Encounterculture

Lest I Forget

Jonathan Rosenbaum is probably my favorite pop critic of all time (although I like his books more than his reviews, especially Movie Wars, which is the What Is Cinema? of the modern movie business), but lately he's been kinda falling off a little. He generally makes good points, but he's very much a critic who grew up in the sixties when the Canonical Revolution was starting to take place; as such, he's very protective of his standards and in recent months has shown unwillingness to change, especially when it comes to issues like the capacity of cinema to reflect a multipolar world, which in my mind should be the most pressing concern of pop critics.

And then he goes and does something awesome. I guess Chicago's in the throes of their annual film festival; I'm not really hip to the various festival circuitry, so I don't know if it's still going on, but from the looks of what they're showing, it definitely seems worth checking out if it is. But more to the point, en lieu of doing an actual review, Rosenbaum's been doing introductions to the festival for the last two weeks, and by god damn, they're really goddamn interesting. It's one thing to appreciate a movie; it doesn't really mean anything to just sit there and appreciate something, and though I'm usually more interested in what Rosenbaum appreciates in a movie than, say, Melanie Credle or Anthony Lane, I can't avoid pointing out that that's what he's been doing recently. But here, he's extrapolating things from his appreciation, and that's always worth publicizing. Links:

The first week's intro
The second week's intro

A few notes before seeing Kill Bill

Everyone in the world who likes movies these days - or at least everyone who likes movies with whom I've recently been in contact - has been frothing at the mouth about Kill Bill; it came out yesterday, and I've already been peppered with opinions (or in some cases for opinions). I have not, as yet, seen the movie, nor do I intend to see it for at the ass-least, a week (but probably more like two weeks), and if you're wondering why, just reread that first sentence.

When a movie first comes out, especially if it's a movie with a heavyweight pedigree, the first few weeks are always the worst. I remember when Beautiful Cinematography, Boring Movie came out in 2000, I couldn't turn left onto Wilshire without four or five people bludgeoning me with a fully-fleshed-out account of their experiences with the movie. I don't begrudge any of them their experiences, of course, but on a very real level, they weren't talking about the movie itself.

Most of this can be attributed to the dominant mode of pop critical analysis today, which is basically to prize your own view of a movie above and beyond anything else. It's times like these when I'm glad that I get a kick out of language, because you can pick nearly any review written for a mass audience ever written, and if you look closely enough, you'll see that the critic is really just hiding behind language. The way they use verbs alone is pretty telling; frequently transitive verbs get employed as description, but who's to say that that description is the only one available to an audience? Lost in Translation's Tokyo was stunningly gorgeous to me, but I can also see how it could be taken as terrifying, lonely, and probably seven or eight other adjectives that never even occurred to me. And it's even worse how they use the passive voice; frequently it's just sleight-of-hand used to cover up what would otherwise be a blatantly fanboyish tautology.

Fuck that. I don't want to come down hard on fanboys, of course - god knows that Steven Soderbergh and Michael Bay don't have a bigger fan in the universe than me - but fanboyism is not criticism. Criticism, to quote Saint Nick, is predicated on the ability to describe what everyone can experience, not what you experience, and yet most people would argue the opposite. By doing so, all they're selling is their version of the movie, and although there's times when that can be interesting (depending on the person doing the selling, of course, and more precisely how interesting I think they happen to be), for the most part, it's just more advertising, and if there's one thing from which I could use a break, advertising's gotta be it.

Kill Bill, right now, at this very moment, is in the grip of some of the worst autocratic fanboy bullshit that I've ever seen in my life, and that includes the Star Wars movies. I can't go to a message board's movie section without being bludgeoned with orders to go see it, or that it's awesome, or in one case, that it's "the best movie you'll ever see in the theaters". If you're in the mood for some linguistic fun, and you think you're resistant to phenomenons of this type, go nuts. Count the number of times the word "great" (or some similar qualitative term) is thrown out in a comparable discussion of the movie, and then try rereading the sentence after adding the phrase "I think that" to the front. I'll bet you a steak dinner that there's not a lot of change.

I want, very badly, to bleat and moan and plaintatively ask why people do this, but in truth, I know damn well why people do it, because I'm in the process of unlearning how to be one of them. The thing about movies is that since they're both such a young medium and such a convincing representation of the real world, it's very easy to give in to the temptation to start talking about them like they're actual events, and prize your experience of "being there when it happened". There are occasions, of course, when reactions like this are perfectly legitimate; if you were there for the Pomona screening of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (one of maybe two times it was shown uncut to the public) or in France to see Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (one of the few cases where I'd be willing to admit that a film is a self-sufficient end-product, and that the presence of an audience is essentially negligible to justify it as art) or - god almighty - sitting with Hitler when he saw The Great Dictator, then yes, you were lucky enough to be "there". These are moments which extend beyond film history; these are moments in movie history, of course, but they touch human lives and real-world situations that don't necessarily have anything to do with the film itself, or even with film itself. If you're there when the film is incidental, a footnote in its own history, then yes, you can say you were there.

I think I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that none of that applies to Kill Bill. Of course, I'd also say that none of that applies to Pulp Fiction, or Contempt, or Citizen Kane, or even The Passion of Joan of Arc. Most movies, including if not especially most of the great ones, are simply case studies of the power of cinema as an artform, but because that particular power is so seductive, people often confuse its intensely personal effect with a more globally important one. Bull. I saw Pulp Fiction at the exact right age (middle school) in the exact right place (the cinematically gaunt Durham, North Carolina) at the exact right moment in cinematic history (I'd been aware of the decadence of contemporary movies for at least a few years previously - remember, that was the age of Dances With Wolves and Forrest Gump and such), but even in spite of all of that, I'm still not about to make any grand sweeping claims that Pulp Fiction captured the essence of the age or anything (well, not anymore). The truth is, it captured the essence of the age as I perceived it, and it certainly changed and affected the way I looked at both movies and the world, but it didn't go further than that.

But the ideology's already starting to seep into Kill Bill of it being a "return to form" or that it's rich in technically "perfect" moments, which is just a more academic way of saying I WAS THERE WHEN SOMETHING PERFECT HAPPENED NANANANANA. I fucked up and read an email from my friend David where he mentioned a beastly tracking shot, and all I can say is Dammit, because now that's at least one section of the movie for which I've got a framework fixed in my mind. (No, it's not his fault; I'm sure I've done the same thing to him in the past.) Recently, I watched Hard Boiled for the second time; when I saw it the first time I didn't even know what a tracking shot was, so this was the first time that I went in expecting to see The Tracking Shot. You know what happened? I spent the whole time waiting for The Shot, and then marveling at the virtuosity when it happened, ignoring anything that happened in the film in the meantime. That's no way to watch a movie, and that's exactly and precisely what I'm trying to avoid with Kill Bill.

If you're really going to talk about movies, or music, or anything, first you have to know what it is. I can't say for sure that I've got anything close to the answer (nor do I particularly want to be the one with the answer), but right now, the one definition that makes the most sense to me is the notion that cinema is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when your mind tries to reconcile your world with a convincing one that you're not in (i.e. the movie). If you accept that as your basic premise, then you've got to also accept that by definition, there can't be a Right way to look at movies anymore than there can be a Right way to look at the world; there's only the one that you have. There's other factors (especially social factors, which I'm still wrangling into the theory), but the fundamental attraction of cinema is one that's based on seeing the world, and I would just as soon tell someone to see the world my way as I would cut off my foot and boil it with a sprig of mint. I love cinema because it's so democratic that it allows five hundred people to see one movie and theoretically have five hundred different, equally legitimate interpretations, and yet now here's Kill Bill, out for two days and a party line's already starting to emerge.

Most people who read this, I expect, are rolling their eyes at me and flipping through their rolodex of witticisms to chide me for being too serious about something which shouldn't really have anything to do with the movie itself. They're right, of course; I am too serious about it, and that's the end of the sentence. You're either for cinema or against it, and I'm for it, to the extent that I'll give Jackie Brown a second chance and tell everyone how stupid I was to bash it the first time, or that I'll wake up at nine in the morning on a Saturday to stand in line with Fellini fans to see the new Dardenne brothers movie, or even that I'll wait two weeks to go see a movie made by the guy who, more than nearly anyone else, set me on the path I'm on today in 1994. I'm bitterly envious of the people who legitimately love cinema and don't have to deal with things like these, but fuck it, that's the way it is. I don't want to go in expecting history or perfection or ideology; I want to go in expecting cinema, a chance to see the world from another perspective, nothing more, nothing less.

In two weeks, time will have passed; most of the hipsters (and don't think for a second that their mere presence isn't another big factor in the two weeks wait. Ever sat next to someone who laughed at every single joke in a comedy simply because it was a joke?) will have likely dragged their girlfriends away from Hot Topic long enough to see it with them at least once more, and the realization should have dawned on everyone that yes, this is just a movie, just like Lost in Translation and Far From Heaven and all the other I Wuv Teh Movees of recent years. That's my cue to walk in and maybe have an experience that's worth something. Being a critic is essentially being an archaeologist operating within a much smaller timeframe; you've got to sift through the ideology to see if something means anything, even if it only means something to you. I want to be a critic because I love doing that, not because it's cool or any bullshit like that, and if that means two extra weeks of anticipation, sign me up.

Here is an experiment.

The true test of skill is not to try to do what you want to do; this is simply safeguarding yourself against failure, since if the results turn out to be unsatisfactory, you can simply shrug it off as "not meeting your expectations". The truth is that skill is the ability to do things, not the ability to want to do them. Allen Iverson is an unbelievably skilled basketball player not because he wants to beat everyone off the dribble, but because he can, and does.

I just finished watching Brown Sugar for the second time, and feel compelled to do...something. I want to write something about it, because midway through this time I kind of tripped and found myself in the middle of a couple of thunderclap realizations; it's just that writing about those realizations instead of the movie is decadent and masturbatory and the Village Voice already has enough critics. Thus, the experiment: what can I say about this movie?

- I did like it, most elementally. For one thing, I liked it on a content level; I'm always going to be something of a soft touch when it comes to Ye Olde Fairy Tale About Those Who Did Safeguard Their Ideals Only To Later Reap The Spiritual/Critical/Financial Benefits (for obvious reasons), but more than that, I think I liked it on a formal level. I saw Brown Sugar for the first time as part of a film-school class where we'd see a theatrical release a little early, and then have a Q&A session with someone creatively involved with the film (insert USC fight song here). For Brown Sugar, we actually got the director, Rick Famuyiwa, although that was probably something of a shooting-fish-barrel situation since he'd graduated from the school less than a decade previously.

I forgot (and/or smoked away) most of the questions and answers from most of the sessions, but the Famuyiwa one stayed with me. For one, of course, the Qs were put forth by Dr. Todd Boyd, who rules in ways that those of you who've never had a class with him will never know. But more than that, I remember one specific question from the audience about the prevalence of self-referential technique in the film, all the jump-cuts and freeze-frames and so on. Famuyiwa admirably characterized them as tips of the hat to DJ tricks like dissolves and transforms and such. At the time, I didn't think much of it other than to be impressed that he was going for something above and beyond "Hey, I'm making a movie!", but this time it was something different.

As I said, I really did like this movie; I responded to it like crazy. The best compliment I can pay a movie is when I involuntarily start carping about like a circus seal mid-scene; it's embarassing and childish and uncharacteristically undignified (and I'm hardly Lord Autumnbottom to begin with), but movies can bring you to moments where you just can't help it. Brown Sugar was full of moments like that this go-round, and the little tricks were among the most prominent. It's just that they're so...well, musical I guess.

There's a quote in Nick Hornby's Songbook, one that he describes as "one of the few lines of music criticism that ever meant anything to me", which characterizes music as the art that all of the other arts aspire to be. Usually I laugh that off; for one it's stupid to prize one artform over another, and for two everyone knows that cinema is the go-to artform anyway (grin), but it's undeniable that music is the artform that can move us like no other. There are times, of course, when we don't want to be moved, when we're doing perfectly fine right where we are. But who the hell wants to be like that all the time? There's lots of time when I want to be thrown into violent fits of furious emotional candor, and for that, I need the Sex Pistols or Blondie or Hybrid or even Jackson Browne (since "melancholy" is in fact an emotion).

It's not rare to find moments like that in movies, but it requires a certain degree of complicity. Moments like that don't just stick out of movies, or if they do, then they're probably pre-fab and don't really register anyway (which would explain why I haven't seen any copies of those compilations of "great fight scenes" sitting on anyone's shelve. Ever). A lot of times, filmmakers will cheat by backing up an interesting scene with a stupendous song (Exhibit A: Casino. The whole thing), but there's no art to that, unless there's an art to liking songs. No, they emerge from the context of a whole, both the whole movie and your whole experience of living up to the moment you sat down to watch said movie. What's simultaneously great and frustrating about them, of course, is that the appeal lies in the way the moment defies categorization; the best you can do is throw elaborate similes or complicated psychobabble at the wall and hope it sticks, but if that's what's going through your mind, never ever ask me anything about movies or music ever again. When I first heard the guitar solo from "EMI" or saw Pulp Fiction (most of the whole thing, anyway), I wasn't thinking "Oh man, this is like X and Y but not like Z because..."; I was thinking, and this is a direct quote: "YES."

- I can also say that Brown Sugar was very anti-musical, because by definition, music and literature are two different beings, and Brown Sugar happens to be a movie with a lot of literary charm. If people identify with music nonverbally, by which I mean that they can recognize things without making formal connections, people identify with literature hyperliterally, for the obvious reason. This is in no small part due to the way we approach the literary medium; if music is so attractive because (to repeatedly quote Nick Hornby - I should really just get permission from McS Publishing House to post the whole book) it's a glib analogue for our emotions thanks to dramatic the crashing switches in tone and timbre, then surely literature is attractive because it's very much how our mind records things. I for one think in complete sentences, and as such I walk around all day describing sensations, emotions, events unfolding in front of me in patterns which eventually become familiar and even more eventually become little chunks of shorthand.

Thus, when I see those chunks popping up in a movie, I connect very rapidly and with a great deal of warmth. There's a great little exchange early in the movie when Sanaa Lathan (you'll excuse me if I don't look up character names; it's a stupid and draconian practice anyway) embarasses Taye Diggs over a speakerphone. What made it work for me was the way in which the dialogue wasn't overwrought for laughs (a simple "wet the bed" joke that wouldn't make it past the SNL cutting-room floor if it were matched up against a dildo joke); it's simply something that would probably be embarassing, but doesn't overpower Diggs' explosive little bit of defensive physical comedy.

I don't wet the bed, of course, but God only knows I've done plenty of shamefully embarassing stuff in my life (eight words, an ampersand, and a slash: Latin poetry recial & Peter Lorre/Sydney Grenstreet impersonations). It sucks to get called on stuff like that - it sucks a lot - but it's also not soul-crushing like your Hipster Guilt Culture Mag of choice would probably lead you to believe.

When I characterize moments like this as distinctly literary, I'm simply saying that their referent is basically your everyday life, or rather whatever you choose to preserve of your everyday life. It's not particularly artful, if you think about it - you're the one doing all the work, since you're the one who has to be embarassed if you're going to get the joke - but it is a connection, for better or worse. If anything, Brown Sugar is probably actually richer in literary moments than musical ones (as are most of the movies you really like, if you're really honest about it). Not all of these moments are real, of course, and they're rarely dead-on. Another one, a more personally involving one, came when Diggs' character decides to start his own record label; this is relatively close to "start a printed magazine", which is something that I'd really like to do, but more importantly, it's close enough.

- And fundamentally, that's what makes it cinematic, which is really all I wanted to say about it. Just to continue the metaphors for the sake of OCD, if music is an analogue of the emotions and literature is an analogue of the intellect, then cinema is an analogue of the world we see around us. Something cinematic, then, is simply something provided by a movie which affords us a chance to look at the world differently, even if the way we look at it happens to be distorted by our own hangups. Or rather, to put it differently, cinema is a catch-all for whatever goes on that makes us give a real-world referent to the sprawling fabricated world of the movies. It's not anything definite, or rather it's not consistently anything definite. Sometimes it may be that a movie plays with time in a way that seems resonant of the way the real world operates; other times it may be that a movie employs technology to show you things about the real world that you ordinarily wouldn't take notice of (and you people wonder why I love Michael Bay so much). But usually, it's neither that noble nor that simple. Cinema, most typically, is just a reaction to the synthesis of content and style wherein we can see what we want for ourselves.

Movie nerds are the absolute worst. I'm sure you've all been stuck in some interminable one-way-street of a conversation where someone's insisting on explaining every pedantic detail of something to you; inevitably there comes a point where the laws of society should cease to apply to you and the right to crush their head with a broken-off chair leg should be temporarily bestowed by the Moral Authority. And yet, as a (slowly) recovering pedant, I can say without hesitation that I know where they're coming from. The great myth about movies is that they're popular because they allow people to see the world if it worked out like it should, and while I can see the appeal of that, it doesn't account for all of the things like the Lumiere brothers' movies (simple scenes of waves crashing on a beach or workers leaving a factory) or the non-narrative art films by people like Joris Ivens (who once went out to film rain).

The truth is that movies are so appealing simply because they offer us a different perspective. If things work out, great; if not, oh well, it's just a movie. It's just so addictive to see things working out in a world that looks so much like your own. Again, this isn't as noble or accomplished as other types of cinema, but fuck it. You have to stake your claims wherever you find gold.

And that's what I can say about Brown Sugar.

Ugh; I can feel the tentacles of sickness coiling around me like some sex monster from one of those incredibly distressing anime pornos (er, um). Thus, en lieu of presenting some whiny diatribe about why I like This or That (read: something about Me) or some pretentious and portentious piece of poncemanship about philosophy or movies or musi (read: something about me, but in the third person), here's some stuff that needs to be preserved.

1. PUTZFUCK~! Holy God, who'd'a ever expected the best review of any album ever to come from THEM?!?!

2. Everyone needs to go read the thing Brendan wrote about the Replacements. I probably should have linked to it before it got buried under the morass of Yankeedom (booooooourns), but quality is quality. The best compliment I can pay to a piece of music criticism is that I can understand the critic's ideas without liking the music, and speaking as someone who responds to four, maybe five Replacements songs (and who only knows that as a result of reading the article in question), I can definitely say that this is one of those.

3. The urge to catalogue useless information is like dorkboy version of the archetypal female biological clock: it's stupid
bullshit that can only get you into trouble, but damned if it's something you can repress. As such, here's a list of the music that's been pounding away in my car, on my headphones, and throughout my speakers:

- The Sounds, "Seven Days A Week" and "Dance With Me"
- The Delphonics, "Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time"
- Lili Hayden, "Anything" (Gabriel & Dresden E-String remix)
- David Guetta, "Just A Little More Love" (Wally Lopez remix)
- Machine, "There But For the Grace of God"
- The Ramones, "Baby I Love You"
- Eddie Holman, "This Will Be A Night To Remember" and Linda Clifford, "If My Friends Could See Me Now" (and boy howdy, is this some miserably embarassing music to admit to the world that you like.)
- Mercedes Sosa, "Mi Unicornio Azul" (actually, I like the version that was actually in the Wong Kar-Wai BMWFilm more, but I can't remember the name and it's impossible to find on SoulSeek anyway. This one's plenty good anyway)
- Jackson Browne, "For A Dancer"
- Puccini/Maria Callas, "O Mio Babbino Caro" (yes, Grand Theft Auto made me a Puccini fan)
- Punjabi MC, "Jogi"

There is more, and I'm sure I'll remember all of it as soon as I press "Post & Publish", but that'll do for now. Needless to say, get all this, I guess.

4. Yes, yes, yes, the Governator. I don't really care all that much; Arnold's actually pretty socially liberal (for a mainstream politician, that is), he just likes to keep his money. Of course, I'm a big ol' red (well, technically I'm more of an anarchist, but voting socialist is kind of a vote for the destruction of at least one social structure), so God knows I wouldn't have voted for him, but since I'm still a resident of North Carolina I didn't vote either way. I will, however, say that I would much rather have to choose between Liddy Dole and James Carville (i.e. the last NC elections) rather than between Gary Coleman and Mary Carey.

That being said, I will do a 180-degree turn on the whole recall issue the moment I see the first "Don't blame me, I voted for the Bumfights guy" bumper sticker.

5. Speaking of the recall: Seeing as how I'm like the only person anyone from back in NC knows in California, I naturally got calls from people from back home who all wanted to do their "governator" thing and profess surprise at the prevalence of the references to Arnold's movies in his campaign (as if you could expect anything else from someone whose acting resume includes both The Running Man and Total Recall. If he'd made it through the first two days without making a reference, I think I'd be dead right now from a massive cardiac episode). Of course, since it's not like anyone expects him to do anything but fuck up anyway, we quickly moved onto other, more interesting and funny topics. Like the following.

My friend Cesar has worked at Domino's for like six years, and in those six years, every single other fucking person on the planet has followed him there. (The place is seriously turning into a bad Chaucer scenario; I've known well over ten people from school who've gone on to work there, and that's a very conservative estimate.. It's getting to the point where if I meet someone in Durham, I should just wish them luck in advance for when they start work at Domino's.) In that time, Cesar's had manager after manager, some of whom are cool (Bundy, for one), some of whom just kind of slip into the ether.

But I don't think the guy they have managing the store there right now is really in much danger of being forgotten any time soon. He is, according to the description of Cesar and the confirmation of my other friend Ryan, the single least respectable person ever to trod the sod (or, to quote Bundy: "He just commands disrespect"). Consider, if you will, the following scenario, which came to me via Cesar, who just does not lie, who heard it from Bundy, who lies even less, so I have absolute faith in its veracity. That's important to remember, because my immediate reaction was to call Cesar and Bundy both liars because this just confounded me. Apparently this manager has a 17-year-old daughter, who doesn't have a car, probably because of the unrelenting forcefulness of her father's refusal to buy one. I guess he must have caved to some extent, because he finally promised to buy her one if she could go six months - six months! - without calling her father a "gay faggot", end quote.

Let me repeat that: she could have a car if she could keep herself from calling her father a "gay faggot".

Cesar's reaction: "When I was seventee, if I didn't have a car, and my dad said he'd buy me a car if I did something, I'd fucking do it. I mean, if he said he'd buy me a car if I could go six months without saying the word 'is', I'd find a way."
My reaction: "WHO THE FUCK GOES AROUND CALLING THEIR DAD A GAY FAGGOT, much less doing it so often that the only way to make it stop is to promise them a car?"

I cannot understate how excited I am to be going home in December. It should be an interesting barometer of my willpower to see if I can avoid calling him a Gay Faggot within four seconds of meeting him. Place your bets now, and put me down for a hundred bucks on "There's no way he'll make it."

(Oh, and for the record, I felt much less sorry for him after Cesar told me how much he makes. Apparently the Domino's managing racket is a lucrative gig.)

(Oh, and also for the record, Bundy asked the guy how the deal was going no less than three days later, and the guy replied, "Oh, she couldn't do it. I knew she wouldn't be able to do it.")

Ladies and gentlemen, that is fucking funny.

Ordinarily I don't see the value in posting catalogued purchases that I make, but this one was kind of significant. Last night I went to see Lost in Translation, and I can't get the experience out of my mind now, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Lost in Translation, for those of you who've been living under a rock for the last month or so, is the critical darling of the year, this year's Far From Heaven (and in more ways than one - LiT borrows TONS of stuff from older movies. The only thing separating the running-through-Tokyo scenes from the running-through-Paris scenes in Jules and Jim was a bridge and a freeze-frame). People, of course, have a tendency to like movies which allow them to vicariously live out their fantasies, and I don't think it's an accident that a bunch of people living here and now really love a movie about frightened, alienated people scraping by in an environment with a humongous gap between sign and signifier. It's the condition of the age, I guess; maybe I was just 22 at the wrong time, but whenever I see people walking around in their ironically-screenprinted t-shirts and oh-so-wry trucker hats, I kind of pity them for a second. Feelings of alienation only seem natural in a world where so many of the ways people like to express themselves have become fodder for business

In that sense, I guess that Lost in Translation is a fine movie. People all around me in the movie theater were laughing at the right times and going church-mouse silent at just the right times, and all of the other people who I saw it with apparently really liked it.

(slug of Jack)

Me personally, however; I haven't had a movie put me so ill-at-ease in years. Sometimes movies can cut very, very close to the bone, not just because they're drawing out things in your life, but because they've got it down. I can't imagine that it's just me, but it sure scared the shit out of me to see that the way I see the world is reductible to a two-hour movie. Worse, this particular movie happened to be exceedingly well-made - so well-made, in fact, that I couldn't identify with anything beyond the impulses beneath the surface. I'm sure, for instance, that Tokyo is exactly as shitty as Los Angeles if you go there, but you'd never tell from watching that movie; its Tokyo looks almost as fun as Playtime's Tativille (and let's not even get into the whole Scarlett Johansson thing). It's presented as this sprawling reflective neon-bedecked playground where these two stray dogs happen to run into each other, and the whole time I'm thinking "Oh Christ, that's tremendous." Not "Oh Christ, that's familiar" - the other one.

And I won't lie: it stung - a lot - to see it with a big audience. It's some cold-ass shit to see something that personally resonant with a theater full of people laughing it up at situations that cut REALLY close to the bone. I suppose it's karma, since I'm sure that I've done the exact same thing to people in the past (and I can think of plenty of occasions when I was a stupid punk kid, arguing with people why I Was Right and They Were Wrong about a movie, which is basically just that), but the fact remains: when the audience started laughing at Bob going to the fashion-designer party and being TOTALLY out-of-place, I died more than a little. Usually I have a pretty thick skin about things like this; I'm always pretty forthright about admitting to being a sensational fuckup whenever it comes up in daily exchanges. But there's a pretty significant difference between people laughing about how I'm socially incompentant and people laughing at a neutral image which pretty much typefies me in any situation where there's more than three people around.

Whenever people compare the theater to the movies, the point of divergence between the two always seems to be that the theater has "presence", because you're actually watching people move around and there's the distinct possibility that disaster could strike at any moment (if the actors pooch a line or the lighting guys miss a cue or whatever), as compared to the sterile end-product world of the movies. I would counter, however, that the difference between the two is simply that in the theater, the experience is shared, whereas in the audience, the believability of the world is so dependent on the psychology of everyone in the audience that it's sheer luck if there's a consensus. I have no problem in saying that movies have a presence of their own, distinct from anything else; I know intellectually that Hong Kong in the sixties wasn't really like In the Mood for Love, but you can draw a similar line of distinction between Orson Welles and Falstaff. At the end of the day, it's just lies; the "presence" is just the degree to which you're willing to suspend disbelief.

In that sense, it should be no surprise that I essentially had a bad trip with Lost in Translation. I mean, here's a movie based on a scenario I understand (if not frequently feel like I'm living out) on an elemental level, set in a spectacularly interesting location and starring an incredibly charismatic actor and an INCREDIBLY attractive actress, and I'm surrounded by people reacting not too dissimilarly from the audience I saw Titanic with. I know I'm just taking it too seriously, but if you genuinely can't understand why the experience freaked me out so much, I might suggest that you go somewhere else and clear your history file.

"Books, music, films," Rob Gordon said in High Fidelity, another case of art gloriously vulgarizing my life (although I mercifully saw it before I became a COMPLETE fuckup), "...these things matter. Call me shallow; it's the fuckin' truth." I think he's right generally, but more right specifically. There are some people who, thanks to a conspiracy between biology and the march of time, are hypersensitve to things, and for better or worse, I'm super-ultra-mega-mega-king-size-hypersensitive to movies. I've spent the last howevermany hours trying to think up a way to commit it to a review, but came up short every time, because I can't claim any conceivable grounds of objectivity. All I have with that movie are my experiences with it, and that's not always a good thing (viz. me at American Splendor, where some guy sitting directly behind me started laughing whenever Harvey was at his job, where he files documents for a hospital).

I can't say I'm going to swear off going to the movie theaters, because that would just be a damned lie (what with Kill Bill, 21 Grams, Eros, Oceans 12, and god knows what else coming out in the next few months). But it's important to remember that just because something can give you a thrill, that doesn't mean that that thrill can't go straight to hell with a change of scenery. When I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, I went out and started reading everything I could about Quentin Tarantino and essentially took my first steps towards deciding that film criticism might be a good thing to do for the rest of my life. When I saw Lost in Translation, all I did was come home and drink.

You'll notice - well, those of you who know me, anyway - that I haven't written anything about movies yet. This is not unintentional; in truth, I've only written one thing about movies (a lonely, incoherent polemic about the auteur theory which only made its way out to a few people) in the last few months. It's just that I've been going through this weird thing where I'm not sure if I have anything useful to say about movies anymore. I'm being unclear. Allow me to explain.

About a year ago, I had to watch Boys Don't Cry for class, and almost ended up tearing my hair out in boredom. I know it's an important story, and I know that the issue of gender identity is actually pretty interesting as it relates to philosophical centers of thought like semiotics and deconstruction (which I am shamefully interested in). But please believe me when I say that I could not have begun to care even the slightest bit, probably because I'd already realized all of the above.

That sounds awful, and I know it, and that's the root of the problem. Writing about movies has become institutionalized, and every institution is fundamentally ethical. There are movie critics piled to God's front door, clamoring at the bit to prove that they're really the ones with the Right Way to Look at Movies. I, to put it flatly, know that that's all bullshit - well, unless you want to view movies as a product with a specific use. Being someone who doesn't, well, you get the picture.

It's also worth noting that the reason why I don't look at movies that way is - well, that's inaccurate. I try very, very hard not to look at movies that way anymore. Pretty much up until the start of this year, I was one of those cocky little fuckups turning their nose down at Star Wars dorks (of course, I was one of them for a while too) and such, telling people why they should go see X or shouldn't go see Y. It's just not worth it. For one thing, I never learned a thing from a single movie I ever saw; I just got confirmation of stuff that I already knew. I mean, it's not like I didn't already know that women in China have it rough before I saw Raise the Red Lantern; it's just that I'd never really thought about it before. But is that any kind of standard by which you should pass judgment?

It's just that the movies that I really value are way more than that. The movies that I really love are the ones that let me engage the world from another point of view, because I'm really just starved for perspective. That, I think, is why I'm still stuck on movies; these days it's so difficult to find any source of perspective that the ones we really do get are all the more precious. Movies, in a very literal way, allow us to see how the world works without our being there, and considering how self-involved the world is getting, that's something that I'm willing to defend in print or anywhere else.

The problem, of course, is that now I have to unlearn about eight years of dogma when it comes to writing about them, especially when it comes to individual movies. It's one thing, after all, to link movies together under a concept, but it's another one entirely to talk about the merits of an individual movie, because in doing so, you have to assume a certain amount of elitism since you're prizing your experience with this movie over all the other ones you've ever had. Usually, you can pick up on this in the defensive tone critics tend to take; I could spend all day linking you to critics who spend large amounts of time in their articles either disproving the claims of others or warding off similar, as-yet-unmade deconstructions of their own interpretations. This is bullshit. In any war, to paraphrase Bill Maher, all defenses eventually fail.

The problem is that I'm not sure if people are interested in cinema as a whole anymore. Now that it has this overpowering ethical dimension of You Should Like This and Oh How Could You Like That, it's a pain in the ass; basically, it's become a form of entertainment which dangles escapism in your face, but can only be evaluated in terms of Right and Wrong, just like everything else in the world these days (since what else is all the hysteria over the war in Iraq, to pick one random example, except just a clash of ethical systems?) That's bullshit, and I can certainly see why people would be willing to tell movie critics to piss up a rope. God knows I've pretty much done the same with most contemporary critics.

Cinema, like all the arts, is always at a crossroads between decadence and subsistence, but right now seems like one of those times when stock really does have to be taken. The way of gaging a movie's critical value is increasingly simply to add up the number of items on the laundry list of concepts it contains or issues it references, and that's just as stupid as judging a movie's popular appeal by the amount of money it grosses (since The Princess Bride, The Shawshank Redeemption, It's A Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, and about a billion other great AND popular movies made nothing at the box office). What matters now as much as ever is why we like the movies that we do, and what that says about ourselves, the world, and movies themselves that we like them.

You'll have to forgive me if I don't have a way to shoehorn Trainspotting into that rubric yet. But I'm working on it.