Play The Game

(For Andrew)

Sometimes the best way to watch a movie is when you're drunk and tired at about 9 pm, with a couple of really close friends who are that way too, and the movie turns into a collage of laughter and whispers and imagery you remember but the meaning gets dislocated, and that movie becomes an installation art project in your head.  David Fincher's The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, is one of those movies.  I've only seen it that one time because I don't want to spoil that initial silly serendipidy that got into my brain.  All I remember is being dumb and ripped and enveloped:  Michael Douglas in an Armani suit, lit in gun-metal-blue light, with a bleeding forehead.  A frantic clown-doll haunting every other scene.  A huge mansion.  Shiny floors.  A taxi cab and a car chasing each other.  Wine glasses in a fancy restaurant.  Scenes with a lot of talk about nothing, plot details spilling out of chandeliers and a sexy ice-blonde waitress climbing out of her apartment in high heels.  A nothingness is at the center of it all:  meaninglessness that gives you a sense of how important meaninglessness is.  Beautiful, foreboding music like a music-box lullaby played with the intensity of Psycho violins.  And the three of us wrapped up in, and not understanding, all that pomp and style. Laughing and being stupid.

It's a beautiful way to be.