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One of Those

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  Some movies have a potency built inside them that can't be unpacked with words or even thoughts. They just have it somehow, and it's not plot or cinematography or even performance that sends a film into this territory: it's a tone inherent in the subject matter maybe, and how the actors and everyone else take that subject matter on and hold it so dearly in their hearts and brains that the movie they make together becomes bigger than what they even thought they could accomplish. Like kindred souls combining into a mutual dream caused by honoring what they love. The Last Showgirl is one of those. The plot, about the last days of a showgirl's professional life on the Vegas strip, kind of feels a little cliche, reminiscent of other loser movies like The Wrestler or The Whale , but Pamela Anderson's face and demeanor and glow (as she portrays Shelly, the main character) make you take all that back. In fact, her face is the plot of The Last Showgirl :  wan, wrinkled, s...
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Perfect Day

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For a while now, art hasn't meant a lot to me.  Think it has something to do with the Pandemic and Trump and post-Trump and social-media and my age and just a total new feeling inside my heart and head that art, whether it is capitalized or not, isn't really worth it.  Doing or seeing.  Plus a couple of my best friends have passed away.  So there's that.  But still something about this era of polarization and dialog flaming into monolog and all the things -- something has evaporated culturally.  Art and life have disconnected in a lot of ways, and when they do connect it often feels manneristic and self-serving and just plain, well, worthless.   All of the above sounds particularly melodramatic I know, but I don't want melodrama.  I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.  I'm perfectly fine.  But I do just want to say:  art has sort of become an old acquaintance that I once had a deep crush on, but now when I come across ...
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Best of...

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Wanted to pull together the little movie reviews I do on Facebook into one post, a "best-of" from last year.  By the way, these little things are like crosswords for me.  I love trying to compress all I feel about each movie into a tiny paragraph/package.  It's like making a poem.  Every word has to count, every feeling justified.   So here are movies from 2023 I truly loved haiku-ing about:  MAY/DECEMBER:  One of the the best movies of 2023 from what I can tell.  MAY DECEMBER is slippery and arch and gentle and crazy and cinematic and trivial and just incredible.  Todd Haynes has worked for 30 years to get this elegant and this primal.  He planted the seed with SAFE back in 1995 with the divine and even diviner now Julianne Moore:  satire pulsing with tenderness, mean-spirited glazed irony with a sad exhausted loving soul at the center.  This one takes its cue from tabloid lives but then uses all of it to inspire a sort o...
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Big Personality

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Dan died a few weeks ago.  Hopefully in his sleep.         He was a strange combination of phantom figure and happy-go-lucky sidekick.  Working-class tennis player, elegant and handsome, but a little rough around the edges, gay but also running away from whatever "gay" means, while running toward self-destruction and loneliness.  A laugh riot, but he could also turn the meanest nastiest gaze on you, and his fury could get so concentrated and petty you would have to block him out just to stay on this side of sane.  Big personality, like gameshow-host big, stand-up-comedian big, but also someone always on the outskirts of where he was, and where he wanted to be.  I don't think he ever found a place where he wanted to be actually, hell, where he could be.  Existence for him was fraught with dangers and connections he never spoke about.  Just acted from.  There was a personal mystery he was involved in, on the other side of w...
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Ramble on

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Our Friend is a 2019 true-life drama that came out to little fanfare, and so when I stumbled onto it on Prime I thought this might be Gen-Z campy and soapy and self-involved.  Why not?  The stars kind of indicate that:  Jason Segal, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson.  But truth be told I also have a deep deep love for Dakota, so there's that.  Something about her face and demeanor reminds me of really nice girls in high school who got all the jokes and stood up for the people nobody stood up for.   So Bill and I watched it, and we lost our shit.  From the get-go it was ravishingly emotional and somehow not over-the-top.  The story is about a reporter whose beautiful wife has ovarian cancer, and they both share a really great best friend. The husband and wife are Affleck and Dakota, the best friend Segal, and the whole movie is blissfully orchestrated around the wife's diagnosis and how the three of them meet, fight, find solace, find a way t...
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Bridge to the Chorus

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I started this blog over a year ago to chart and define my love of things in the world (art, books, music, TV, whatever else), and my approach to loving these things:  incredibly, stupidly, blissfully.  But this has been a year or so of a lot of bad shit:  my mom died, then a friend from long ago committed suicide the next month, and just yesterday I found out one of my best friends has cancer.  What do you do with all of this? Write a blog about a TV show I guess.  One of the standouts on TV this year has been a show called The Last of Us .  Big hit based on a video game about the end of the world caused by an evil fungus. One episode stands out, although all of them offer a wildly precise fusion of arthouse and house of horrors.  This episode focused on a gay survivalist who stumbles across the love of his life after ambushing him in his post-apocalyptic front-yard pit/trap.  From that connect through twenty years of being together, the two men ...
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Weird in Our Own Ways

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  Fruit Bats is a one-man band overseen by Eric D. Johnson.  I've loved everything he/they have done since 2003 or so (including his side-band Bonnie Light Horseman), when I first discovered Echolocation , the debut album.   All the way through those 20+ years, Fruit Bats has been a touchstone for me, but Pet Parade , an album that came out a couple years back, is what I go to just about anytime I need music now.   It's lush country-drag pop, delicate but also full of denim-flavored 70s Fleetwood Mac greatness.  His voice is Supertramp merged with Glen Campbell, and the music has a synthesized ominousness and sense of fun, a hominess too. It's singer-song-writery but also contemplative beyond that, moving into this weird poetic direct-connect to my soul.  Every dang song on this thing is blissful and halfway awkwardly stupid in the way it needs to be, feelings bleeding out of every chorus and every note, with melodies laced with losses and happine...
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