WHEN IN ROME

Look around you: we are. The first city purely dreamt into existence came out looking at the same time bombastic and austere, in marble buff-white as the teeth of Kristen Bell when she draws back her bloodless lips. Madeleine: “Those are Louboutins, you can see the red lining. Those are thousand-dollar shoes.” Bell plays a young and super-successful curator of the Guggenheim, the ostentatiously classical museum on New York’s regal Fifth Avenue. Uptight, she loosens, and when her four comic suitors come, near the climax, all to her door, one wonders…

I didn’t mean to say before that anyone fucked, sometimes or often, gains any special understanding or even pleasure from it, always or ever. I’m just saying, sometimes having a cock is like operating the robot arm from within the space shuttle’s hermetic pod. How much better to pop the airlock and let nothingness crumple you like a can.

What do you get for the girl who has everything? Honey, just get me those red-lined shoes. I’m giving away my beauty, sitting in the dark like this, gang-banged by gravity, laid waste by the barbarian afternoon. But at the same time I pull gravity apart, I leave it the slightest bit more slack. The barbarians ride home with the contagion of ruin inside them. The EXIT sign marks a door where the cold sneaks in. Our will to conquer leaks, by the same derelict portal, steadily out.

EDGE OF DARKNESS

As the marquee once read: It’s Complicated. In the course of the film it comes out, just by the way, that Gibson is a war veteran, and he is asked his view on post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a scam, he says. In his experience, one leaves combat as pretty much the same person who went in. It’s complicated. All the violent deaths I’ve seen on screen over the years, where did they flow or pool? Could their materials be refined, if a refinery I am, into mercy? Do not forget the man’s reputation as a prankster and practical joker. Arrested for drunk driving in 2006, he ranted, “Fucking Jews... Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” It’s complicated. Intertwinement is the torture he loves best. His acting tricks are wild eyes and dead eyes. His forehead is a dense grid whose horizontal lines are astonishment and vertical, rage. His foil in this film is a fixer-type, quote, I’m usually the guy who stops you connecting A to B. Any child could tell you, they don’t connect.

In 14 movies I haven’t seen a single sex scene, not even the conventional man above the woman, moving beneath a modest sheet, one or both going unh unh. Do the movies feel this as redundant, since it is the movies and I moving this way, the movies above me going unh unh? The day after the orgy no one remembers the taut, lascivious beast who ranged through the rooms with stamping hoof and steaming nostrils. No, they dream and whisper of the creature who went limp before all comers, who assented to be annihilated by desire in the way they only wish, if not for all this fussy desire, to be.

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.

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.

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.

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.