Just For a Couple of Hours ~ Why going to the movies still feels special

I love going to the movies.  I love seeing enormous people who are not politicians or corporate schmuck smeared with PR propaganda juice going about a life.  I get to see through their eyes, and sometimes, on very special occasions, I see something so different, so good or so bad, and it changes me.

Franz Jachim, some rights reserved

In the ordinary world, we're all attentionally deficit.  I work at home on a computer, and against my better judgment, sometimes while I work I flick backwards and forwards between my work and the internet because I simply can't help myself.  On any given day I tend to have 10 browser pages open at once.  Before I finish the end of one page, I have generally flicked over to another, or to check my email, or to look at Facebook when I'm on it (at the moment I'm not), or to look at Twitter.

We are starved for stories in the world we live in, though we're surrounded by words and great stories.  But where are the good stories about us?  Where do good stories fit in a world where the economy is the god, and we are forced to be its subjects?  Where do we fit in?  And how do we see each other?  It feels like every turn in this world I am encouraged to see people as cogs.  There is nothing to stop me from looking at you and seeing someone who is simply not-me, and simply in my way.

I sat in a university class a couple of years ago listening to fellow creative writing students who are 20 years younger than me talking about how flatpacked and meaningless this world is to them, how going overseas opens up their eyes because they see people who are living in ways that matter.  There was something about hearing those people say those things that made me feel hope.  Even though they have been born directly into consumer culture in a way that I wasn't 44 years ago, they still harbour the same hopes and desires for things that it's becoming harder and harder to find the words for.

This search for meaning, for story, is why I love writing and reading.  And it's why I love going to the movies.  Like Patrick Goldstein, I am an old-fashioned purist when it comes to the cinema.  Even in the age of Netflix and DVDs, there is still a ritual about moviegoing that sets it apart from those other forms of viewing.  Something about sitting in the dark feeding your face with popcorn with a whole lot of other people who are all sharing the same story turns it into a sacred space for me.

The old Barkly Theatre in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray.
 State Library of Victoria, some rights reserved

When I go to the movies, I guess a lot of what I like to see is about meaning as well.  When I was a child and before I could read, my Mum read a story to me every single night.  By the time I was eight years old I was spending afternoons clambering up the Faraway Tree, polishing off one of Enid Blyton's books from the time it took to end lunch and begin dinner.  It was escape, but it was also developing imagination.  It was realising that there are as many different ways of looking at pretty much anything, and that every way you do look at something opens up a particular world at the top of your tree.  It colours the way you see everything.

In the cinema, I am stuck in the best possible sort of way.  I'm not at home.  I can't go and get online.  I am forced to sit there, even if my mind wanders.  I don't want to check my mobile phone.  Nor do I want anybody else to check theirs.  We might miss something.  I want us, just for this little time, to be all looking the same way and all seeing the same thing.  Just for a couple of hours.

Moviegoers at the Melbourne International Film Festival, enjoying the wonderful Forum Theatre in Melbourne's centre.  Pic by Anne Holmes,  some rights reserved

1987 was 153 years ago

Or at least, it felt like it on Saturday night when I subjected my partner and myself to the last 30 minutes of Dirty Dancing.

Goodness me, what a giant field of corn, stretching far beyond what the eye can see!  So cliched!  Truly awful acting deserving three sentences running with exclamation marks!

I tried watching another movie from the 80's the other day too - Local Hero.  Unfortunately, I had to turn it off after five minutes because it was just so heavily cliched and caricatured that it seemed ridiculous, like a soap opera.

I know we watched Dirty Dancing as teenagers, and I know we were aware of the corniness of it.  But still, what a difference 30 years makes.  The intervening decades have seen the field of corn transformed into 11 giant vats of high fructose corn syrup poured over things which were vaguely acceptable back in the 80's.  It has, unfortunately, began to seem quite truly like another time and place.  A more innocent time.

Saying that makes me feel creakily ancient, like I am the door of a building first built in the 1700s.  For all the distance between now and then, the 80's may as well have been located in that century:)

Patrick still looked pretty alright in that black t-shirt, though.

(Apologies to Shawn Econo, the taker of this picture and the spermer of this adorable boy, for proving my point with this picture :)

The Railway Man

Today, in the toilet at the Cameo Cinema, The Police were playing.  The entire album of Outlandos D'Amour, which was pretty cool.  And so I did a wee to the rather apt strains of So Lonely.

I went to the movies alone because it's sort of empowering going to the movies alone, don't you reckon?   Maybe especially when you're feeling lonely.  Nothing like being held by the Great Dark Womb, munching a popcorn/Maltesers combo.  Soothing stuff.

I saw The Railway Man which was quite wonderful although probably not really all that soothing.  It was also very symmetrical because the seat I got allocated was right in the middle in the very back row.  The curtains squeaked ever so slightly as they opened to their full we're-past-the-ads-now-prepare-for-the-feature width.  I was the youngest person there, which doesn't happen very often these days. 

The movie was about a whole lot of things - the futility of war, about shame, about PTSD, and ultimately about forgiveness and redemption and all them big-band beautiful sounds.  Which is pretty interesting because a great deal of it was about the horrors of what one bunch of people will do to another bunch of people in the name of whatever it is they're fighting for.

I would love to have the solidity and faithfulness of Patti Lomax but unfortunately the reality is that I'm closer to Eric, even though that leaves me in the crappy position of feeling bad comparing my own traumas to his astronomical ones and therefore finding myself wanting and thus increasing the loneliness quotient.  After all, I have never suffered the sorts of atrocities he suffered while a POW in the Second World War on the Burma Railway.  I simply don't know how he survived.

But that was only one self-absorbed component of the flavours that I've been left from this movie because it really is very good.  And my, Colin Firth proves again that he is a wonderful actor.

More people than usual sat silent at the end of this movie when the credits rolled.  And from my position at the back, I got to inspect just how many people were wiping their eyes.  But of course we were all good cinemagoers and managed to keep ourselves intact.  Nary a bursting sob ensued, though I think there were probably a few people, like me, holding themselves back.

Great stuff.  Highly recommended.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape Tribute

Geez, it's been 20 years, Candy.

 Twenty years since What's Eating Gilbert Grape was released.

I don't just love it simply because Johnny Depp's in it, although that makes it more lovely because I adore the quirky, offbeat characters he plays. But Gilbert is at the beginning of his career (before he "went weird" as someone described it online yesterday) and is as straitlaced as 21 Jump Street. But this character affects me maybe more than any other ~ there's something so heartfelt about his portrayal, and his desire, and his feeling of being held back and frustrated, and his desire to be free, that gets me every time.

If Leonardo di Caprio had never made any other movie after this, his career would have been an accomplishment. And while I can't say that I've seen much of anything he's made, from what I have seen he has not been able to scale the acting heights that he did playing Arnie because he was, quite simply, brilliant.

Margaret from At the Movies thinks that a classic is a movie which gets better every time you see it. What's Eating Gilbert Grape is my best-loved classic of them all. Its sweetness, aching and longing works on me every single time.

The Pit of the Pretentious Prat

The Luncheon on the Grass - Edouard Manet

I don't know about you, but despite the fact that I don't know a whole lot about art, I love it ~ I love looking at it and the jolt that (sometimes) comes when I get a feel for what I'm looking at.  And I also don't know about you, but I am forever fascinated by the back-story ~ what it was that drove the artist to spend all of those hours making that particular object.  I suspect lots of us are fascinated by that mysterious space where everyday people make stuff out of nothing.   That's why we pedestal artists, creators and mothers to high spaces (and why we cannot define our society as "civilised" until they are all getting paid higher than laywers).  'Tis a bit magic making something out of nothing ... but really actually very mundane, when you think about it!

If you wish to learn more about what the artist might have intended or what a piece of art might mean, then that's where art experts might come in, if you dare.  But that's also where the anxiety comes in too.  Because art experts sound pretentious often enough that it's a cliche.  And they make me feel like I shouldn't talk about art if I don't know a whole lot about it because they've done the hard yards and what do I know if I haven't studied art for 916 years like they have?  But raspberries to that, and raspberries to their formal education.  Because the problem with formal education is that it crusts up your edges and makes you unable to see other options.  And because of that, I take what resonates and leave the rest.

Learning about art can easily make you feel like you're in a classroom where all the mystery and fun about something is deconstructed into 187 different pieces so that the thing that you loved a little before you analysed it now resembles the texture of last night's used condom (sorry about that visual).  One more interesting thing whose essence is splattered by TMI.

That's why I was a little uneasy about going to see Exhibition: Great Art on Screen last night at the Nova.  This was a movie about an art exhibition - Manet: Portraying Life, which recently finished after playing  for three months at the Royal Academy in London.  But it was really ultimately just a documentary about Manet with the fact that it was filmed as part of the exhibition being a bit of a redundancy.  But that's okay.  I'm willing to give the other films in the series a shot too (especially if Weekend Notes gives me tix for nix).

And so I was worried about seeing this movie that there would be a lot of prattery and twattery but in the end there were only a couple of times in the movie that I wanted to whisper "Wanker" under my breath.  So that's a pretty good outcome in the end, I think.

Image by Sethlamden

But what does that say?  If you got 100 people in a room and said, "How many times did those people sound pompus and assey?" what would happen if 99 people said, "Twenty-six times" and I say, "Three"?  What happens if the world is getting so damn stupid on GMO food that soon we won't be able to talk about anything other than Beyonce's rack without sounding like we're up ourselves?  I don't like that idea either!

But really, I don't like pretentious prattishness.  It's vulgar.  The thought that I might come across like that to some people is ... well, it hurts a bit because what if it's true?  After all, I am the owner of an ego which wants me to look awesome to everyone at all times.  I also want to demonstrate my knowledge and my opinions about something.  And being human, that can easily translate to being a knob.  That is the sort of class they should have at school - how, if you are passionate about something, some people will think you are a twat, and how to learn to not appear like a knob.  I would sign up for that class.

I had my astrological birth profile done a few weeks ago.  For a bit of fun and out of curiosity.  But wow, you know what?  It's actually surprisingly accurate.  Like this bit, for example, apparently all because my Moon is in Capricorn:

The Capricornian part of you needs to begin by asking itself one critical question:  In the part of my life touched by the Sea-Goat, what is the highest truth I know?  The rest is simple ... at least simple to understand.  Just live it.  Keep a stiff upper lip and do what's right.  But be careful.  There's nothing wrong with expressing feelings as long as they're not doing your decision-making for you.  If you're tempted to do something wicked, don't be afraid to mention it.  Otherwise, half the world will think you're a saint while the other half thinks you're a pompous ass.  And neither half will get within a light-year of your human heart."

 So there you go.  I claim the moon as my defence.  You might think I'm a pretentious prat - but that's not within a light-year of my human heart.  My ego though, that's another story :)

Just for a Couple of Hours

In the ordinary world, I am somewhat attentionally deficit.  I work at home on a computer, and against my better judgment, every day while I work I flick backwards and forwards between my work and the internet because I simply can’t help myself.  On any given day I tend to have 10 browser pages open at once.  Before I finish the end of one page, I have generally flicked over to another, or to check my email, or to look at Facebook, or to look at Twitter.

I hate it.  I feel like an addict, like I’m munching my way through those pages, going from one to another without digesting properly.  I guess a lot of the stuff I like to read is about subjects that are maybe a little deep, and that feel wonderful to me – creativity, humans and how we work, spiritual stuff, the stuff that goes beyond the dreary and desultory everyday.  I guess what I’m looking for when I read (and when I watch a movie) is meaning – finding it, keeping it, living in it.  Because to be honest, I’m struggling, in this world I find myself in.  It’s too fast, too loud, too disjointed, too meaning-deficient.  What the goddamn is the stupid way we live for, exactly?  

But then what can we say about the world we find ourselves in that hasn’t been said a million times before?  How can I talk about this deeper sort of stuff that compels me without sounding like a wanker?  I find that people have a limited ability to talk deep because they’re basically too busy just trying to get through the day. Sometimes that makes me feel lonely and frustrated in equal measure.

This weird system we are forced to live under is too in love with the economy at the expense of damn near everything else.  Where do the stories about us fit in a world where the economy is the new god, and we are forced to be its subjects?  Where do we fit in?  And how does this system make us see each other?  It feels like every turn in this world I am encouraged to see people as cogs.  There is nothing to stop me from looking at you and seeing someone who is simply not-me, and simply in my way.  

I sat in a university class on Thursday afternoon listening to fellow creative writing students who are 20 years younger than me talking about how flatpacked and meaningless this culture is to them, how going overseas opens up their eyes because they see people who are living in ways that are meaningful.  There was something about hearing those people say those things that made me feel hope.  Even though they have been born directly into consumer culture in a way that I wasn’t 41 years ago, they still harbour the same hopes and desires for things that it’s becoming harder and harder to find the words for.  

This search for meaning, for story, is why I love writing and reading.  And it’s why I love going to the movies.  Like Patrick Goldstein, I am an old-fashioned purist when it comes to the cinema.  Even in the age of Netflix and DVDs, there is still a ritual about moviegoing that sets it apart from those other forms of viewing.  Something about sitting in the dark feeding your face with popcorn with a whole lot of other people who are all sharing the same story turns it into a sacred space for me.  

When I go to the movies, I guess a lot of what I like to see is about meaning as well.  When I was a child and before I could read, my Mum read a story to me every single night.  By the time I was eight years old I was spending afternoons clambering up the Faraway Tree, polishing off one of Enid Blyton’s books from the time it took to end lunch and begin dinner.  It was escape, but it was also developing imagination.  It was learning that there are as many different ways of looking at pretty much anything, and that every way you do look at something opens up a particular world at the top of your tree.  It colours the way you see everything. And so this is why I love going to the movies.  I love seeing enormous people who are not politicians or corporate shmuck going about their life.  I get to see through their eyes, and sometimes, on very special occasions, I see something so different, so good or so bad, and it changes me.

In the cinema, I am stuck.  I’m not at home.  I can’t go and get online.  I am forced to sit there, even if my mind wanders.  I don’t want to check my mobile phone.  Nor do I want anybody else to check theirs.  We might miss something.  I want us, just for this little time, to be all looking the same way and all seeing the same thing.  Just for a couple of hours.

Diving Bells and Butterflies

The flat, fluorescent morgue light in Melbourne train carriages must be made by people who do not believe there is anything beyond death. The light is an insult to God, an insult to candlelight, a failure of imagination, making corpses out of commuters.

This evening I find life in the life and the death of Jean-Dominique Bauby on my screen and I remember again what I keep forgotting. I forget it all in a few blinks of an eye. Bauby wrote an entire book on one eyelid blinking. Sometimes I wish and yearn for death but it is not a wishing and a yearning for death, but for real life. The deepest deaths are the ones we die a million times every day while we live.

I sit in front of an empty page and the void is what drives people to drink but only if you don't think there's anything beyond the void. Sometimes, maybe only for a second, I see it, a taste through my eyes. Lightbulbs encase the sky; yellow suns nod on green stalks, flooding Rumi's field.

I stretch and I bend, creak through four rounds of salute to the sun. It gives me a headache. Salute to the sun is really meant to be only a warm-up for the rest of the yoga postures you do after that. This evening, it is the whole shebang. There is wisdom in not dislocating your entire body on the sharp spike of your ego.

Sometimes, when I am taking care, I notice some of the millions of lives I am born to every day. It's all moving too fast, and I note what I can, but so much is lost. Still, I keep walking out on piers I cannot see because the footing is more sure walking into the void than it is sometimes walking into the street.

Sometimes I think that You are going to turn the world inside out, the way children do that horrible thing with their eyelids. That one day we are going to wake up somewhere else and the beating, gentle, pink desires that were all aborted in one world, that never saw their way past enclosed hearts, will beat out into the world, over and over, and we become the children we never even were when we were young.

I can not imagine what life is when there is no death to frame the picture.

Equilibrium

Wow. That was really very unpleasant. I finally feel like I have gained some equilibrium back from the hell of Wednesday night.

I'm glad I'm not an alcoholic, because my liver is already stuffed. Seriously. Which is probably why I reacted the way I did on Wednesday night. In Chinese medicine, each organ is associated with a particular emotion. The liver's emotion is anger. And oh, boy, have I been angry the last few days? I've been exploding with it, spilling out of my eyes, my ears, but most definitely my mouth - yelling at the poor dogs to get out of the way when they happen to be in my path. This morning they were both sitting there staring at me and it was driving me crazy ape bonkers. They were wondering who this weird freak was who had come in and replaced the nice lady that gave them treats a few days previously. I made them go out of the room and closed the door. Couldn't stand them looking at me. Made me feel horribly guilty :)

I've been thinking for months I need to do a liver cleanse, so it looks like I am suddenly in one. Today I have done liver loving things - eaten beetroot, drank green tea and shitloads of water - and this afternoon bought some tablets that are for "liver detoxing". They are already helping. I am feeling more normal again.

Last night I borrowed a few DVDs, smoked a joint like the good Christian girl I am (which just made me feel worse than I already did, so that was some sort of of backfiring :), and watched The Meaning of Life. Hah :) Good stuff. Tonight I am about to watch Against the Wind, a mini series that was made to great acclaim here in Australia in the 70's, I think it was. Did it make it to the States and England and other places? I know Jane watched it in her childhood in South Ifrica because she was just waxing lyrical about how she loved when she watched it as a kid. I know I loved it too but I have forgotten so much of it. I love this way of watching mini-series - on DVD, so you can gorge yourself on 2 or 3 episodes in a row if you're so inclined. It feels very luxurious to me :)

My internet/telephone connection has been playing up ever since the heavy rain of last night. I think maybe it means I have water in the telephone line or something, if such a thing is possible. It's very annoying and I shall ring and complain like a grouchy old cow on Monday about it. Last night I grouched and smashed the phone around when it kept cutting out. Today it's been intermittent. Tonight it seems to have righted itself. Like me.

I'm off to lie on the couch and feel not angry. It feels really lovely :) Whee! And now I am going to feast my eyes on a youthful black-eyed Jon English :) (What an old perve I'm turning into. Cripes).

Thanks for prayers for me :)

Before Now

Okay, Jon, this movie is messing with my head :) The comments on YouTube are just as interesting sometimes as the portions of Waking Life movie chunk they're talking about.

I can understand why some people think that at some times this ventures into psychobabble. I can understand how some people would think all of it is psychobabble, but all that means is that the ride is not for them, as far as I am concerned. Luckily there's more than one ride at the fair. I guess it's just how much you want to think and ponder stuff. It can all get too much, definitely. I think and ponder stuff so much that this is not too much for me. Except for those days when I'm so sick of thinking that all our surmisings seem like self-absorbed psychobabble wank - as pointless as dancing to architecture (thank you Brian Mannix for that thought, thrown up like a dead fish from the 1980s).

I did a few Philosophy subjects at uni when I first began this degree way back in the Paleolithic era in 1998. Blew my mind. Got me excited. To sit in a room with a group of people throwing this stuff backwards and forwards - was like swimming in an ocean of 75% dark chocolate. I have toyed with the idea the last few years of going to a Socratic dinner, but that time isn't rght for me yet. Maybe some time in the future. I don't quite trust my mind to stay on track enough to indulge in philosophising in shared company for several hours without muddling or getting performance anxiety, but we shall see :)

Been thinking about the lines between things. About how the best kind of philosophy can lead into psychobabble. About how the best kind of art can lead to pretentious bullshit. Seems to be the process of things, this shelf life of certain expressions. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe the new wineskins just need to keep coming.

Anyway, I loved this part too of this movie. Because Before Sunrise is one of my favourite movies ever. And I didn't realise until before that Richard Linklater is involved with both, but the internet makes five minute experts of us all, doesn't it :)

I have had far too little sleep. Got myself all excited about thoughts and concepts and reality and time at midnight. Kept me awake and up like caffeine and viagra :)



Why does one eternal soul have to be an "ego thing"? :)

Waking Life

Thanks to Jon at Something Else, I have been watching part of another movie this evening. In 2008 movie-watching mode - that's on YouTube, in chunks. Hell, I'm not even watching it in consecutive order. But I'm kinda getting the gist of it anyway.

Anyone else remember this movie? Slipped right by me when it came out in 2001, but I was in CFS land and my whole life was slipping right through my hands back then. Those days turned out nothing like I had planned.

Anyway, this is kinda interesting. Who needs drugs when you have philosophy, huh? (I'm also thinking of how close genius and insanity are, and it's been something I've been thinking about all week, and I must say this is pretty trippy - and I don't know how much sense it actually makes - but gee, I love fascinating concepts :) I don't need them to be real necessarily, I just need them to be possible in all possible worlds. That's enough to float my boat ;) But having said that, this is something akin to the way I look at it all :)

Celluloid Sydenham

This morning on the train I tried to look at people as just people instead of potential subjects for my next train study :) And anyway, they were doing not much of anything really, it being a rather dull Tuesday, albeit a beautifully sunny one. Despite the sunny weather there was a dreariness about the day - tightarse Tuesday, the dude selling the Big Issue whispered to me (after I'd bought a copy, of course ;) Not much buying or selling or much of anything happenin' on the old Tuesday. I think there are lots of colds and flu's swathing their way through the streets of Melbourne at the moment, if the sneezing level at my workplace is anything to go by.

On the train, everyone being dull, I looked out the window. Actually saw a tumbleweed blowing down the tracks, like some kinda throwback to a wild west street a century and a hemisphere away. But of course, everyone has tumbleweeds, right? Just because they've been captured so much on film in that setting doesn't mean you don't have Thai tumbleweeds, Romanian tumbleweeds.

Went across the small bridge and then past the empty dirt field that caught my attention last Thursday. Today, like then, the wind was swirling around, having its own little dirt and wind party. There was something somehow whimsical about it, the way the dust whirled in circles, dancing for the entertainment of nobody. I gazed at it again this morning, in my fancy imagining invisible men in invisible cars doing invisible doughnuts.

Came home this evening and watched The Book of Revelation which is neither religious nor spiritual but instead, an Australian film about a man struggling to regain himself after a traumatic episode involving an abduction and torture and sexual abuse by three women. Sounds strange. But the role reversal really threw effectively into stark relief the disorientation, dissasociation and shame of abuse. I really loved this movie.

The movie would have affected me all on its own (indeed, Margaret and David, my favourite movie reviewers, both gave it 4 stars and I am always interested in seeing movies that both of them agree on). This would have reeled me in anyway, reminding me of my own struggles in a way, and of others I know, the silence and inablity to express what is going on when you are held prisoner within your own soul.

But blow me down with a tumbleweed if that little field with its dirt swirls isn't sitting there in that movie, with trains going past and that funny little bridge up in the corner. And dammit if it isn't going to feel just that much more poignant when I see it tomorrow morning.

Baraka

I watched Baraka for the second time last night. Well, I didn't realise it was the second time until things started occurring to me again and I realised that this was again one of those times that I had forgotten I'd seen something because I'd been stoned the first time.

Sheesh, what a bloody waste of time, huh?

Smoking dope, I mean, not the movie. The movie is just wonderful, so very poetic in the way he juxtaposed certain scenes. I just can't get the chickens out of my head :(

I also can't get it out of my head that I was bawling like a baby watching those chickens, but not as hard watching kids crawl around on rubbish dumps. There's something really rooly wrong there.

It's just that chickens are innocent. And people aren't.

Chick flick schmick schlock

I guess I'm a bit of a movie snob. I usually head straight for the arthouse section in the video library. I just find the formula of Hollywoodised stuff so thin that I'm bored within 4 minutes, knowing exactly what is going to go on. Yawn.

Still, having said that, I can go the occasional chick flicky-type movie. Indeed, I have watched the BBC four-hour version of Jane Eyre twice in the past couple of weeks. And could quote Mr Darcy lines. I loved The Big Chill, Thelma and Louise, Sense and Sensibility, Lovely and Amazing. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are deliciously romantic and chicky flicky and make me swoon and I think I shall put them on the list to give another whirl this winter.

Tonight, I felt like something a bit lighter than my usual serious fare, a bit of romance, a bit of unreality, a bit of girly stuff to spice up and wind down the evening. And so when I saw Pay It Forward sitting on the shelf I thought, why not? Good actors, and the whole pay it forward thing has gone into the general wordage of the culture, so let's give it a whirl.

Sheesh. What a load of trite schlock (in my opinion). Seriously, even though I did shed a tear at the end almost despite myself, it was so saccharine syrupy sweet I feel like I need to go brush my teeth. Blergh! If you're going to do that sort of movie, with a heartwarming kind of focus, with an idealistic young man (aw, don't you want to just squeeze Haley Joel Osmont? He's so cute!) who is wanting to make everything better, you've gotta have some sort of chutzpah about it to make it work. It needs to be laid on light, with big doses of irony and realism thrown in to make it palatable. But even throwing in a few smackheads and a chick about to jump off a bridge and wounded abused drunkards and homeless mothers and yada yada just really don't do anything to stop this movie from being fatal for diabetics. It felt like even with all the realism, the drug addict in the end was probably only shooting up dissolved sugar. Blergh.

Some people seem to like their saccharine piled on six feet high with a trowel. I feel like I've just eaten an entire cake with a cream-filled centre.

I think I'll go and watch Pulp Fiction :)

At the Movies. With your host, Suzie Q

There's something about watching a movie in front of a cinema-sized screen, in a darkened room with my fellow people, that just fills my creative well. It makes me feel like I'm in some kinda giant womb, there in the dark, with nothing to do but be told a big stowy and suck my thumb ... or eat popcorn and a strawberry choc-top. I love the movies. And it's been too long.

There is something about that experience that just wells me up, you know? It feels childlike and magical for me and the creative cogs start turning, and I start getting story ideas. But of course, I have to let them all fly away, which is a luxury all it's own, 'cause I'm in the middle of a stowy and this is all about being fed.

Ahhhhh :)

I especially love it when it's a good Australian movie, which it was tonight: The Black Balloon. A coming-of-age story told from the point of view of Thomas, who is 15 going on 16 and has just met the adorable Jackie at the new school he's started attending after his soldier father is stationed in a new barracks. Thomas has an autistic brother Charlie, and the main thrust of the story is about Thomas coming to terms with the facts of his situation while trying to work his way through that horrid, shitty age where your peers opinions are everything and they're often mean.. The scenes of Thomas in Phys Ed swimming classes brought back to me all the claustrophobia of my own high school experiences, about how much of teenagerhood is just pure embarrassment and shame. YUK! And the burgeoning romance between Thomas and Jackie was so sweet it literally brought tears to my eyes. The movie, in that quintessential Aussie way, highlights the darkness and light of life, full of quirk and a bit of whimsy and twice I thought I was going to burst into tears. It was lovely.

Luke Ford is quite amazing in his performance as the autistic Charlie. Toni Collette is a maestro. Nice to see Eric Thomson on the big screen. No passengers in this movie; accomplished performances all. Great debut from first-time director Elissa Down.




Not the way you wanna get to school when you're 15. Catching a ride on Charlie's special school bus :)

Imagine ...

... how much more honest the world would be if we could only communicate to each other in song lyrics? There are parts of me that feel like they can only be expressed through music. And I can't play any instruments. But still, I can sing - or at least, a passing resemblance to singing. And I did, yesterday, with Neil Diamond on the CD stacker. I have his Greatest Hits CD there that I pass over constantly over and over. I haven't played it ... well, I don't think I have played it ever, actually, since my ex-father-in-law asked me if I wanted it. But yesterday, gave it a burst, and boy did I dance around my lounge room? Yeah, I did. But then went quiet for Play Me. But gee, he had some good stuff. Solitary Man, September Morn, Cherry Cherry, Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon, Kentucky Woman. I must admit, I'm also a bit of a sucker for You Don't Bring Me Flowers. Just don't tell anyone.

Jane and I were talking last night about how a movie of Gandhi needs to be made that is less Hollywood-ised - that tells the story not only of his greatness but also of his less-than-perfect family life, and of an India where the people look and sound Indian instead of some bastardised English/New Zealand/Swahili/Botswanian thing (the South African ones were even worse), and where the poverty is represented truly instead of glossed around the edges for a people who weren't ready to see how the rest of the world lives. But then again, those things aside, the heart of the man was captured. Which is the only thing that matters, perhaps, or at least the best thing that matters. This quote was featured at the start of the movie:

"No man's life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record, and to try to find one's way to the heart of the man...."

Still, it would be good to see a movie about Gandhi made in India. Just as long as it's not a Bollywood version :) A dancing Gandhi musical probably wouldn't cut it :)

A dancing life musical though. That would be pretty cool. As long as it was a rock musical.


Edit: I think this disjointed post is actually about 3 separate ones. But you know, you can't always have jointed posts on a blog called Discombobula. And anyway, the transitions make sense to me - however, I suspect my brain works in rather strange ways :)

A new movie I wanna watch

How cute is this? What on earth are those pusses up to? (I don't think this is Photoshopped?? Or am I being naive?) This pic is in honour of Andrea's puss puss Emily :( She was hit by a car last night, poor Em. She was a beautiful cat.


Today I'm gonna watch Ten Canoes. The other day I watched Noise but it kinda left me a bit flat, really. I was thinking, I don't really care about these characters in the end, despite Brendan Cowell's masterful acting. I watched The Tracker recently (excellent suggestion, Urbanmonk) and rewatched Witness (the '85 version with Harrison Ford - I love the meanderingness of that movie, the way Peter Weir filmed it was just lovely) and A History of Violence which is good even for a perve (yummy Viggo) but is one of those movies that gets me thinking about questions of identity and how much we can change.

It's good to be back in the movie armchair again. I have been off it for a while. Movies feed my creativity. Almost as much as music. Speaking of which, I've been clicking pages on EBay again and shall soon be the proud new owner of a couple of secondhand CDs (I love rescuing secondhand things; I also like knowing they had a life before they came to me): Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows and Damn the Torpedoes by Tom Petty. Yay!!!

PS: I think the post I wrote yesterday was for catharsis more than anything else, and to show to you blog buds why I've been a bit of a fruitcake this past week. But it feels a bit unsafe having it sitting there so I think maybe it'll stay for a week or two and then get deleted. I wish life was that easy :)

So I wonder if Emily the puss has now met Hamish, Lucy, Tinker (plus the two cats we had when I was young and who I can't even remember their names - oops) in the great cathouse in the sky (if that's how cat afterlife works; I would be betting that it does work in some form. I think when it says everything shall be made new it means everything ... and everyone. Everything :)

But still - I'm sorry Andi :(

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