And the Winner is...

The Oscars are being awarded tomorrow and I'm almost through with my marathon of movie watching.
In the last week I've seen My Week with Marilyn (delightful), A Dangerous Method ( gripping), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (brave), The Rum Diary (enjoyable for nostalgic reasons), and  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (anticlimactic). I've now seen all nine best picture nominees, and most of the movies with best actor/actress nominations.

I found this year's crop of movies overall to be slightly less stellar than last year's, but still there were movies I enjoyed so much that I'll see them again. I've already watched The Descendants twice, ditto for The Artist and Midnight in Paris. Add to this list of favorites - My Week with Marilyn.

So here are my choices, not the ones I think will win - just the ones I like the best.

Actor in a leading role - George Clooney (The Descendants)
Actor in a supporting role - Max Von Sydow ( Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
Actress in a leading role -Michelle Williams ( My Week with Marilyn)
Actress in a supporting role -Berenice Bejo (The Artist)
Best Picture -Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I had been resisting Extremely Loud from the start. I was afraid to watch the 9/11 movie - after all we New Yorkers saw the original uncut version over and over on the news for days and weeks after the event. Many of us lived it in 3D: I personally know of one firefighter who had an extremely loud and incredibly close call in one of the towers, and I know of several Wall Streeters who had to run for their lives. My mother had to walk home from Manhattan to the Bronx on that day, as did thousands of others when transportation was shut down, however I (with a combination of very good luck and a little common sense) was able to avoid being close to the action on that day. I was late for work and was standing on an elevated train track when the first tower was hit. I saw the smoke, and took the next train heading back home.

I finally watched that movie today - the story of a boy dealing with the loss of his father, aided by a whole city of villagers. He finds so much through his loss, which is a great lesson for anyone with the guts to try and learn it (which is why my one word for this movie was 'brave').
The movies are a great way to escape - but they rise to what I think is their highest calling when they  actually help us to face something,

Life, Life... Life

Last weekend I watched the movie 'The Tree of Life' and found myself unmoved.
Well, that's not strictly true. I found the concrete story engaging, but the attempts to reach for a  'bigger theme' irritating.
The movie seemed to be an attempt to place the short span of human life into the larger context of the universe - but images of outer space, cells dividing and even dinosaurs interspersed with scenes of swirling colors, light, sky and forests seemed to me like overkill.

An afterlife was imagined on film which made all wrongs right and took away the pain inflicted and suffered in earthly life, but I found it unsatisfying, unable as it was in its ephemeral lightness to counter the grittiness of the flesh and bone existence depicted.

After all this is the only side we know about, however incompletely, right?

This weekend, I saw the movie 'A Better Life'. This was a small movie which didn't try to draw any bigger circles than those implied by the situation depicted. It was the story of a Mexican-American boy on the edge of young adulthood, living with a father who was himself outside the fringes of social legitimacy. In the time they have together before he is deported, the father manages to teach his son lessons in ambition, perseverance, mercy, decency, faith, sacrifice and hard work. After the father is deported, his son has to decide whether to join mainstream society or fall into lockstep with the gang members who have begun to press in on him.We are never quite sure that he will, but he chooses the better life.

Coincidentally this past week, for the second time in his life, my son asked me "Have you ever thought what is the meaning of existence?" 

When he'd asked it the first time maybe a year ago my heart leaped, but this time it sank.
Suddenly I didn't want him grappling with this question for which I didn't have an answer, let alone the answer.
His father's theory is (and I quote): "You're born, you live, you die and there is not much meaning to it". His grandmother's theory is (verbatim): "It's a struggle to be born, a struggle to live, a struggle to die - and we'll know the meaning of it 'by and by'."

So what's the meaning of life? You're born, stuff happens to you, you feel stuff, you think stuff, you do stuff. Sometimes you stop and wonder about all the stuff, looking for patterns so that you can figure out what kind of stuff might happen next. And sometimes - in frustration, in boredom, in despair, in wonder or awe, in the craziest (or maybe the sanest) moment of your life you put all the stuff aside and turn toward yourself. And it's then that you ask, what is the meaning of existence?

My son wanted to know - did I ever wonder, did I ever ask.
Slowly I replied, "Yes, I have."



Photo: Corrie White - Liquid drop art: Mushroom and Jellyfish

Letting It Be

Do you wish you could leave the past behind? Really leave it behind. Just walk forward without dragging it along like a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe?

I do.

Of course, despite all the talk these days about leaving 'smaller footprints', it's quite impossible not to leave some evidence of where you've been, but how about not bringing so much of that dust into the next room with you; or into the next moment?

It's an Eastern idea that negative emotional memory tends to accumulate in our cells and our organ systems: anger being stored in the liver, sadness in the lungs, stress in the stomach... fear in the kidneys. (Hey, where do the positive emotions go?) And as usual, we westerners seem hell bent on proving that we are the best at stockpiling it.

We drag that dust along for a variety of reasons - lack of awareness, incomplete processing of experiences, fear of change, the need to make others feel guilty, and plain old denial or a refusal to accept things.

Isn't it funny that refusal to accept something should bind us to it? 

Or, that what we become attached to should desert us?

What if things are neither here nor there? What if it's just our wanting them to be here too much that makes them seem far away; or our pushing them away that makes them seem so threateningly close?

No amount of rationalizing will completely quell the urge to seek what we want and resist what we don't want - but when we get stuck, letting things be as they are might be the only reliable way forward.

AP Photo/dapd, Winfried Rothermel

Carnage

Well, this was refreshing - a movie set almost exclusively in one room, with four people who meet to discuss the beating ( one whack with a piece of wood) of one of couple's child at the hands of the other. The movie is set in Brooklyn - in the gentrified Brooklyn Bridge area which is now essentially, (culturally at least) an extension of Manhattan. Civility quick gave way to a veiled blaming as both sides sought to uncover the 'sins of the fathers' which could have caused the event which played out  between their two eleven year olds.

The aggressor's father (Chistoph Waltz) appeared to use his blackberry as an appendage as he did damage control for the pharmaceutical company which he represented; his wife (Kate Winslet) was preoccupied with her appearance, constantly stroking a lock of hair across her forehead, and deftly re-applying lipstick mid-sentence without the aid of a mirror. She, appropriately enough, loses all her composure when she throws up on the coffee table art books belonging to the victim's mother ( Jodie Foster), a highly strung perfectionist, and quite possibly, an alcoholic.  The victim's father (William C. Riley)  seemed like a teddy-bear - apparently affable, but cold-hearted enough to release his daughter's pet hamster into traffic because he was sick of the noise it made at night.

Loyalties slackened as the dynamics of each marriage became evident - the two couples became four individuals, aligning themselves in various ways from moment to moment; wives against husbands, moderates against liberals; alliances made and dissembled in the course of the heated conversation.The  thin veneer of civiility gave way to raw viciousness, exposing each person's insecurities and angst, before snapping tightly back into defense and accusation again.
There was no resolution, they still didn't decide at the end of all of that talk how to deal with the situation of the playground violence, which seemed mercifully expedient by comparison.

Showtime

 


I've continued making my way through the list of movies I want to see before the Oscars are presented on February 26th. I'm well on my way - having seen seven of the nine Best Picture contenders and 14 movies overall. My favorite is The Descendants with The Artist ( which I've seen twice) a close second.

Most inane movie - Melancholia.
Most predictable ( despite all the suspense) - We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Most delightful - Midnight in Paris
Most uplifting - 50/50
Most depressing - Margin Call
Most fun - Bridesmaids
Most gut wrenching - Jane Eyre

My original list of 33 has been reduced to twenty-ish.
On the near horizon:
The Tree of Life
A Better Life
Carnage
and the documentary "Pina"

To the movies!