INVICTUS

My forehead’s glued to Smith’s dashboard, I’m trying to spark up his elegant little bowl out of sight, and a five-O does drive past our parked car, once, but it’s all clear. When we get to the theater Smith opens both doors, breathes deeply, and declares “Ah, the movies!” A fucking prince, I love him. A libra, like Matt Damon, “keen to make a good impression,” “gives wise advice freely,” “likes to know all the facts.”

P.W. Botha gets the gas face. Mandela follows rugby like I watch movies—with time he hasn’t got. Morgan Freeman plays the great man as wide awake. Shrewd and a judo master—this is Eastwood’s Obama movie, all right. The sports narrative, meanwhile, though true, is shameless. One is not permitted both neat drama and the unimpeachable event, as necrophilia is not, despite a seeming valid but misleading arithmetic, simply twice as fun.

Everyone matters, everyone’s in sight. But there is less humanity than there are humans, and it must rove from house to house like a dog in the night. Most suffering winds up in walls, in floors and mirrors, there’s a lot inside chairs of course and then trace amounts seep into the ground and water table. It’s a hard feeling to shake, that the earth is not just haunted but over-haunted, such that molecules of anguish may even combine in unstable compounds of exultation. All the worse, when through dead farmlands a shaggy tarantula leg stretches to run its crystal-tipped claw straight up your back from ass to neck.

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

A city of epic revels in which every stark or shattering reality remains always in plain sight—New Orleans. No place for the timid. We underwent, there, some memorable defeats, and any fun was end-of-the-world fun. I’m afraid to return, and not proud of it, since the end of the world did come.

The story is strangely unwilling to hazard the mechanism of the fabled frog kiss. To me it’s a simple identification of the reptile—gelatinous, swollen sack—with the male eyeball. Organ of the creepy gaze, abject master in this its dojo. The princess, I guess, is écriture feminine.

More fireflies. I hear Avatar’s doing big numbers. “The King of the World,” Midas himself, surely met the devil who obsesses this tale, too, that devil who when he seeks to tempt projects movie-dreams onto desert-screens. In a cartoon, the fantasy sequence is also a cartoon, just in a different style. And style is almost nothing at all. “Open your eyes,” says the firefly, but to what? Where, in paint and line, is solid ground, zero level, the reset button, the Good, the ought? Are we meant to surmise that the style of reality is self-evidently the style of Snow White? Or, more bizarrely, of those Silly Symphonies in which the hard schist of judgment is depicted, paradoxically, as a landscape of funky, undulating trees?

UP IN THE AIR

The Odyssey. The story by means of which a hundred and more generations have contemplated the status of the gifted fraud. The sea and land vie on, to offer what each insists is the superior perspective on the stars. Heaven being that space between Clooney’s nose and upper lip. The monkey part of the face, the hot grill of the volatile ape. Hence the enormous, white handlebar moustache of Sam Elliott, who appears here, as in The Morgans, as the still center, that same laconic boundaryman who, it should be remembered, tells Lebowski’s tale. His key gesture in each role is to surprise even himself when he speaks.

The other night, from the idling car, I saw two young women leaning against a storefront window, one of whom had no head. Obviously it was a trick of the light or angle—people have heads—so I looked again. But gazing at the discarded mannequins I repented that too-ready disbelief in my own eyes. Does one step out the front door each day to be surprised by seeing or by knowing? It’s kind of important to decide.

Films that start in the clouds—like this one, like Triumph of the Will. Wanderer, frequent flyer, it was on some other island, and only there, that you were designated wield, that you were called caress. Maker’s Mark, rocks, Chris and Cecily tell us the Aztecs permanently downsized 20,000 of their number per year. Is the cherished formulation that holds the movie theater a communal temple at all correct? Full Friday-night audience, I turn my gaze and speculate about the identity of the word poised on each upturned face’s pair of slightly parted lips. The word the stoic executioner fishes from the mouth of your severed head.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

A nice surprise: Wednesday’s screenings are eight bucks all day. But because of it I allow myself a popcorn and wind up spending more than full price would have been. I share the back row with a Chassid afflicted with phlegm and an overactive blackberry; he changes seats twice and walks out on the final ten minutes—an inspired move the courage for which one man in a thousand might summon. Do people see me writing into the tiny bright circle of my flashlight-pen and think me a reviewer? A critic? Rather, I am Watson, the man who watches his reason give way to love.

Leave it to an Englishman to invent a character capable of divining, according to infinitesimal details of clothing, deportment, and physiognomy, the entire history of his interlocutor—i.e. his exact social caste. Does it mark us so? Downey gets the A-list trainer, now, and wears the muscles well. And that hair—ooh, la la. The essential Angelino, I imagine him in a full lotus sipping a wheatgrasstini and snorting artisinal coke.

It’s scary stuff, a fistfight on a precipice, and a marvelous “special effect.” My daughter looks at me and thinks, father knows the secret connection between grandmother and her photograph in the frame upon the shelf. I look at her and think, the child knows the secret of germinating, within superhuman repetition, an as nearly frictionless as possible breathtaking speed of pure deduction.