Incredibly Stupid Bliss

  Mass is a deep , meditative, and somehow shimmery movie about a meeting that takes place inside a church basement.  There are only a few glimpses outside this scene and environment:  one of a piece of plastic tied to a barbed-wire fence that gets repeated throughout, the other of the street outside, cars, sidewalk, mountains and prairie surrounding the town.  The purpose of the meeting is to unpack the horror and damage done by a school shooting, through a dialog between two sets of parents:  the shooter's (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney), and one of the victim's (Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs).   It really is hard to convey the odd aesthetic reverence this movie uses, because it's almost holy.  "Holy" without religion, without pretentiousness.  It has everything to do with a cut-to-the-bone screenplay by Fran Kranz, who also directs.  This is his first gig, and it is harrowingly on-target, without sentimentality but also basking in sent...

  This is the first post I'm doing on a blog I'm calling Incredibly Stupid Bliss , and there's really no better way to get started than by blissing out on Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza , a movie so stupidly wonderful and brilliantly executed that as I watched it I kept welling up with tears.  I do that a lot with movies and books and paintings and songs (that's why I've created this blog so I can go on and on about all that stuff), so my reaction is not really that revealing.  But somehow this time the tears felt so joyful and earned I just kept turning around to Bill in the theater and whispering, "Jesus Christ.  This is a movie." It is.  A movie.  Not a film, not a motion picture, not a spectacle, not a dramedy, or even an auteur turn (like a lot of PTA's portfolio).  It simply is just a good movie, and in a world where meaning and absurdity and truth and facts and bull-shit and showing off all get tossed together daily in an ongoing conv...