Wednesday, March 24, 2010

EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES

“Don’t hope for a miracle. Make one.” And if one knew what the Good was, one would do it. But even the angels don’t know the plan—only that it perfectly exists.


We know there are no angels. But imagine a film that is not, as we expect, merely the sum of the best take of every scene—the others discarded on the cutting-room floor or its digital equivalent—but instead compiled from scenes for which every other possible scene that might have been was shot. If you knew yourself to be watching such a film its aura of inevitability would crush you in your seat. Or better yet, pop you open like a kernel of corn in the hot kettle: inside-out flower, frozen in full bloom, whose petals were always already there.


We all know more than we ever thought we would about pharmacology. So that when Encino Man and Felicity and Han Solo in his old-man jeans stand around discussing enzyme action and glycogen uptake the shit is exciting. We hope the biotech firm’s start-up capital materializes. We hope the office park does not appear too much, from above, like a body, pumping blood and dripping hormone and rising up, each improbable morning, to live another weird day as charged meat. Upright, flexible flesh draped upon its armature, stamped—for purposes of identification—with a face.


Thanks, C&C, for the whiskey. And thanks, Patrick Bachau, for playing the CEO; Rohmer is dead, with his love of office park and suburban zone alike, with his pity for our, no, his delight in our sun-drenched, sun-stunned filling the long spaces between anything ordained actually occurring, vast howling spaces we may unsupervised smoke, chat, flirt, sip, and snack away.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

LEGION

I should get my chart done, find out which planet is responsible for images falling on me, these days, like rain. Or snow—in that they dissolve on contact. When they don’t? Apocalypse. Images on fire, piled in the street.


I should say up front: in this film, an African-American man who is known to enjoy hip-hop is enjoined by an elder to lay down his Glock; a slutty teen repents making her parents’ life difficult; a yuppie with a BMW is crucified (upside down). A woman—“I’m nobody, I’m just a waitress”—tells of having backed out of an abortion, thereby saving the life of a child who turns out to be the savior of all humanity. In the end she and her male protector set off to found a new world, the baby at her breast, the SUV’s ample trunk weighed down with small arms. In their wake are strewn the bodies of the townspeople who turned on them, who were in turn slaughtered by an avenging angel with perfect bone structure and a British accent: Bettany, who I saw once in the lobby of Angelika, being a tall drink of water and waiting for his violet-eyed wife.


What do angels do? Fall into rank, and contemplate God’s plan, which though too intricate for their understanding nevertheless compels them by the beautiful order they know it to contain. And we’re way down here, and when I try to think of how things are connected I get a hot, fuzzy feeling in my head. Warm, southerly air today brought a pattery shower, the vans still beaded with rainwater do the traffic circle too fast, the green globes of the F stop are lit and glow. We could probably bear this so-called order if it didn’t of necessity draw its sphere of inclusion just behind our heels—we’ve always, in spite of ourselves, just stepped inside.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

DAYBREAKERS

The hydra of impulse. Pack a lunch, you’ll be eating it by eleven. A movie about cannibal vampires speaks to a people so hounded by the infinite menu they’d be willing to see it shrunk to the one worst thing.


The day I go, I shit you not, is the day I discover on google the rumor about bedbugs in the theater. My skin crawls the duration. They’re said to infest in every unfortunate way: invisibly, entirely, and forever. Anyway, it can’t be broached. The one time I tried to make a lighthearted crack about the heat the usherette on her smoke break—she’d been the one to chat me up—snapped into defensive mode: “Do you have a complaint about the theater, sir?” Jesus, no.


Can we ever become human? In the end the vampire soldiers attack and devour other soldiers who have themselves, in attacking the hero’s brother, consumed his now-curative blood, made so by the brother’s previous biting of Defoe and subsequent transformation because Defoe is a vampire-to-human following his accidental exposure to the sun, which he survived by falling into a lake. In other words, the cave is deep and dark and we are up in it. I feel nervous, strung-out by all these vampire stories, post-apocalypse stories, post-vampire-apocalypse stories. Like a crop in exhausted soil—but who, in times like these, can afford to keep a field fallow? Sacrifice, comes the eternal decree. Eat life itself.

THE BOOK OF ELI

Carley and I see the movie about surviving a post-apocalyptic wasteland of killer gangs and paltry resources and afterwards conduct a seemingly unrelated conversation about New York real estate.


The plot is: We Love Books! And in the plot the man with restless lips (Denzel) and that gait that made Glory hurt carries a book, the crisp milk of the bound actual, to Silicon Valley, losing the book along the way but keeping the book on tape within him, reading it later through his battered lips into the record to be kept in a museum (Alcatraz). And then the girl character leaves the museum-prison or prison-museum wearing fatigue pants (cataclysm chic) and an iPod that’s somehow wearing her.


A movie not from but of the book. And yet, a movie to its core. Whose strange project is always to say, this is what we mourn, in this case the earth nearly emptied of our stuff. So build a set, hire extras, screw a dreary filter on the lens. Together they embody the mourned thing. Then the star—our radically particularized proxy—takes a gun or sword to kill the loss over and over, while the cameras roll. Not, then, to mourn, but to slay mourning, to be rid of it, to be released—if a bit frightened that in one’s own time the same merciless abbreviation will be applied.


The promise of bed, the pillow. At my age one frankly understands what it is to close one’s eyes and go to the happy place.