Let me program your movie house

We would watch so many great films!



Midnight: 1930s screwball perfection, written by your good friend Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond, starring Claudette Colbert and a hot young Don Ameche.
Breaking Away: Is it the best coming-of-age movie of all time? (And hellooo, 1970s Dennis Quaid!)
Whip It and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. Obviously a costume party theme.
Rushmore and All the Real Girls, because the difference between Wes Anderson when he had his man, Owen Wilson and David Gordon Green in the same sitch, with Paul Schneider (would switch Aziz Ansari out for you back on Parks and Recreation in a HEARTBEAT) makes me think that directors need their muses.
Mad Men week where we watch all the movies cited/that clearly have an influence on the series. The Best of Everything. The Apartment. The Swimmer. Etc. What would Don Draper watch?



Breaking Bad on the Big Screen, because it would be amazing. “One Minute,” in particular. And then with Coen Brothers movies and The Searchers and all sorts of stuff.
Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
Wim Wenders day with Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire. My favorite theater in Cambridge used to do a semi-annual Wings of Desire showing around Christmastime and it was incredible.
In the Loop, Keane, New Waterford Girl, Reprise, Reality Bites, Something Wild, Blue Valentine, Blue Velvet, Medicine for Melancholy, Friday Night, Beau Travail, Amelie, Paul Robeson week, amazing stunts in movies week, let’s watch a documentary and talk about it and then take action week (small screen, generally, unless you make it pretty, documentarians!), etc. etc. etc., forever. Great movies about weddings and country houses week. So many potential themes.

[Related: Elvis Mitchell, the teflon man, remember when I used to see you on the Harvard campus all the time? Pretty sure you lived on my block. We would nod hello to each other. (Film Independent, keep this in mind, I would totally be his assistant. And I’m wildly reliable.)]

How much fun would we have? So much fun! Let’s build a film community!

Stop it

Movies take on a certain amount of importance in the humid, sticky, gross months of summer. They’re your ticket to another world, a world of magic and dreams: a gigantic room blasting air conditioning.

And dear me, this summer of terrible movies just means that the world of air conditioning, of thinking straight, of not feeling like a humid blob is denied to me. Thanks movies! Since I hadn’t seen Bridesmaids when it came out, I got to see it last week. Great, wonderful, A-number-one movie that you can see when it’s 100 degrees outside. And it was really wonderful to see a movie about a lady fuck-up that had a lot of emotional truth (people getting married always throws your life into sharp relief, doesn’t it?) even if the movie’s actual structure was sloppy and uninspired.

But, god, if I had seen Bridesmaids the week it came out, since it was my social obligation as a woman? Then I would have to choose between The Hangover 2 (on four screens), Kung Fu Panda 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, X Men: Mocking My Life… ugh. It was bad. Seeing movies during the summer is more of a mercenary act. There are ones that look passable enough for air conditioning’s sake - Super 8, Horrible Bosses, Tree of Life (playing in a tiny, crappy theater in two weeks), Midnight in Paris (I guess, if I have to, but, you know, fuck Woody Allen), Beginners (doesn’t come out until July, and I desperately want to see it) -  and you have to wait until the weather demands it. You can’t use up all your chances to hide from the heat in the movie theater, because then you’re stuck seeing Green Lantern or Larry Crowne. And that’s just not treating yourself well.

logic vs. emotion

I just went through all five seasons of Friday Night Lights and it was glorious. The thing that I think is sort of funny about the show is that… logically, there were so many holes. How old was Tim Riggins, really? Characters switched classes and schools oh-so-easily. But I was okay with it because the emotional core of the show was so strong. I’m not quite sure how it got pulled off, maybe because the style was documentary hand-held, maybe because the actors were generally unfamiliar and worked with the scripts until the dialogue felt like riffing… I cared about the characters on this show in a way I don’t, generally, with TV. (It wasn’t just about “the moments,” which is a feint of an argument that justifies liking boring mumblecore films and Mad Men.) And Coach and Mrs. Coach, what a great, sexy, adult relationship. Seeing two smart people in a grown relationship is a valuable thing in these times.

Heather Havilresky’s piece in the New York Times Magazine nails some of the show’s greatness, cannily comparing it to the empty, emotionally bankrupt calories of Glee: “The real message of “Friday Night Lights” is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life. If “Glee” is about expressing yourself, believing in yourself and loving yourself all the way to a moment of pure adrenaline-fueled glory, then “Friday Night Lights” is about breathing in and appreciating the small, somewhat-imperfect moments that make up an average life.”

I’ve been working on something that I’m utterly frustrated with, and I think part of the reason things aren’t working out for it in a variety of ways is that it goes against some of the easy storytelling found in certain genres. It’s dark and weird, and it’s trying to be a response to some of the “you are the CHOSEN ONE” stories. The narrative of specialness. But if you do that, you need to nail every single emotional event and pain in someone’s life. I learned that from Friday Night Lights. We’ll see what happens.

Tortured Relationships #1: Email

One nice thing about a vacation was that I got away from my email. I don’t have a smartphone. Checking my email means firing up my computer and clicking on my firefox icon. (God, it feels old-school just writing about it.)

The distance, however, gave me a little clarity. For this moment in my life, email has too much importance. It plays too many roles. It’s my form of communication for work. It’s my form of communication for staying in touch with my friends - and, admittedly, I have far too few friends within driving distance at the moment. The people who play big roles in my life are all very far away. (A dream, within the next year, is to have friends in proximity. It should be easy! It is not.) And I have gotten myself in that worst sort of email pickle, the email equivalent to trying to date a dude who is sort of interested and then decides to give you the slow fade, without rejecting you outright or telling you what’s going on. The dude that disappears. It’s all a recipe to stare at the gmail inbox, hoping it will tick forward to one, so that you have that very special email in your hands and can move on with your life.

That’s no way to live! So, from now on, time to wean myself off in the smallest of ways: 30 days of checking email at noon and four and that’s it. Replying right away. When it comes to friends, I want to make more use of things like Skype, for now.

Hopefully, things should be improved. Nobody should be chained to their computer and email in the summer. That’s just not healthy.

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is now, in retrospect, a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.”

— David Simon talking about James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in GQ is 1200ish words of perfection. It’s not online yet, unfortunately. The Alexander Skarsgard interview is fairly hilarious and worth a read, too, partially because I think Sweden is an underrated funny country.

Maybe I am a movie nerd/purist because let me tell you, I got to see the teaser trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tonight and it was an incredibe experience. I walked out of the theater super pumped, stoked, whatever surfer word you want to use. Pretty sure I talked my sister’s ear off because I got excitable.

The majority of films I’ve seen in the past couple of years have been at critics’ screenings, where jerks with iphones tap tap tap and show little to no enthusiasm for what’s to come. There’s never the feeing of an event. Granted, I was at a gimme David Fincher event with Fight Club nerds, but it was pretty thrilling to see a well executed two minutes, at most, of film, that left the audience feeling wowed.

I don’t want to write too much about it, but a note: I was in a room with a bunch of Swedes. I laughed at one dark little joke. They didn’t laugh. It was done, of course, with that Fincher blue everywhere.

But listen to me, and don’t do yourself a disservice: when it leaks to the internet, don’t watch it. You need to see it on the big screen when you’re seeing some other movie, with the images large and the base booming. I guarantee a shiver of excitement.

The more I think about it, Fincher is one of the majors, isn’t he? (A part of me would file away a mild little attraction to him in the David O. Russell category. I have a soft spot for the idealism of directors who seem like visionary jerks.) You have to have strong feelings, one way or another, about Seven, The Social Network, and Fight Club. What other director has been so consistent and so nihilistic and so devastating?