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.
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