NINE

We are already over-budget and off script. I plan ahead and do a couple shots of espresso, invite a friend, wear wool socks. I gather they heat this place with nothing but a few tea candles and Oscar buzz.

Madeleine snorts with derision when Kidman tells Day-Lewis he doesn’t know how to love. I wonder in what way his is like and unlike Alvin’s problem, who is an artist, too, though—I’ll just say it—a compromised one. Day-Lewis dangles his long blackstockinged feet from the cuffs of his skinny suit; Cecil Vyse is banished completely now, with his shoes in dejection slowly tied. Madeleine maintains director Rob Marshall prefers, in choreography and camerawork, “the hinders” to tits. Maybe so, but skinny Cotillard, more frozen than Kidman, more bland than Hudson, more haughty than Cruz, is paradoxically the only one whose musical number, a striptease in memory of her debasement, provides the sole instrument by which a single cock in the seat of any theater in Christendom might be prevailed upon to grow by a scarce quarter-inch. I see I must cross a desert to write the feminist text this must of necessity be.

And Italy—gone for good, though it held on, like the whole twentieth century, for an extra ten years. As 1910 bid the true farewell to ornament and the lie of dynamism, so 2010 gives the slip at last to close reading, museums, and the “march of centuries” itself. In one motion a career barman lifts the scummed espresso cup on its saucer as already his other hand swipes a damp towelette across the surface of the marble bar. For an instant you believe you still see the ring. No, it is the light-writ ceiling fan looking up at you from the stone.

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS 2: THE SQUEAKQUEL

When you presume you make a “pres” out of “u” and “me.” The root is the Latin sumere: to take. So, presume, to take as fact or take liberties. Resume, to take up again. Assume, to take on—to carry or don but also to feign—and to take for granted. One thinks of the idiom a take, which reminds me I met a guy last night who worked on It’s Complicated and told me that Streep could do take after take of “spontaneous” laughter with uncanny consistency. She is simply the best we have.

Alvin, capably voiced by the same Justin Long who represents Macintosh in the Apple company’s popular and long-running ad campaign, cares only about himself. Fundamentally true of anyone, but when we formulate it this way we mean: his way of taking is too naked and shrill, it humiliates the empty space it should hallow, the space from which we ought to take the thing precisely in order to render the subsequent void a thousand times more full.

I missed the first one. But “squeakquel” is a nice portmanteau to remind us that, when we reach the afterlife, we will go before God as a small and terrified creature whose voice will barely register at the scale of His greater terrain. We may be offered assumption—ascent to heaven—or resumption, with honor, into the earth. I take it that presumption, then, represents the final option, a descent into the frozen works. A labyrinth crowded with handtrucks and library carts and blockaded at every third turn with copyright applications stacked a mile high. We consign our own small portion of lovingkindness to hell, we damn it when we force it through that maniacal apology apparatus—our stupid voice.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS?

In the sweeping establishing shots over the ostensible settings of rom-coms we come to understand at last the power in the metaphor of the heart as depopulated city. The heart, as it breaks, is perfected. We know this. That is why it is called Sex and the City, not Sex in the City. Is Sarah Jessica Parker supposed to be the nice one, on set? So why’s it so easy to imagine her slapping the shit out of some clumsy make-up guy, or calling Cattrall a washed-up talentless cunt?

Overhearing plays a role in this film, in which a super-successful realtor and her husband (a lawyer, Hugh Grant) are forced by events to travel across both the United States and, simultaneously, mysteriously, across its map. Only one woman and I took in this poorly-heated matinee. I let her do the laughing, accepting that, if I wasn’t going to laugh aloud much, I must be careful above all not to laugh once. To laugh only once would have insulted her terribly, which would have spoiled the gratitude we owed one another for not having to be alone—exactly the crux of this glittering tale.

I like those addenda to myths, as when the barber, prohibited on pain of death from gossiping about King Midas’s donkey ears, goes out and digs a hole in which to whisper the hot item, only to be exposed when the story is picked up and reported by the shushing reeds. Spoiler alert: in the final five minutes, the titular couple name the baby they adopt from China after the site of their near-assassination and ultimate reconciliation (a small Wyoming town). But who will sing this enigmatic gesture? The usherette informs me that this film is on the chopping block: Thursday will be the last day it plays.

IT'S COMPLICATED

A beautiful film. Briefly: Streep—I imagine her as a somehow resurrected Sophie, twenty-some years on, the accent dropped, the soul at peace—is a super-successful bakery owner with three kids who falls into bed with her estranged husband at New York’s opulent Park Regent hotel. Later a marijuana trip brings tensions to a head. Baldwin perfects the blank look of haunted desire. The ever-present blackberries and laptops drive it home: we are all a bit technology-obsessed. A very cold night in Brooklyn and my boots, though comfortable, are not warm.

Sometimes, when a character is trying to patch up a sticky situation, trying with rhetoric and pity to win the conciliation of her miffed antagonist, I, in my seat, in the darkened theater, anticipate and provide the hoped-for nod. Literally moving my head—before I catch myself. To concede complication is only a beginning. To unlearn is the great thing.

And who would dare to say, it’s simple. It is as impossible to be here, pierced and unfolding, piercing others where they unfold, as it is impossible that these linked impossibilities—that we—ever come to an end. With the ker-thunk of the main switch before the theater is locked for the night? Or the dimming of the lights signaling the screen’s imminent blaze? The movies are more complicated than life. I thought the son was Zac Efron but it’s actually that hottie from Weeds.

AVATAR (3D)

I’m so high I’m shivering.

A plot that’s been wrong for so long I can’t remember, anymore, what’s most wrong with it. The blue natives are the noble savages who must be saved by the enlightened invader himself. But Cameron’s a subtle genius: Terminator, Aliens. The plot is just a screen, the world of the blue people is really where you go when you go online, your crippled body left behind in your too-cheap ergonomic chair, and the familiar figure of the native is but a device to remind us that in this new world we are all of us pioneers. And what luck, to have another shot at discovery, along with hotter bods. And are we again going to fuck it up? On the precipice, thinks the man, we should be physically daring, even if we are no longer sure where the physical resides. And contemplate for the utmost time the forms of seeing and choosing.

“You should see your faces” says the helicopter pilot to her amazed passengers. But it’s us she means, rapt in the theater, already virtual, already there. The jack in the back of the head, an image with the most sinister implications in The Matrix, is here imagined as the holy ethernet cable through which the long-lamented dead will reach us. Necromancy, in this new dimension, beckons close.

From the special glasses, the restroom mirror notices, two little divots on my nose.