Be Good

Sometimes you just have to marvel at things.  "Things" is a stupid word, but it works here because it is so wide-open and meaningless/meaningful and dull that it encapsulates the whole stinking universe while also shrinking the whole shebang into just 6 reliable letters.

I guess you could call ET a thing.  He was a puppet turned into an intense reality on the big screen in 1982, when I was 17, and living in a small Midwestern town, feeling lost and disjointed, floating from school to a part-time job to home to wherever else I needed to go.  No direction outside of what I kept seeing in my head, dreams about not knowing, dreams about leaving, dreams about the terrors of leaving, dreams about being a star.  I knew I was what I was:  lower-class/working-class and gay and weird and excited to be alive but also scared of letting people know any or all of that.  I also did not feel like I could connect to an identity that accommodated those crossed signals.  In short I felt like ET, a puppet and a real thing, lost in a world he was only supposed to be visiting.

That movie.  That thing.

Flash-forward to 35 years later.  I'm 52, living in a bigger Midwestern town with Bill, working a job I like, trying to write stories and a novel, running a little non-profit gallery, and so on.  ET comes out in a 35th Anniversary edition on the big-screen thanks to TMC.  We go.  I watch, and it all, as they say, comes flooding back:  that feeling of being lost/sad/excited. I realize that Spielberg created a existential security-blanket, not a movie, a sense-memory, not a blockbuster.  It is a puppet-show from a dream you have when you're small and sweet and innocent, and when I was 17 it made me lose it.  I was bawling my eyes out at the textures Spielberg found, that foggy dark night gleaming inside itself with window-light and moon-light and a kind of suburban night-light sorrow you can't really describe, a yearning cut through with love and hurt and above all a sort of kindness.  Pure kindness really, as if some beneficent imagination was fitted with a golden spigot and out flows those colors, those sentiments, those images, those moments.

ET has a plot, of course, about a spaceman coming to earth and getting lost and then finding solace and safety by following a trail of Reece's Pieces through the forest; it's also a coming-of-age gig too, with Elliott figuring out how to let go while also maintaining hope and wonder.  It's about a divorced mom trying to maintain sanity in the shadow of her husband who has just abandoned her and her three kids.  It's about a team of kids riding bikes around the neighborhood in order to save the universe.  It's about a little girl named Gertie who is told, at the end of the movie, to just "Be good" by the creepy/sweet stuffed-toy that fell from the sky and into her bedroom closet.

It's everything.

Watching it at 52 I reconnected to not necessarily my youth because I don't think I want to reconnect, but to a spirit of escape and return to that pure bliss most movies can't manufacture or even hint at. ET is a cornucopia of compassion, weirdness, hope.

And then the credits roll, and I remember me and my mom and my little sister getting up from our velvet-lined seats in the old State Movie Theatre in downtown Anderson, Indiana (a plush, old-school cinema that had seen better days, with fake-Greek sculptures lining the walls and a black-painted stucco ceiling speckled with electric-light stars, and that musty cool smell of better days staying on your clothes even after you leave), the three of us walking out into late-day summer sunlight, my face red and my eyes still pouring, and next door is a little Chinese restaurant we always went to, just like 5 or 6 booths, red-and-black decor, a Chinese family owned it, and the mother took the orders, the kids bussed the tables, the dad made the food, and me and my mom and my little sister sit down and I'm still crying, can't stop because of what I just saw, that stupid movie giving me a sort of traumatic sense of joy, and finally I stop and I laugh and I think by that time mom and sister are laughing at me too, and I order egg-drop soup, I always did there, and here it comes, somehow the same color as some of the light in ET, lush yellow, with flickers of white, you make this soup by boiling chicken broth and then dropping an egg in and stirring it real fast and it kind of explodes and cooks and turns into this creaminess, and I remember sipping that and recovering from crying so hard, and right then it was one of the best feelings in the world.

Not to Be Believed

"A lot of movies are about life.  Mine are like a piece of cake," Alfred Hitchcock once said. 

Nancy Meyers is the 21st Century Hitchcock in many ways.  While Hitch hitched his sense of cinema/design/manipulation/aesthetic mostly on the thriller genre, cake-decorating the screen with posh, Technicolor, darkly romantic interiors (think North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, etc.), Meyers creates a romanticism of conspicuous consumption, making romantic comedies/dramedies that feel both fairy-tale brittle and heavy-handedly delightful.  Her slice of cake is interior-design as fever-dream; each of her greatest films are elopements from reality, and yet so overtly realized and sumptuous as to blow your stinking mind.  I'm talking here mainly about the movies she's directed and written since 2003:  Something's Gotta Give, The Holiday, It's Complicated, and this year's The Intern.  All of these films are sentimental and bland and populated by talky, over-earnest, rich ladies and gents who have successfully created their own destinies through hard work and good living.  All of which would piss any normal moviegoer off, but somehow, due to Meyer's innate, obsessive tendency to manufacture a sincere and scrupulous universe you feel sucked into all her gorgeous business; you feel the pain and triumph of made-up bicoastal white-linen American aristocracy.  You want to be a Meyers-ite from the first glimpse of sunlight through Central Park trees, so iridescent and lyrical as to make you feel nostalgic for experiences you've never experienced, or the sun-drenched ceramic-tiled roofs of Santa Monica mansions undulating into the sunset, or the crisp, bright, efficient stylishness of a Brooklyn warehouse transformed into heavenly office-space.

I could go on.

Meyers, like Hitchcock, seems to be more interested in the stuff involved in making the movie than in the overall movie itself, meaning she has an almost perverted sense of objects, décor, things.  She's a fetishist in the most regal and Architectural Digest sense of the word.  Her camera lingers across tables, pillows, couches, Egyptian-cotton bed-sheets with a voluptuous voyeuristic slowness and ardor that reminds me of Hitchcock's slow and delicious lingering on lips, eyes, and lady-gloves.  You feel a world opening up inside a mind in Meyers' movies, a wish-fulfillment that somehow allows you access into another dimension where everything is so fucking beautiful you feel both alienated and welcomed home.  But it's not your home.  It's really nobody's home.  It's just some figment, some colossal cottage-castle in the Hamptons filled up with taupe fabrics and antiques and people drinking white wine at dusk laughing about how lucky they are, even though sometimes they get kind of sad because you know everybody gets sad sometimes.

I just saw The Intern, which might be her best.  Meyers captures a phony, gorgeous, intensely not intense NYC in it, with so much aplomb you might view it as some over-the-top parody of a tourist commercial for the Big Apple.  Perfection is not the word here.  The brownstones in it have a heft and grandeur not to be believed, and the office-space overseen by Anne Hathaway's Millennial Internet entrepreneur is a vast white-bricked labyrinth of ergonomic seating and long white tables for laptops and big mugs of tea.  You want to work there, especially because everybody just seems to be meticulously performing work, not really working.  And Robert Deniro, as the titular intern, a Baby-Boomer retiree with a benevolent sense of patriarchy spilling out of his eyes, is a beautiful, static study in sweet, handsome decency:  Deniro in The Intern, in fact, might be Meyers' ultimate piece of furniture, and I totally mean that as a compliment to both.

I want to have a Nancy Meyers movie-night soon, where everybody brings a big elegant throw pillow, a home-made cobbler, and expensive bottles of white wine, and we sit in chunky knit sweaters and act like we're the most important people in the world, while watching the made-up and yet somehow actual and more important people in the world experience all their First World problems on a lush and monochromatic planet called NancyWorld. 

It's a good goal to have.  Makes life worth living.

The office space in The Intern



The English cabin in The Holiday

Meryl and Alec in the NYC hotel bar in It's Complicated

The kitchen and dining area in It's Complicated

The Hamptons house in Something's Gotta Give

Robert Deniro and Anne Hathaway in The Intern

The Glamor of Being in the Psychiatric Unit

Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of those movies that gets under your skin without really working too hard.  It does a sort of slow, sad, hallway walk into your soul.  Based on his novel from a decade or so ago, the movie lovingly cannibalizes John-Hughes movies for its textures and rhythms, and somehow deepens those moments through a misty-eyed adherence to the importance of nostalgia.  It makes being in a psyche unit feel like going to Sundance and having hot chocolate with a bunch of other sad kid actors.  Glamorizing sadness and depression is an old movie staple, but Chbosky gets it so right you feel a sort of gorgeous depression slowly seep into your consciousness as you watch the movie.  There's something about lead actor Logan Lerman's wide-open but still a little closed-up face that allows us to feel that self-involvement is an artform, and Emma Watson and the ecstatic Ezra Miller playing Lerman's Island-of-Lost-Toys sidekicks gives the movie's atmosphere a stylish, kinky kick.  Whoever lit this movie must know how to write extremely effective love-letters, because the lighting in every scene has an unbearable lightness of being to it; you feel yourself aching to ache in those suburban houses these kids live in, and in the penultimate scene, the three of them riding through a tunnel blasting David Bowie's "Heroes," you truly want to become a part of their miserable little clique.  Perks is a masterpiece of sad-sack outsiderness, celebrating those feelings you often just have to shrug off in order to get things done.  This movie wallows in beautiful self-pity, and that somehow is its genius.

Ballroom Blitz

 

Movie reviews get on my nerves.  Just googled A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth Die Hard movie that debuted last night on every screen in America, and ran across bitchy, pissy little critiques about a movie that truly is just what it is:  silly, sleek, pointlessly violent, with the brain of a dog and the heart of a high school football coach.  We went to see it last night, and I loved it.  Bruce Willis looks fantastic as an elderly gent still rocking the working-class blues, and his son, played by Jai Courtney, is his reluctant prodigal CIA son with a penchant for gritting his teeth all the time.  The plot, the visuals, the situations are all rote, but comfortably so.  It's exactly what is required, and then some.  There's a setpiece inside an old decrepit Russian hotel ballroom with a helicopter hovering outside the glorious windows that simply is too stupid and wonderful for words, crafted by John Moore the director to look like a crappy-chic music video from 1988.

1988 was the year Die Hard came out.  Seeing it back then was a revelation.  I was snobby at first but then when I saw it I got mesmerized.  It had an elegant machine-like veracity laced with blue-collar discontent.  The tall gleaming skyscraper during a Yuppie-pretentious Christmas office party was the perfect setting for Alan Rickman's prissy villain to sashay into.  Willis played John Mcclane with a sort of exhaustion burgeoning on fury.  He was pure white-trash, bare-foot and gun-toting and over it.  He became iconic.

Good Day is not iconic in anyway, but it is not a piece of shit either.  It's just what it is:  a way to revisit McClane, now an old grumpy guy wanting to help his grumpy young son out of an international mess.  By the end of this one, you don't fee let down; you feel just happy and content.  Bombs and guns went off.  McClane and his kid saved the day.  Time to go home.