Another Reason Why Theater is Better Than Film

Now that my show is open, I finally have some free time to actually sit down and watch a movie.  While I appreciate the chance to shift into neutral and recharge the batteries, I wouldn’t say that I’d characterize my time with cinematic adventures as “vegging out.”  I’m an active movie watcher.  I wanna get involved.  I wanna get right up in there and help Daniel-san Crane Technique little Johnny in the face.  Right in the mouth.  I wanna be the one saying to Allie, “I wrote you every day for a year.  It wasn’t over for me… It’s still not over for me!” as the music swells.  I wanna be tired by the time the credits roll.  I blame The Neverending Story.

OK… summer’s over.  No more shitty CG-driven “blockbusters.”  Give me good writing and complex characters.  This week, netflix has bestowed these two things unto me in the form of what inadvertently became a mini film festival focusing on renowned playwrights as writer/directors.  Redbelt, by David Mamet and In Bruges, by Martin McDonagh.

If I could, I would only see movies written and directed by well known theater playwrights.  The characters are fuller and more challenging for the actors, which amount to an opportunity to show their chops or a glaring example of the lack of real talent in the Hollywood Uppercrust.  The characters, oozing real humanity through their pores, are also placed in situations that you feel could be happening just around the corner.  Everything feels realer, more human, and yet extraordinary.  Maybe that’s because most movies are either trying to flex an FX muscle or trying so hard to be artsy that they end up choosing style over substance.

These two are simple, no bells and whistles, just real people making choices, taking us from point A to point B.  That’s what makes them great.  YOU HEAR THAT, HOLLYWOOD?  DO YA?

So if you get a chance, drop either of these in your netflix queue or stop by the video store and see if they’re there.  They might, topically, not be your cup of tea but the storytelling is better than I’ve seen in a long time.

Adam Sandler – 2, Wile E. Filipino – 0

Recent events in my personal life have left me junk-punched. I’m walking it off.

Idle hands are the devil’s playground and, apparently, idle brains are his coloring book. So to quell the onslaught of thoughts that have me renting a flat in the Dark Place, I’ve turned to my dvd collection. I’m starting to regret selling Nacho Libre to that used dvd place, cuz daddy needs some escapism.

Maybe that’s not what I need, but it’s definitely what I want. The time for wallowing is over. Time to move on to watching the Big Bear speech from Swingers over and over and over.

[Note: a very special thank you to all those of you who have sent me an encouraging word or seven. The last time this happened to me I didn't have too many friends to lean on and it's great to know that at least something has changed in the last year.]

Today, the movie of choice was 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore and the long and short of it is that I cried like a little girl watching her balloon fly away. This is not the first Adam Sandler movie to make me weep in the last month. The Wedding Singer did me in a couple weeks ago.

There’s a certain kind of catharsis that happens with watching a romantic comedy. I’ve even been tempted a few times to turn movies off during the “Boy Loses Girl” section, just to give myself a dose of reality. But there’s something to be said for having faith that, in the end, everything will turn out for the best.

At first glance you’d think that a Sandler movie might not get too deep, but I realized today that this movie encompasses almost everything I believe about love. It’s in the things you do, the choices you make. I want, one day, to wake up in the morning and spend my entire day getting someone to fall in love with me and knowing that she spending her day getting me to fall in love with her. Then I want to go to sleep and wake up the next day and do it all over again. I want to protect her from the things that scare her or are potentially hurtful to her and feel safe knowing she wants the same for me. I want every kiss to feel like a first kiss. Is this a lot to ask? Yes. But since when did love become ordinary?

Cloverfield

Maybe I’m in a mood. Well, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a couple of days, so that’s an understatement. I got the movie Cloverfield from my netflix and I gotta say… I like it. I liked it in an unexpected way. It’s a Monster eats New York, blood and guts disaster kinda movie shot through the eyes of one of the characters taking a shaky home video a la the Blair Witch. I’m sure it’s easy to just stop there and ask yourselves, “Aren’t these the same guys who made Felicity?” And the answer is yes.

Again, maybe I’m in a mood, but I didn’t stop there (I’m not afraid to admit that I watched Felicity pretty religiously since it coincided with my college years, and the girls on that show were a lot hotter than most of the girls I went to school with). I’m sure that some people saw it for the Sci-fi alien, special FX driven movie that it was. If you wanna get uppity, we can discuss the implications of how the first-person shooting concept, that made some theaters need to hand out barf bags at each showing, was ground-breaking and an interesting visual vocabulary. I think all of this stuff is just fine and dandy, but what I want to talk about is how this movie with its CG and virtually unknown cast got me thinking about life, love, and priorities. Don’t get me wrong, I totally geeked out at the effects, and I did think that the visual style of the movie was an interesting way of personalizing the scope and breadth of what could otherwise have become a big budget monster movie (read: boring).

If you’ll allow me to mix my sci-fi here, there’s an episode of Firefly that references a fictional chinese poet named Shan Yu, who wrote: “Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano’s edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man.”

As you follow this group of people making their way through the streets of New York, the stress of their situation sets in and you start to see what’s truly important to them and the lengths to which they’ll go for one another. One of them in particular, Rob, who is hell bent on walking 40 or 50 blocks to make sure the girl he’s in love with is ok. It’s cheezy, yes, but love will do that to you.

The philosopher Schopenhauer wrote that “in the tragic catastrophe we turn away from the will to life itself.” It’s suggested that witnessing this catastrophe can ultimately be liberating for us because we reach a state where we are no longer attached to our suffering and that leads to a sublime perception of the world. A state that is compared to the Buddhist concept of Nirvana or enlightenment.

I’m sure that the philosophy nerds out there will tell me I’m misquoting Schopenhauer, but I like to think that in those moments when we suspend our will to life, we put our own welfare aside and our potential becomes limitless. And if not, at the bare minimum we learn what’s really #1 on our list of priorities.

I used to think that it was pretty morbid of me to wonder how I’d feel at the moment before I died. The age old ‘what if you only had one day to live’ thing. Would I have regrets that I didn’t say what I should have said or do what I could have done? Well, maybe I’ll never know what my true priorities are til I’m going toward the bright white light… but at least I’m thinking about them now, and I hope that it won’t take a monster eating half of Minneapolis for me to figure them out.

Movie Love

Is it possible that the only times I’ve ever really fallen in love was at the movies?  I can remember the first time it happened.  Drew Barrymore.  Even before Princess Leia in the gold bikini, it was Drew Barrymore in ET.  After all, she was much closer to my age.

As a 28-year-old man who still sleeps with a Pound Puppy who’s old enough to drink (creatively named “Puppy”), these are things that I’m starting to wonder about myself.  Not big things, like how I’m gonna pay bills on an actors salary, or where I see myself in 5 years, but little things.  Things like this.

I’m not just talking about thinking actresses are hot, there’s plenty of that to go around.  Watching two people fall in love on the silver screen makes you feel like you’re falling in love.  It gives some people hope that true love, fairytale romances, and happy endings really exist.  But what if I’m merely living vicariously through the fictional life of John Cusack?  What if Meg Ryan’s Sally is the one of a few women I’ll ever really fall for?

Someone said that once you find the person you belong with, the only other time you fall in love is at the movies.  But what about beforehand?  What if you don’t find each other?

My first high school girlfriend came along when I was a freshman.  My parents sat me down and attempted to explain to me the concept of puppy love, the idea that infatuation and love are not the same thing.  The problem is that my 13-year-old brain couldn’t tell the difference.

People say that when you find The One, it changes your life.  That it’s totally different from anything you’ve ever experienced.  So if that’s true, everything else is prologue.  I’m ok with that for the most part, because I’m gonna have one hell of a story to tell the grandkids, but it begs the question: How can you tell the difference?  I heard someone describe the way women look for the ‘perfect guy’ as the same thing as shopping for the little black dress:  You think you know what you’re looking for, but you don’t really know until you find it.

My idiotic 13-year-old self thought he was in love, and maybe he was.  My idiotic 25-year-old self could have been just as much in love as the 13-year-old was, but the truth is that neither of those guys are still with the women they thought they loved.  So what’s the difference?

She’s out there somewhere.  It’s a matter of faith, and I’m trying my best to be patient.  But if she turns out to be married to the wrong guy, or a nun or something, I can always pop in The Notebook and fall in love with Rachel McAdams…again.