Paul and Robert

After the utter joy of watching The Sting (1973) this summer, I have to say that Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is a letdown (1969). I think this disappointment develops from the film's confusion of tone and meandering pace. Robert Redford and Paul Newman have enough star power to make an Ocean's movie, but they cannot carry a film on looks alone. As one-liners slip and slide throughout the movie, I couldn't help but be bored with where they were going. I didn't really care about their mythic characters. Everything dragged on a bit too long, and I found myself wondering where the story went.

Referring to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, I think we could place these two heroes under the ironic category. I found myself looking down at them and their antics. This is not the case for the troublemakers they play in The Sting. You want them to steal and swindle. In this one, I couldn't help but feel sorry for Mr. Woodcock for being swindled by a bunch of amateurs.

I've Loved You So Long

Phillipe Claudel's film was saved by the last 30 minutes. And it's title. The title was probably the reason I decided to check out the movie. Something about it is so plan, yet so sincere. I think sincere would be the best way to describe this movie. A love letter to a lost child. A child killed by his own mother. An intriguing premise that is complemented with a very quiet movie. I wish it hadn't followed around the other sister so much, because I cared more about Juliette and her life after 15 years of prison. I cared about her and I wondered what could motivate her to kill her own son. I wondered what made her chain smoke and look out windows towards the bustling world unfolding around her. There is a scene involving a letter that is bonecrushing it its sadness. The last minutes of the film reveal everything, and it's not enough to justify the sense of loss we carry out.

I've loved you so long. Elegiaic.

Where Are We Going?

That might be the best question to ask for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). As the credits start the film, a harmonic chime hums in the background and a lone trumpet croons to its audience. Where are we going? What world have we decided to join? Will be able to get out? I'm not sure about the last question, because of the film's mixture of sexiness and macabre nastiness. To the core, this world seethes and the monsters leech in and out of it. Forget the black and white shadows of film noir. Chinatown is a dirty, muddy brown, where grit and dust attach themselves to sunlight like parasites.

What a fully realized film this is. For the first time, style does not carry the noir genre; rather, storyline, set development, and acting really elevate this film to a masterpiece of the time period of noir. When you develop the world, there really is a feeling (as an audience member) of inescapability, of surrender. As J.J. Gittes watches Mrs. Mulwray's corpse drip out of her car, we hear the blood dripping on the sidewalk, we see the sweat cool on Gittes's forehead. The slutty lights of Chinatown surround us in a hypnotic pulse and this world infects us with its filth.

However, that main theme by Jerry Goldsmith plays on. Something about it remains in my head. It might be the masterstroke of the film. It's not dirty or filthy. It's not broken down by this noir universe. Something about it remains. It manages to breathe despite the fog of crime and corruption. It's a somber tune, yes, but it's romantically somber. It carries the voice of the long-lost knights who pioneered into the California basin and founded this slut of a city. It remains in the valley like a distant echo, beating off the cold-dark wind.

And Gittes. What a man. Go home, Gittes. Go to sleep.

Q & Q

Questions are everything. Gotta try and remember that. Curiosity can take you far.

Waiting, Anticipating.

Look at the boy walking under the streetlights. I see him out of the corner of my eyes late at night and I sit and I stare. Mostly out of some odd amusement, but sometimes a sadness creeps its way in like it does with most things. I sit in my chair and watch as he swings around a pole like a leaf in the breeze, almost like a dance, almost like a waltz. He never looks straight ahead, but always up into the beacons of light. I sit in my chair and watch him flutter beneath the lamps and I feel sadness sometimes. What a life that must be, what an inspiration, what a joy. What secret does he hold that brings him here on these lonely nights to my window? Does he even remember that I'm here, watching him with dejected eyes, watching his skin pulse like the moon? Is he threatened by the tiny things that creep into heads like mine late at night? What does the passage of time feel like for him? What does love taste like for him? What does a hummingbird sound like to him? What are dreams like to him? I know, now, that there are certain moments in your life that will cripple you with their sincerity. There's no symbolism to them, no deeper meaning except in the fact that they are brief glimpses of melody and magic. At times late at night when he comes to my window, I often look away. Not ashamed, necessarily, but I don't want to make eye contact with him for fear he might run away. For fear that life is nothing but two dreamers lying in bed. I place my eyes on the windowsill and watch him waltz under the stars and streetlights. I want to smile but I don't, because it would only be stifled by the urgency to wipe the tears away from my quivering chin. At times late at night, I want to stand outside in the twilight shadows and wait for him to come by, to run up to him and hug him until he's smothered and can't breathe and screams and crys out but makes no noise because there's no air because it's only a vaccuum of fluorescent lights and stars. But for now, I'll keep my eyes on the windowsill, biting the inside of my cheek and smiling.

Are my chances of streetlight waltzes through?


There's a certain bliss implied with an untied shoelace. Sometimes, things are more important to worry about. Sometimes life can be too beautiful or heartbreaking to worry about shoelaces. Sometimes its more important to lay on the grass under the streetlights and feel the cracked skin of the asphalt against the pads of your fingers and smell the hint of long forgotten rains upon long forgotten highways.

Iconic.

"We are a people starving for beautiful images" -Werner Herzog.

A Saloon

Saloon.


I must profess a platonic love towards that word.


Something about it seems adamantly Western.

Better yet, American.


Surely it exists in other places.

But just the sound of it makes you think of the two wooden doors that squeak open as cowhands stumble in for another drink.

Dust on the floor.

Whiskey in the cabinets.

Women on the stairs.

We should change the White House to a Saloon.

It's time for a revolution.