RAMONA AND BEEZUS

Just back in town, a perfect summer night, I take a detour through the park on my way to the 10:10 screening and watch the crowd watching Sonic Youth distort the breeze. All gorgeous youth and agitation, a crowd like the picture of my soul, even or especially to the extent that I stand outside it. Not cast out—I’m not being maudlin—but apart. And when I say soul I mean, not something mystical, but a kind of ordinary bodily function, a way the body organizes energy, just as when we say “mind” we mean the capability we possess to weave powers together, and when we say “heart” we refer to our capacity to channel feeling with great force. “Soul” means our sense that effervescent energy, which is somehow both ours and not-ours, bubbles up from deep within us—it’s the place where meaning abounds, do with it what you will. You don’t even need to go to the movies, in a way, because the beauty of the movies is that everyone else will go. The movies are what we none of us need to worry about. Then again, let’s go.

To take a beloved book for young people and shoot it like an Old Navy commercial is to practically beg us to lay aside our sentimentality and recognize, as in an Old Navy dressing room, what we brutally are. Oregon, where the DJ from Northern Exposure (Aidan!) is a middle-manager who gave up his artistic dreams for house, Volvo, and kids. He’s downsized and suddenly a stay-at-home. Foreclosure looming—Obama’s America, but they do have a really nice washer/dryer. Troubled middle-child Ramona still loves the big, emasculated lug. Antics. Ginnifer Goodwin pursued all the while by Josh Duhamel (When in Rome)—he pops in the mixtape she made him back in high school and out comes the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” Oh man, fourteen years old, standing on the streetcorner with Richie Pagano, he told us “That song makes me cry,” and I didn’t know how literally to take it nor understand how that confession made him somehow cooler than ever, and now which way was up? Selena Gomez, to Ramona: “You don’t care what people think.” I’ve always found it’s more that one cares a lot, but how on earth can you ever really know?