Day: October 24, 2023

Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Posted on 6.29.15: The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I was so down it looked like up to me. All of it. I didn’t expect any semblance of “happiness,” but I was hoping all the time that life might eventually become less grueling.

I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober in March 2012, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and basically lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism thing started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and had gotten to know people, etc. Things didn’t actually kick into a good place (confidence, comfort, fair reward) until the online column era started, in late ’98 — a quarter-century ago.

…was a Wilton high school science (or was it biology?) teacher named Dan Cappel. It wasn’t his teaching methods which threw me off — he was actually a very bright fellow who knew his stuff cold, and was likably mild-mannered to boot — but his voice sounded so depleted of raw energy, and he had this seemingly exhausted, baggy-eyed, beaten-down appearance.

I once spotted Dan driving his three or four kids around in a VW van, and he looked so weary and bedraggled and sleep-deprived and generally sagging at the seams. Something inside me recoiled in horror at this sight, and from that moment on I couldn’t listen to Dan. I couldn’t unsee that exhausted guy. I had decided “whatever kind of biology this guy’s selling, I can’t buy it. Because I really don’t want to be him when I get older.”

Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham: “I can tell by your faces that many of you are shocked at the outcome. I, on the other hand, am not because I have had the misfortune of teaching you this semester, and even with my ocular limitation I’ve witnessed first-hand your glazed, uncomprehending expressions.”

Brady Hepner’s Teddy Kountze: “Sir, I don’t understand.”

Hunham: “That‘s glaringly apparent.”

Kountze: “No, it’s…I can’t fail this class.”

Hunham: “Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze. I truly believe that you can.”

Kountze: “I’m supposed to go to Cornell.”

Hunham: “Unlikely.”

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“Head-Scratchy “Occupied City” Includes Heavenly Entr’acte Musical Passage,” posted from Cannes on 5.18.23:

I reluctantly sat down this morning with Steve McQueen‘s Occupied City, a doc about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II and the various oppressions, suppressions and terrors that arose from this. “Reluctantly” because I’d read that McQueen’s film is a bit of a tough one or, in the words of Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, “a trial to sit through.” It seemed at the very least unworthy of a four-hour-plus investment. Maybe.

I was nonetheless ready to engage, and I can at least report that I didn’t hate it. Given the historical aspect you might presume that McQueen would be using troves of digitally enhanced archival footage from the war years, but it was all shot during the pandemic of ’20 and ’21, and in vivid color inside a boxy (1.37:1) aspect ratio, and overflowing with Amsterdam capturings.

It’s based upon “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a purportedly exacting coffee-table book by McQueen’s wife Bianca Stigter, and it’s basically one fixed-tripod tableau after another of Amsterdam, augmented or expanded upon by narration (read by Melanie Hyams) about this or that dark anecdote or tale about Jewish residents of that Dutch city who were persecuted or hid in attics or were eventually murdered in concentration camps. But it feels awfully dry and rote and static, I can tell you. It’s not boring or uninvolving but a bit flat, but within 12 or 15 minutes I was muttering to myself “this is it?”

McQueen’s basic idea (hold on, it’s a lulu) is that the bureaucratic repression of the Covid years, which we all felt pained and smothered by in more ways than one, and the deeply injurious Amsterdam restrictions, suffocations and violations of the early to mid 1940s are somehow related. Or, you know, not dissimilar.

This is what the film keeps saying over and over, that we’re all living in the now but that the past is still with us (and isn’t even “the past”, heh-heh) and lingering in our hearts and souls and all that. It’s a strange concept but I went with it, and I certainly came to know the various neighborhoods and bridges and weathered buildings and town squares of Amsterdam look like these days, much more than ever before, I mean, and I’ve been to Amsterdam, mind. Too many British pubs, too many party boys.

But I have to be honest and admit that my eyelids didn’t make it all the way through. I’m blaming this not on myself but on a certain fellow I’m sharing the apartment with, and more particularly his grizzly bear-snoring…make that his Steven Spielberg T-Rex snoring. (More on this in subsequent story.)

McQueen’s film includes an intermission, and it’s finally time to fulfill the promise of the above headline and state that the musical entr’acte interlude between parts one or two is truly, oddly moving. In a liturgical sense. I loved just sitting there and letting it sink in. It made me feel oddly happy, and also persuaded me that there might be something deeper to Occupied City…something that i wasn’t paying sufficient attention to. But I let that notion go.

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The Gotham Award nominations were announced at noon today, and hoo boy…talk about an organization and a community that lives in a deep mine shaft within its own secular planet…nominations that represent an elitist bubble of urban progressive sensitivity that could choke a plowhorse…a mindset that frequently spits upon Joe Popcorn cinema and enforces a social prejudice agenda…diverse, convulsive, queer-friendly, gender-neutral, indie-favoring, right index finger inserted in rectum, down with older white guys, “we know what we know and if you don’t like where we’re coming from that’s on you because we represent the better angels of the human condition, in large part because we’re more highly evolved”…

Okay, I’m half on-board with a few of the acting nominations…some of them are fairly spot-on so the people who selected them aren’t knaves but perceptive, sensible types for the most part. But the Best Feature and Best International feature nominees…yeesh.

The five Best Feature nominees are Ira Sachs‘ Passages (forget it), Celine Song‘s Past Lives (the fix is in on this one, trust me), Tina Satter‘s not-half-bad Reality, Kelly Reichardt‘s Showing Up (a reasonably decent woke-lifestyles-in-Portland film) and A.V. Rockwell‘s A Thousand and One (not a chance).

The Best International Feature noms are All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, Tótem and The Zone of Interest. Yup, that’s right — they’ve blown off the audience-friendly The Taste of Things (i.e., The Pot-au-Feu). I didn’t realize that Poor Things was a truly international production….whatever.

Outstanding Gender-Free Lead Performance noms: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin, Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country (peresumably a KOTFM stalking horse), Greta Lee in Past Lives, Franz Rogowski in Passages, Andrew “beard stubble” Scott in All of Us Strangers, Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, Michelle Williams in Showing Up and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.

Outstanding Supporting Performance noms: Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things (obviously NOT a supporting performance), Penélope Cruz in Ferrari (yes!!), Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone (what about his knockout performance in The Burial?), Claire Foy in All of Us Strangers (very good performance), Ryan Gosling in Barbie, Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry (first-rate!), Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest, Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (good performance), Charles Melton in May December (forget it), Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers (best of the bunch or at least tied with Penelope Cruz!).

Back to the root elements: Remember Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian with the insect antennae popping out of his head? Many of the Gotham nominators are 2023 Walston variations…alien humanoids with a knowledgable, sophisticated, well-educated dweebo sensibility…Snidely Whiplash foo-foos who all drink from the same well or the same teapot…Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, Jessica Kiang, Claudia Puig, Alison Willmore, Thelma Adams, David Fear, Jon Frosch, Wendy Ide, HE’s own Guy Lodge, plus Carlos Aguilar, Lindsey Bahr, Lovia Gyarkye, David Sims, Monica Castillo, Robert Daniels, Tim Grierson, Tomris Laffly…okay, I’m not 100% certain that each and every Gotham Awards nominating committee member is a “bad” person but many of them are, in my humble opinion.

These folks are mostly ideological sycophants, political cowards, go-alongers…people who have sworn loyalty to the politically purifying, disruptive, anti-populist social serum that’s been flowing through the veins of Stalinist theological authoritarians and generally plaguing cinema since ’17 or thereabouts by attempting to transform the art of motion pictures into an instrument of progressive social change…these are basically your Strelnikovs, your enlightened cool kidz…advocates of sweeping social change first and movie fanatics second.

If, for the sake of self-protection and your own professsional survival, you’ve decided to flip against a certain mouth-breathing sociopathic bully boy, fine. It simply means that your interests are now being harmed by your previously obedient association with Donald Trump, and that you’ve trying to wash yourself clean of this ignominous chapter in your life and move on. But the weeping in court is pathetic. Suck it up, comport yourself like a responsible adult and read the statement, but theatrical displays of remorse are basically cheap theatre.