HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

Apologies to all, and beggars can’t be choosers, but Will’s pot rules. On a bench by the park I overdo it, some rustling behind makes me nervous but it’s just a squirrel. Will’s ex likes the little guys. We speculate that a parking spot too good to be empty must be haunted—but it’s Park Slope, someone will take it anyway. Like Rajiv, Will doesn’t care for previews—too much of a good thing. Okay, but when an ad for the Phish concert comes on I see my buddy Smith playing back-up for the band, and for a moment the screen’s constituent opacity wavers, turns porous, it helps that we’re in the second row, the place is packed. People are always so fucking psyched at these weekend shows, and I’m fucking psyched, Will says it’s like a hot tub in this theater which is the one that you may have been in that leaks in the rain. It does stink.

It’s these wish-fulfillers that sell tickets. This one’s male mid-life, and how great are hot tubs? Some people have ‘em in their real own houses! “Fuck wives! Fuck kids!” say the buddies, on a ski weekend meant to placate the old friend (Corddry) they’ve ignored to the point of his attempted suicide. Hey, that’s what it takes to get people out. It’s a comedy. One of the great drinking montages, and how great is booze? They get so wrecked they travel through time, and the first thing they do, aged 18 again, is ski down a mountain in a hymn to pure bodily joy.

The 80s—how great is cocaine? Cusack: “We had Reagan and AIDS.” The fashions not as they were but in dreamlike pastiche. The textual web grows dense: they avoid the butterfly effect, which is an Ashton Kutcher reference, who is the husband of a famous cougar who is an 80s star, and now these already-beleaguered middle-aged men have the cougar effect to worry about. A running castration gag involves the cutting off of an “arm.” You couldn’t get a girl to come for the life of you, back then, and you once lay in the snow with someone intriguing and briefly, weirdly interested in you. So why go back to the future? Wife and kid, dummy. “You may find yourself/living in a beautiful house…”

When a squirrel figures in the plot, Will and I trade looks. The bad guys take our heroes for communists. Might our own fears, the film asks, one day seem so overblown? A white guy almost blows a black guy. The movie’s lament: you can’t fuck your friends. The one you betrayed. It’s a comedy. The ancient form in which you go to a place so dark tragedy won’t touch it, and then in the last ten minutes tack on a wedding or, as here, a found fortune, and wrap it up by demolishing the fourth wall. Reader, are you still here?

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (3D)

Tired and broke ($14.50 for 3D), and this place is grub city. “Attention Pavilion customers: we will now be showing Avatar in 2D only.” A piece of exemplary illogic, in desultory font. Fuck the ushers. To work the ticket booth is to possess a second, inscrutable mouth. And do they see me? The creep who sees every kiddie movie alone, the sap at every rom-com, the ape-king of the action flicks? Help me, Marina Abramovic, patron saint of the brave humiliation without which no two people can be freed to speak as equals. The body is a glass house: throw enough stones at it, and the soul might just come to the window and wave.

On go the glasses. A beaut. A boy and his dog, or Le Petit Prince. The small fight the big: dad enormous, the demon mountain-huge. “Our parents’ war is ours, now,” so by the end a now-iconic prosthetic leg of the springy crowbar-looking kind is brandished. Dragons are bombers. The kid can draw, a skill the existence of this very movie makes quaint. 3D has yet to emphasize anything but itself: water, reptile skin, flight.

What will happen when one day the glasses come off and on, instead, goes the gear that tells the gullible brain, you are touching and being touched? Many things, the smallest of which will be that poetry—the poetry of essences, what else?—will end, and begin.

DIARY OF A WIMPY KID

The previews always shock—they’re making more of these? Great, but whatever time you’re counting on—time between now and then—is already gone. A railroad through the wilderness, built on spec, and your ticket booked. I can’t remember whether, as a child, my predominant feeling was of tenuousness in the world—pressed by the surging crowd to the void-edge—or rather of being linked to it by the tentacles of an attention I thought might flourish forever. I’d say I was one of those precocious little performers who detected, one day, the limits of others’ patience. Two options at that point: press on, and dominate, or else take a flat-head screwdriver and scratch out one’s face like effacing a coin. “The violent games of selfhood,” Adam Phillips calls them. My enneagram personality type is nine—no wonder I like that film so much—so I seek unity, immersion, I suppose I’d like to know for sure if pleasure is ever really pleasure shared, or whether the pain in someone else can ever be real. Unity, which is why all this highly attenuated hybridity and disjunction stresses me out. I’d like some meaning that comes out as if from my own bank’s ATM, i.e. without a fee.

The kid is not a “wimp” at all but a craven fraud, a desperate social climber, a coward and a sneak. We are meant to understand that he’s intelligent, and more than once he declares that when middle school is long forgotten his kind inherits the earth. But this is no diary, it’s a confession, and we see not a kid but a soul a-tumble through the eternal gauntlet of its becoming. All the grade school friends I betrayed, later, when they threatened to taint my status (one half-notch above rockbottom)—what was I turning myself into, anyway? Someone indomitable? But I was so clearly sentimental, weak, vulgar, anxious, foolish, insatiable, and cold. Unity: the giant or titan you’d grow up to be, if only you hadn’t marked it with the blemish or infected it with the virus or pricked it with the thorn of regret.

Weird, at 13 my almost romantic love—with a shudder through it—for Anne Frank.

REMEMBER ME

A perfect film, say my companions, and I can’t help but agree. Where to begin? With summary, the very lie this film exposes? Hamlet or It’s Complicated, thunderous as they are, both sound silly over a beer. If I told you that the hero (Team Edward!) is a 21-year-old bad-boy cigarette-smoking semi-college-dropout and would-be writer who works at the Strand, plays Holden to his sister’s Phoebe and his suicide older brother’s Seymour (I know, but…), hates his chilly dad (Brosnan), and falls for a girl whose mother (Plimpton) was killed a decade before in a Brooklyn subway mugging-gone-wrong and whose father is a cop who arrests our hero in a meatpacking-district brawl leading the hero to later realize the cop’s daughter is in his Global Politics class at NYU and they fall in lip-mashing love and get both their fathers to marginally improve—what am I really telling you? Would you be more or less inclined to believe that the final five minutes find our hero, his problems seemingly resolved, looking out the window of his lawyer-father’s opulent office which the camera zooms out to reveal occupies a high floor of WTC 1 even as we cut to the little sister’s teacher writing on a blackboard “Today is Tuesday, September 11, 2001”? Then back to the towers rendered in dazzling CGI—were they ever anything but? The ash a ghoulish film crew shook over the rooftop set where the girl and the hero’s roommate rush out, look up, and react.

A “cop out,” as the marquee no longer reads? But earlier, an un-telegraphed cut to a scene from American Pie disorients us until it’s revealed that the principals are watching it on a period movie screen. The lesson’s clear: the god in the machine can switch the reel anytime. You’re Orestes, you’re an awkward young guy, you avenge your dickish dad and the Furies come smelling like blood and garbage, you stagger down shadowy streets until Athena: “Everyone Cut The Shit.” What could have more meaning than that? Did you think your life wasn’t undeserved reprieves, and sudden death? I know, I know, the lie of form. You work really hard and do nice things for people and then good things happen. Or you’re really bad and then, sure sure sure, in a special underground torture chamber (that’s located where, exactly?) you have to pay the bill.

GREEN ZONE

Based on a too-true tale. How do you like them apples? GWH (Good Will Hunting) chases WMD’s in dusty, shouty, mustachioed Iraq, kicks in doors crisply, goes to a prison we sadly recognize, features in more GPS and googling montages than you’d think. Damon’s got this resourceful, improvisatory hero down cold. In the late 90s, forced to hypothetically choose, my wife picked Affleck. She could not foresee our collective need for a more perceptive lout. Though I concede that, unlike Leo, Damon’s dick is beside the point, not counting, of course, the boner of the scold. In Shutter the man is wrong, but here the world’s what’s oh-so fucked.

We were gonna do it right this time. Okay, sit down, have a drink. “Defend the law as you would the city wall”—Heraclitus. In our empire’s long decline we shall be interesting. The sand castle neither fresh-built nor erased by tide spends the ebb as a suggestive lump. Meanwhile clams suck airholes in the muck. The American contribution to moral philosophy: See you in hell. If we could only plug Cheney’s airhole up.

Amy Ryan as the Wall Street Journal dupe. We are criminals, soldiers, terrorists, cops, reporters, spies. The Wire’s titular cord is information tunnel, fine line, held note, and garrotte. It’s also a theatrical device by means of which a pull on one side opens a trapdoor across the stage. A dancer flies from the wings, a marionette waves goodbye or crumples as if cut. A thread encodes a Persian rug. You push a plunger—maybe you’re just draining the tub—and half a world away: kaboom.

BROOKLYN'S FINEST

To be clear: the non-cupcake, non-artisinal-pickle Brooklyn. Deserted streets under elevated trains, projects, for-all-we-know authentic slang, half the cast of The Wire (Wee Bey, Omar, Clay Davis). I saw Ethan Hawke in The Cherry Orchard at BAM. Will his Catholic cop with five kids and an asthmatic wife pregnant with twins turn dirty and take drug money to buy the bigger, mold-free house he’s promised his family? Only if Richard Gere’s jaded alcoholic divorced cop seven days from retirement can find some redemption by breaking up a human trafficking ring operating out of the same near-derelict neighborhood where he visits the prostitute whose comfort he’s come to mistake for love. The guy in the next seat over keeps calling Gere “the O.G.,” as in, “Oh shit, here comes that O.G. motherfucker again to take shit down.” Every movie is in 3D.

Every movie is in 4D. Time is real, says Cornel West: after the film you’re two hours older. They say to live is to learn how to die. So what do you have to learn? The autonomy of form. Cheadle’s undercover cop (who lives in a Williamsburg condo?) is in too deep. In prison and on the streets, taking on the shape of a criminal, he has become one. These narrative obstacles are your very own. Reach into your pocket: surprise: a badge, some cash, a gun.

Every movie is in 1D. The energy ball Ben saw, on DMT. A cheerio to my daughter, a child’s booger rolled between the fingers is anti-matter itself. That rubbing point between pads of thumb and index is the locus of serious sensuality, a conjuring- or contemplation-point where the kernel of the present winks in and out. A bit of held emptiness, a thing with no name. There is a secret somewhere in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn lays curled around it like a dragon. More on this when the time comes.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

A masterpiece. From the freezer Madeleine and I have eaten, unwrapped each from its crude chrysalis of foil, the two little lumps of psilocybin-laced chocolate bought three months ago out the backpack of Jack’s old buddy Jesse from Asheville. A cold, wet gale outside, so Madeleine goes to the snack bar—for tea—while I do a little Charlie Chaplin routine trying to get umbrella, hat, pen, notebook, 3D glasses, dried mangoes, and water bottle balanced on a folding seat that flips up at diabolical intervals. When I look up Mad hands me an improbable cup of chamomile she’s gotten at the upstairs café which has not in the previous months ever once been open. Curioser and curioser…

The three digital signs in the theater hallway read “POWER.” Here portrayed by Helena Bonham-Carter as body-shriveling and head-swelling caprice, a treatment of nature as mere raw material, and a penchant for decapitations. She can’t and won’t be forgiven her holocaust. Her sister the White Queen (Hathaway) is a reconstructed Shakespearian witch. Alice a runaway bride. Trying to hide, she grows to twice her size, and when asked who she is answers “Um.” You know the feeling? Her “muchness” is the issue. Despite her kindness, she’s required to wield a sword that “knows what to do.” A hero is a vessel, and form is real. Dreams are real. Games. Grammar. Protocol is action. Politics are life.

Luckily, chaos. Kids running wild in the back of the theater—3D. The whole place breaks up when Hatter Depp busts his wacky moves. “The dandy ninja,” Mad calls him, the lunatic artist whose spirit turns the wheels. “You’ll forget me, Alice,” he tells her on her brink of home. And don’t we need constant reminding? He keeps “thinking of things that begin with M.” Me, too: Madeleine, Malka, and Malka’s Mama. Dandelions and butterflies and a tea party—FUN!

SHUTTER ISLAND

I’m finally reading The Basketball Diaries, and here’s Leo who’s played Carroll (Jim, not Lewis) and Rimbaud, too—what about him once screamed “hot little visionary”? Those wanton cheeks? That apple-shaped head, soft shoulders, intense eyes with a speck of neither anxiety nor evasiveness but out-and-out fear? It was in Heath Ledger, too, but he took too long to set it free and it overwhelmed him too fast. Leo the survivor. The widow Ledger is in this thing, doing a solid crazy. Spoiler alert: denial is a sieve, and it’s raining through. What we push down subterranean chutes out into nature rises up malevolent wearing the rictus of our sin. Birnam Wood, the Witches. There’s a reference, as in The Wolfman, to the practice of submerging the criminally insane in ice water. Recall that ice water, borne beyond bearing, burns like love. Delia watches half the show through peekaboo fingers. Why are movies so violent? Look around. We should wear our own R rating, a big red R on every shirt. The Wolfman was rated R for quote Bloody Violence Horror and Gore. One cannot dispute that fortune has smiled on Leo. Has it made him guilty? Sensitized him into a depth over which he teeters? I wonder, if I listened hard enough, if I could hear the movies playing in the other theaters. What detail we take in: it storms plausibly in our dreams. The multitudinous seas incarnadine. “You are the man that ruined the world.” The H-bomb century, the Dachau century. The self portrait stashed in the closet is a metaphor not for depravity’s true effect but to register confusion at how we can do terrible stuff all day and still not show it all that much. Gandhi and the knight from The Seventh Seal are in cahoots. I’ve never seen such beautiful cliffs. Bluffs. Beautiful blue rain—god bless the camera machine and its flapping aperture. Shutter Island is where we live.

COP OUT

I love irony. A two-for-one deal, and in this economy. The best game of peekaboo is the one in which you peek through your fingers even during the hiding part, the better to savor your opponent’s appropriate consternation at your disappearance. And then to watch, also, once you are revealed, his perfect relief. Poison is on the soundtrack: “Every cowboy sings a sad, sad song”—it’s that second “sad,” the one that fills out the meter, that calls everything into question. The casual misogyny, affectless violence, and recycled one-liners of this seeming tired black-cop/white-cop buddy movie should not distract us from the presence of Authority that mounds up such residue to obfuscate its immanence. Never turn your back on an adjective. Could you have an ironic dream?

We know Bruce Willis is an old white guy because nothing that happens is his fault. He was the hero who crossed into my nightmares, to save me. Of course he isn’t “dead all along” in The Sixth Sense. He is, rather, a therapist of such skill that, the therapy over, it is as if he had simply never existed. You’ve forgotten those who aided you the most, if aid you they did.

Tracy Morgan is the analysand par excellence—“When the patient is at his most regressed in the transference he is like a baby who can talk” (Donald Meltzer). And Jason Lee, from Alvin, has turned evil, and the drug dealer from Weeds plays a drug dealer. He’s buttoning his top button for a living, I guess. “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” the Williamsburg Bridge, a Q stop, Spumoni Gardens. Though I sincerely doubt, Kevin Pollak, that a Brooklyn cop would go there and not order the square.

VALENTINE'S DAY

The face of Taylor Swift: If the glass dome placed over her blooming flower is not airtight, then what is its function? To announce, by conspicuously but only temporarily retarding, the spectacle of her eventual and spectacular decay.

The face of Taylor Lautner: the leash’s desire to be free of the dog.

The face of Emma Roberts: I don’t know. But I’d cast a homely Helen of Troy, if only to emphasize how events construct her repute, and not the other way around.

The face of Shirley Maclaine is juxtaposed, here, with its far earlier incarnation, which she now seeks surgically to precede. Reincarnation, thus far, has required the splitting of souls; henceforth it will require their erasure.

The faces of Eric Dane, Bradley Cooper, Patrick Dempsey, and Ashton Kutcher: the jawbone(s) of an ass raised against our better judgment.

The face of Jessica Alba: Life’s exhaustion lies not in desire but in pretending it.

The faces of Queen Latifah, Kathy Bates, George Lopez, and Hector Elizondo: Get out of the way, we’re looking at the other faces.

The face of Jamie Foxx: Intensity as a bombastic joke told alongside an injunction not to react.

The face of Topher Grace: Oh no, what if this is the mirror?

The face of Anne Hathaway: Julia unhinged. Of Jessica Biel: Julia burdened. Of Jennifer Garner: Julia insatiable.

The face of Julia Roberts: One almost wants to say, its world-beckoning charm is not the bright, sudden laugh that breaks across it, but the moment just before in which it registers another’s presence and threatens not to react. Richard Gere was never so lucky as when he flipped closed the necklace box and was allowed to go on existing; she might have as easily withheld that conflagration of delight and so annihilated him on the spot. And he knows it. A power dangerous to wield. Bersani: “In Freudian terms, the hyperbolic ego risks being obliterated by its own narcissistically thrilling inflations.” And yet, this is the formula for love. She must be so careful with us because she knows: if that laugh started and didn’t stop we would watch her shatter. Watch unprotected. And if that is love we might never again be willing to yield.

THE WOLFMAN

The full moon, the projector’s white eye, the lit cherry at the tip of Rajiv’s one-hitter. He explains cinematic materialism: Kubrick’s D.P. developed a new steadicam, so The Shining is a film about long hallways. He likes to skip previews, worries they pop the visual cherry. Which reminds me: the globe of Emily Blunt’s right breast, glimpsed around her flawless white back. The 19^th-century hymen is the proto-screen which interpellated the movie camera into being.

I like when you can tell the screenwriter’s been recently therapized—this one’s a sure bet, in which a son (Benicio) kills his aged but supernaturally strong dad in order to claim the sister-in-law who kills him, in turn, to save him. He thanks her for it, and dies. Hugo Weaving continues in the role he perfected: authority’s coolly ruthless hand. But when he shoots a mirror we know he too will end up werewolfized. The beast must be slain to preserve the family and the town, but we’d do well to recall it’s only he may strike the System Itself and, in some small measure, win.

A breathless Blunt to del Toro, mid-courtship: “What’s it like in New York?” Owooooooooooo. His character’s an actor, played Hamlet, as dogface del Toro himself always plays Brando, hushed and almost formal between explosions. An animal equals a lunatic, so the doctors strap him to a special chair they crank down into an ice water bath—holy hell. All the while sticking him with those old-timey syringes with the finger-loops. I confess: I’m a cat person. Hamlet, the moon, the bestiary children learn. Am I afraid of the raving monarch that I—like every little boy—once was? But one feels calm, calm, calm before the plenitude of this feast.