere and the blog he wrote on its site called "In the Company of Glenn," wrote a quick, little post on his new blog saying that a perk of unemployment was not having to care about the Sarah Jessica Parker et al. summer juggernaut. He got a pretty heated response to a tossed-off comment and wrote a great post about it here. A couple people who did see the movie and have a lot to say about it are the Real Geezers. I'm always pleased to watch a new Real Geezers review. I worry about one or both of them kicking the bucket since they are well into their eighties. They should have a weekly TV series. Here is their Sex and the City review:

(Private) Parts and Labor(ed)

It took me a while, but I can clearly say now that I find Catherine Breillat's films, with the exception of Fat Girl, unbearably stupid. Her films are cold, grindingly repetitive, simplistically and dishonestly reductive, emptily provocative for the sake of provocation (and probably for the sake of commercial appeal masquerading as non-commercial independence), and both misanthropic and anti-male. It took me a while to reach these conclusions because she's such a gifted visual stylist. Her films are compelling if you turn the sound off, and she shows an empathy in photographing her actor's faces and bodies lacking in the rest of her approach. Her dialogue destroys everything, though. Blank characters function as mouthpieces for her outdated mix of Freud and pseudo-feminism in which men hate women because they're terrified of their vaginas. Everything that happens, in Breillat's world, happens because of heterosexual power struggles between the two sets of genitalia. Anatomy of Hell, which I watched last night, is Breillat at her embarrassing worst. The film is about an unnamed woman, who goes to a gay disco where she's the only female in the place. She tries to commit suicide in the bathroom, but an unnamed man finds her and gets her medical help. She repays him by blowing him in the bushes, and then paying him to watch her most intimate moments for four days. Not only is the man gay, but he hates women and finds vaginas disgusting (like all gay men, Breillat possibly implies). Over the course of the four days, the man will smear lipstick on her open vagina and anus while she sleeps, stick a garden hoe in her anus, drink a glass of water with her used tampon floating in it, and (shock of all shocks) have sex with her on her period. The man, once the four days is up, becomes an obsessive shell of himself and goes back to find her, but she's gone. He then imagines pushing her off a cliff into the roiling sea below (described in voice-over narration as "a bitch in heat." Seriously.) The whole shebang is approached with a deathly seriousness that provides the film's only trace of humor, albeit unintentional. Check out some choice nuggets of dialogue that Breillat finds philosophically provocative:
(When the man finds the woman slashing her wrists and asks her why)
Woman: Because I'm a woman.
(After the man sticks his finger in her vagina)
Man: I bless the day I was born immune to you and all of your kind. The elastic resistance of a boy’s anus doesn’t lie about the tightness of his lower intestine. The lie about the softness of women is hateful… the malevolent triviality that turns them into a trap. The horror of Nothingness that is the imprescriptible All.
(When the woman asks him why he is disgusted by her menstrual blood and not disgusted by anal sex with men)
Man: Fecal matter is inert. It has already been through the life cycle.
(After they have sex while she is having her period, and blood covers his penis)
Woman: There's blood on your penis and you are afraid. You think that your penis is wounded. But the blood comes from the fertile place of life, and you can't understand how something can bleed without coming from a wound. You are afraid that your penis has lost all of its power.
Man: Yes.

To be fair, these are English subtitles translated from the French, but I don't see how dialogue like this can ever work in any circumstance, even in the hyper-stylized allegorical world of Breillat's films. How can anyone take lines like these seriously? How can this pseudo-profundity be taken seriously by anyone as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit? Her supposed provocations (tampon tea, etc.) are ridiculous as well. John Waters did it better and funnier in his early films, without the terrible doctoral dissertation dialogue.

The actress playing the woman, Amira Casar, requested a disclaimer before the film telling the audience that the penetration shots and vaginal and anal close-ups were filmed with a body double. The disclaimer should have let me know what to expect for the next 80 minutes: "A film is an illusion, not reality-fiction or a happening: it is a true work of fiction. For the actress’s most intimate scenes a body double was used. It’s not her body, it’s an extension of a fictional character." I wonder how the real woman whose body parts were filmed feels about being described as "an extension of a fictional character." Breillat, in an interview about the disclaimer, says "I wrote especially heavy-handed wording designed to be vague for the viewer." How is heavy-handedness vague? The interviewer failed to ask her. People think all art films are like this, and waste their time on crap like 300 and Transformers instead, which is too bad, but if it keeps them away from Breillat, I guess they broke even.

While I was searching for excerpts of this film's dialogue on the Internet, I stumbled across an academic journal article about the film with this section title, "An Introduction to Breillat and the Transvaluation of Gender Morality and Sexual Aesthetic through a Subversive, Nietzscheian Übermunsch." Somebody with tenure probably wrote that. What an uber-munch.

I did like one thing about this film -- the performance of Rocco Siffredi, an Italian gay porn star, as the man. That a porn star speaking ridiculous dialogue in a non-native language gives a memorable, impressive performance is a real surprise. It would be nice to see him work with a non-porno, non-Breillat director. His ease in front of the camera, his movements in and out of the frame, and his expressive face act as an antidote to Breillat's attempts to cardboardize him (and all men) as a woman-hater. He's more interesting than the terrible movie he's stuck in.

Trailerfest #5

Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy

Trailerfest #4

Kubrick double feature, Pt. 2: The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.

Trailerfest #3

Stanley Kubrick double feature, pt. 1: Dr. Strangelove and Lolita. Kubrick took creative control of his promotion and either made his own trailers or commissioned graphic artists to do them for him. Two today, two more tomorrow.

Trailerfest #2

David Lynch's Wild At Heart

Wild at Heart Trailer
Uploaded by FreddyRis

Trailerfest #1

I'm going to post some of my favorite movie trailers over the next several days. These are trailers that transcend the medium of advertising, the worst medium on earth next to performance art.
Trailer #1: Let's keep the Russ Meyer vibe going. I haven't seen Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens yet, but I will make it a point to see it. Anyway, the trailer is a work of art by itself.

Cuckolding the Middle-Brow with the Wrist-Bazooka

Two weeks ago, I watched Joe Wright's Atonement. Last week I watched Russ Meyer's Supervixens. It is a sign of the triumph of middlebrow thoughtlessness in our culture that the former is considered high art while the latter is considered b-movie trash. Very few stylistic choices Wright makes serve his material, while no shot, edit, line of dialogue, camera movement, joke, or image is wasted in Meyer's film. Because Wright's film is a literary adaptation about tragic love, WWII, and British upper crusties and contains one of the most memorable tracking shots in cinema history, it is somehow important while Meyer is just a drooling dirty old man making low-budget camp. Yet that technically amazing tracking shot in Atonement is purposeless, inappropriate for the scene, and shows a director lacking in judgment. Meyer's film is inventive, personal, and truly cinematic. I'll take Supervixens!

(The following trailer is borderline NSFW if your office door is open.)

Supervixens.flv
Uploaded by rsleddy

Richard Widmark 1914-2008

There Will Be Tacos

Adding to the confusion: I read an interesting review recently that teasingly dropped another possible allegorical/literal reading of this film without developing a close reading. The film's dates closely correspond to the birth and death of silent film, which give the final scenes' tonal changes added resonance, if you're so inclined. This is admittedly hard to justify, point for point. But one thing we can all agree on: The meat pies in Sweeney Todd obviously symbolize Darfur.

There Will Be Bullshit

I saw There Will Be Blood last week, and I think it's a great movie. However, 90 percent of the reviews tell us the film represents a symbolic battle between God and Greed/Capitalism. Maybe I'm the wrong guy to tackle a criticism of this point of view, because I'm as far from impartial as you can get. I detest symbolism. Detest it with every breath in my body. I think it's a bullshit way to read a text. When you look for symbols, you lose the text and burrow up your own asshole. Anything could be a symbol for anything else, and the whole exercise becomes a pointless waste of time. People who look for symbols in books, movies, and songs hate books, movies, and songs. Symbolism leaves out detail and aesthetic pleasure. If Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday (and, yes, I'm aware that their names are loaded with allegorical and symbolic connotations, but those names come from the Upton Sinclair book which very, very loosely inspired this film) represent Capitalism and God, can you explain to me your reasons for believing this? In my reading of the film, admittedly based on a single viewing, Plainview cares very little for money, and the reason for his greed is a hatred of people, which he explicitly spells out in a very interesting conversation with a man who may be his brother. He wants to grab up all the oil for the sole reason that no one else can get it. He spends most of the film living in a shack, and when he finally buys the big house, he's indifferent to it. Greed fueled by misanthropy instead of a hunger for money and the American dream lifestyle. Hardly sounds like a sterling representative of capitalism. The preacher seems to care very little for God, and his unsettling creepiness, manipulative nature, selfish thirst for glory, and questionable motivations are hardly emblematic of Christian theology. If you stay close to the text, this movie is a rich, strange, American original. I'm glad it's found an audience, since Paul Thomas Anderson's previous film, the equally rich, strange, and American Punch-Drunk Love was overlooked.

Real Geezers

I just discovered the Real Geezers through a link on Spacebeer yesterday, and I love these people. The woman produced several films I don't particularly care for, and the man was a screenwriter of mostly forgettable stuff (in my opinion), and almost everything they say is full of common sense, intelligence, and humor. Two people in their eighties with different sensibilities having great arguments. More old people on TV, movies, and the Internet, I say!

This clip fits in particularly well with my last two posts:


Here's another good one:

Everything that ever happened to me (abridged), Part 1

I can't articulate what I'm trying to do here, and I don't know if any of this stuff belongs together, but here it is. This post will go on indefinitely, possibly, and will surely be continued for the duration of this blog's existence. Will this be the autobiography of a 30-year-old man who has lived a relatively uneventful life? I don't know. This is a pointless introduction, so without any further ado, here is "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" by Ween, with liner notes by George Will. Literary pretense + small town folksiness + farts = me at 10:53 p.m.

"A man of talent is like a marksman who hits a target others cannot hit, but the man of genius is like a marksman who hits a target others cannot see." - Schopenhauer
"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." - Frank Zappa


I've always read a lot of criticism, even when I was a kid, and I think the stereotype about critics (failed artists taking their revenge) is mostly bullshit. My favorite critics (James Agee, Robert Warshow, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Manny Farber, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ray Carney when he's not being an awful human being) are writers. That's all. Writers writing. Agee also wrote fiction, journalism, poetry, essays, and a blurred, indescribable mixture of all these, and Farber makes his living as a painter. He also spent time as a carpenter and a teacher. I could go on about the others, too, but you get the point. Bad critics are usually strictly journalists. I don't know what that means except that I'm probably making an unfair pronouncement about journalism. Reading good criticism has made me a better ... what? I don't know. I don't know if it's healthy to analyze everything you see, hear, read, eat, and punch. What's the point? Art should speak for itself, but there is so much chatter. Higher education, journalism, criticism, blah blah blah. My opinion, your opinion. Which opinion will prevail on "American Gladiator" tonight? Who shouts loudest, wins. I'm getting tired of all the incessant chatter, even the considered stuff. That's why this blog has become mostly images instead of words. One person's interaction with culture is a personal thing, one that can't be understood or articulated by anyone else on earth. Every second of our individual lives is packed into every other second. Why do we argue about whether a movie is good or bad? Who wins? Who loses? What's the point?

When arguing with friends about a movie, album, book, sandwich, etc., I've noticed something. The person who doesn't like it, whatever "it" is, almost always "wins" the argument. Does "wins" belong in quotes there? I don't know. Negativity is easier to articulate. Slam dunks can be made. End zone dances can be extended for a full quarter. Defense blows. When you're on defense, your indescribable personal connection with an artwork cannot compete with your opponent's specific objections. Unless someone says something unbelievably stupid about why they hate the film/sandwich/whatever (i.e. "There was too much singing" about a musical, or "I didn't like the lead actor's hair," or "That sandwich would have been better if it hadn't been placed between two slices of bread and served on a plate" etc.), you're going to lose the argument.

Life is nothing but contradictions. I only agree with everything I've written so far when I'm not disagreeing with it. Here is my opinion about a movie. I've been thinking a lot about The Darjeeling Limited lately. I'm on the defense. I seem to be the only one I know who liked it. My wife liked it, too, but in a very muted way. Between "good" and "meh." Seconds before beginning this post, I noticed two new comments from a friend of mine on the negative side of the scorecard. I've only seen this latest Wes Anderson film once, but, like The Life Aquatic, my opinion of it has changed several times since. This week, I kind of think I love it. And I kind of think that the people who don't like it, even if I think they are wonderful human beings, are undergoing some kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing because they are all saying the same things about why they hated it. Oh, snap! Now you're on the defense, haters! Before I get into that, though, I need to go a few other places. I'm going to go back to 1985, to a Friday night in my former home, with my formerly married parents, and a VHS rental. After that, or maybe before that, we'll see when I start typing the next paragraph, I'm going on a fool's errand, to a place that can never exist, where I will try to articulate exactly what it is I value at the exact moment I watch a film and how anyone who argues about the merits of a film with someone else needs to give the opponent the same courtesy and attempt to articulate this completely indefinable aesthetic. Can it be done? Maybe we could understand each other better if we tried, though trying is all we can do because there's no way in heaven or hell to succeed at this game.

Class consciousness has always been a big part of my own identity. I was raised in a small town by a railroad machinist and a housewife, both of whom had spent large chunks of their childhoods alternating between poverty and getting by okay. Until my mother's dissatisfaction with the constraints of being a homemaker when I was a teenager led her on to menial jobs, a return to the college she'd dropped out of at 19 when she married, a Master's degree, social work, writing, published work as a poet (and an eventual divorce from my non-supportive father, no matter what the fuck he thinks caused it, and I know I'm being too hard on him but sometimes he deserves it), we were a five-mouthed (six if you count the Dalmatian, Pepper, who died when I was 12, and two months later the black lab/mutt mix Jazzy, who died the year before my parent's divorce, when I was 24) one-income family. I'm not wearing this as some badge of working-class authenticity. The majority of my hometown was, still is, working class, so only the dirt-poor kids were ostracized. Most of my friends shared my economic background. The handful of rich kids were hated, but mysteriously became the most popular kids in the school. My only economic childhood burdens were the lack of name-brand foods in our cupboard and refrigerator, and modest Christmas and birthday gifts, though we got a Nintendo when I was 10, and I received a drum set when I was 12, though my parents borrowed the money from my grandfather and spent the next several weekends doing odd jobs for him to pay it off. (I remember a privileged friend of mine a few years ago asking me what I got for my birthday. When I told her that my mother sent me a CD, she snorted and laughed, like I had been shortchanged by a cheapskate. What the fuck? That's what I asked for. I don't understand rich people. I guess money trumps love, even if you're a liberal.) My parents felt the real financial burdens as children. My father's father drank himself within a hair's breadth of bankruptcy and lost his farm. (Incidentally, he was a wonderful human being. My father, unfortunately, takes after his mother, and has never read anything voluntarily, ever. He won't even read newspapers or photo captions. He reads his mail, and ads for cars and motorcycles when he's ready to trade in his old model for something new. He spends his life ensuring that nothing, good or bad, will ever happen to him. Life has other plans, much to his chagrin.) (Jesus Christ, I'm an asshole. He loves me, and what have I ever done with my life?) (I want to point out that I'm two vodkas in to this post. I don't know if that affects anything. I don't usually post about my personal life, so this might explain it, but I'm getting somewhere. The payoff will occur 600 posts from now, in the year 2000. I swear this has something to do with movies, eventually.) (I use parentheses like David Foster Wallace uses asterisks. I apologize.) (I hate David Foster Wallace's writing, by the way. Just want to put more of my friends on the defensive.) (I'll probably get zero comments on this post. If I wrote, "Today I ate a truffle," I would get 40 comments.) My dad's sob story has been simplified to one line. On to my mom. She grew up dirt-poor. Her dad drank too much, too, but he bounced from odd job to odd job instead of farming, bouncing her along with him and the rest of their large family all over Nebraska, Washington, and Oregon, and back to Nebraska, where he sort of got his shit together as a truck driver. She's told me about living in places with holes in the walls, rats coming up out of the toilets, not enough beds so she slept on the back porch, enduring constant interruptions from my grandfather's drinking buddies. One drinking buddy worked near their trailer, so he cut through it every morning on his way to the job. My grandmother let my mother hang up her Monkees poster in the living room. The drunk saw it one morning and laughed his ass off, thinking it was my grandmother's. When my mother was a teenager and my dad was in his early twenties, in the early days of their relationship, they came back from a date to find my grandfather and some alcoholic drinking it up. The drunk said something obscene to my mother and my grandfather chased him out of the house, all the way to the highway, in a pouring rain, and beat the shit out of him. My future mother and father watched the whole thing. Some date. I've never had a date that good. I can't even imagine my grandfather running. A formerly handsome man, he's enormously overweight now. A crane fell on him in New Mexico when I was a small child, and he lived because he was so fat. Dignity? Nobody's ever had any. It's a myth. We're animals, for fuck's sake.

I guess I'm supposed to hate Wes Anderson because of my background. The Darjeeling Limited is self-indulgent, elitist, about rich kids, imperialist, racist, right? I can't believe that we're damning Wes Anderson for being white and rich and privileged. Let's take every American film and TV show from the last hundred years. And we're finally getting pissed about this? From someone who is honest and forthright about his elitist privilege, and makes it the subject of his film? Meanwhile we pretend that every sitcom and Hollywood movie is reflecting average American life? Those giant houses in the suburbs. The expensive furniture. The lack of unemployment. The intact family units. None of this acknowledged. We're not outraged at these lies and brainwashings perpetuated by even good films like Risky Business, etc. Ferris Bueller is a hero, and Wes Anderson's the elitist? Give me a fucking break. What, he should pretend to be poor? Progression? A filmmaker constructing his own visual world out of his own imagination, even the references to other films and songs made personal. A filmmaker with a rich, cohesive visual palette, a visual palette that has continued to evolve with each film even when the narrative hasn't. An expert handling of color and movement. The movement of human bodies through the frame. A Precision Ambiguity. That's what I'm looking for, and that's what Wes Anderson gives me. He's not sloppy. He puts two years into a film, and we call it elitist in two minutes, and somehow we've done something important for culture. No one's above criticism, and I made the same criticisms of this film at different points in the last couple months, but where were you/me when the useless, elitist bullshit culture that has either given us or pretended to give us every opportunity and told us every lie we've ever had/heard preceded The Darjeeling Limited? Now we're upset, though, because someone whose films we supported ended up making money from these films and made a movie reflecting this success. The Iraq War is a real drag and all that, the Patriot Act, too, but the Writer's Strike is what we should really be up in arms about. Those poor, poor TV and Hollywood writers. Why aren't we out in the streets, banging pots and pans? The people behind Jimmy Kimmel, "Everybody Loves Raymond," and "2 Fast, 2 Furious" are not as rich as the directors and stars of same. Don't look around when they come for you, bro. You didn't speak up for these heroes. Fuck those motherfuckers. They shouldn't be paid one dollar. If they were real writers, they wouldn't live in that town. Enjoy Sodom, you mediocrities. Dollar, dollar bill, y'all. I'm obviously not talking about The Darjeeling Limited anymore, or my friends who didn't like it. But I do hate hack Hollywood and TV writers and their whiny bullshit. People have real problems in this world.

Obviously, I didn't even get to the purpose of this post yet, so I'll leave that for Part 2. Up next: the trip back to 1985 and that VHS rental (pictured above), and how I watch movies and what I'm looking for when I watch them, though I don't think I know how to explain that. And more personal revelations. (Revelation #1: I don't like broccoli.)