Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Friday, May 14, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Omega Man meets The Dreamers! We had tickets last night for a free screener of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. We were reasonably excited about them when I got them from work on Friday.But the closer we got to Thursday, the less we wanted to go. And by Thursday morning, it was decided in one of those weird, unspoken, coupley things that sometimes happens: we weren't going to go, and neither of us were into it. Now, we both like Jim Jarmusch, and we both like free. And after a day spent doing all sorts of back-patting accomplishments (haircut, laundry, egg-boiling, shopping, working out), you think we'd both enjoy a relaxing flick filled with understated humor and delicious celebrity cameos. Instead, if I may use the patois of Northern Island comrades, we couldn't be arsed. Do you know the original Japanese cut of Godzilla is halfway through its two-week run at the Castro and I haven't seen it once? We still haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven't been to the Naz8 in months. All of this has built up to the sort of frenzy that would normally drive me into the theaters for a week, an ongoing frenzy of diurnal dark-dwelling and compulsive cinema watching. I even want to see The Punisher now, for Christ's sakes! And yet, whenever I think of actually going to the theater I get restless and uncomfortable and kind of twitchy. I actually think shit like "Why should I go to the movies? All I'm doing is wasting two to three hours of my life?" As I do with everything nowadays, I blame Van Helsing. ("Honey! Van Helsing clogged the toilet again!!") Van Helsing wasn't the worst movie I've seen--at the time, the action seemed okay, the set design was nice, I even laughed at a line or two. But it's as if the movie, like a slow-acting toxin, has thoroughly poisoned Edi and I on the idea of going to films. Even when seen for free, the relentless vapidity and repetitiveness of Van Helsing (a movie which, in a more honest world, should have been called "Everyone Swings on a Rope!") causes such existential distress, it is capable of blighting one's soul. Perhaps it was precisely that Van Helsing wasn't the worst film ever is why it has destroyed my kidneys and begun atrophying my optic nerves--all the noise and the color and the movement of the cameras was able to keep me distracted the entire time, almost pleasantly, and now I fear the movie-going experience because I am filled to my very core with anguished self-doubt. If I can't tell the difference between soul rape and a decent movie, how can I protect myself? What's to keep me from sneaking into a showing of The Day After Tomorrow and then finding myself, months later, a man-whore in Bogota with no idea how I got there or even whether Jake Gyllenhaal is a decent actor? My hope is it's just a passing phase, an aftertaste that will fade from one's mouth as the cells are replaced, generation by generation. But I worry, in an distractable and irritable way. What if Van Helsing is, to steal a metaphor from another film, the cinematic equivalent of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique? I felt okay when it happened, but now I wonder if, five steps after I left the theater, my love for movie-going tumbled lifeless at my feet, while I staggered on unaware. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:12 AM | |
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