When the cows come home...

Continuing this whole "defining" movie thing, I wanted to respond to some of the comments on the initial blog. A couple of people mentioned Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. I have to admit that while I enjoy the movie very much, I don't love it as much as many of my friends do. But a recent viewing at a "movie night" at my apartment recently made me realize how the film is a good example of how movies (and books and stories of all kinds) hold our imagination--and, by extension, how these movies come to color our own personality, our own personal cultural history (which is of course the whole point of this little experiment I'm trying to conduct).

Most of my friends can quote the film ad nauseam and the humor and fantasy elements I think are what hold it in the high esteem of a lot of the people I know. But what I find particularly interesting about The Princess Bride is its framing story. With all the swashbuckling and throwaway one-liners, it's easy to forget that The Princess Bride is not about Westley, or the Dread Pirate Roberts, or Inigo Montoya, or even Princess Buttercup. Really, it's about the story of these characters. It's about "Columbo" telling the story to his grandson--you know, the one who'd go on to date Winnie Cooper. And throughout the film, the child stops his grandfather from telling the story, redirects it, and makes him skip the bad parts.

Isn't that what we do with all the movies we love anyway? We relive them in our heads and we make our ideal of them fit our particular psyche; we rewrite these movies in our memory. How many times have you talked about or thought about a movie you loved when you were a kid only to watch it again and not feel the same way about it?

It's a fact of nature (unfortunate perhaps) that once a work of art--a movie, a novel, a pop song--hits the world, it ceases to become the property of the artist and instead becomes the property of its audience. Each of us brings a bit of our own emotional history to the work, our own personal experience, and that can't help but color our own reaction to it. As a result, we are in an ongoing dialogue with the film, an intellectual back-and-forth between our mind and the screen--a give-and-take that continues, theoretically, for the rest of our lives. Or at least for as long as we continue to watch a particular film over and over again.

And that brings me to the next film on my list.

The first time I saw Federico Fellini's 1953 film, I Vitelloni, I was a young idealist, a 19-year-old college student. The five "vitelloni" (literally, "big calves" or more loosely, "big children"), though almost a decade older than me at the time, were people I looked down upon. "How could men of their age act like such boys?" I thought. Of course at the time I didn't get the irony of my own arrogance. Here I was an adult (technically) still with the mentality of a child, still a dependent, still unaware of what was out there beyond the scope of the existence I knew my entire life. I believed I was more mature than these adolescents trapped in men's bodies; I believed Fellini was pointing the finger at them, castigating them for their insouciance. I watched it that first time with an emotional distance I didn't quite earn.

Cut to four years later at the 2004 Florida Film Festival, where the film had a special screening. I was now 23, graduated from college for two years and the movie held an entirely different meaning to me. Instead of looking at the characters with superiority, I began to see myself in them. Four years later, the movie had not changed one bit, but I did. And I realized that Fellini was now pointing the finger at me. It was a complete slap in the face. "How did I get here?" I wondered. "How did I turn into one of the 'vitelloni'?" More than that, I began to see specifically how I was like some of them: the laziness of Fausto, as well as his simultaneous selfishness and ambivalence towards the opposite sex; the artist Leopoldo, who in some ways is more worried about playing the part of a writer than actually being one; the sad clown, Alberto.

Toward the end there is a character who gets on a train and finally leaves this scene of ineffectualness. He looks back in sadness down the railroad tracks, sure, but it's the right move for him. The only move really.

It's now another four years later and I haven't seen the movie since then. I wonder what the movie will mean to me now. In a way I feel like I'm at a particular crossroads in my life (for more than one reason). But unlike the character in the train, this time I hope I'm looking forward, instead of looking back.

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Does anyone have a movie or movies that have drastically changed for you in this way?

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the initial list of movies from some of you. And you know who you are.

Tipitina, tra la la

"What is it about movies that explains
their amazing hold over the human mind?"

-- Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies


I've just finished reading an advanced reading copy of a new memoir by novelist David Gilmour called The Film Club. It chronicles the the relationship between Gilmour and his son, Jesse, who is so bad at school his father gives him the option of dropping out altogether and not even have to pay rent or for food. But he has to agree to one condition: watch three films with his father a week and discuss. The book is more a love letter to Jesse and the relationship between dads and sons than it is to film, but there are some choice passages in it that really get what it is to love movies. Not to like them, but to love them, and what it says about those who do:

Picking movies for people is a risky business. In a way it's as revealing
as writing someone a letter. It shows how you think, it shows what moves you,
sometimes it can even show how you think the world sees you.

People often say that you can define a person by what they say or by what they do or by what they believe in or their values. But I like to take a different approach. I like to define a person by their taste, by the things they like. Because, as Gilmour alludes to in the above quote, a list of things you like says as much about you as it does about those things. That goes for all art, including movies.

And so I propose a little activity. For those of you who read this and know me personally (which is almost all of you), know I work at a library (which is, again, most of you who also do). Recently we had a StoryCorps mobile booth parked outside our library, which allowed anyone on the street to tell their story, whatever it is.

What I want is for you, yes you, to tell me your story, but not in the traditional sense. I want you to tell it through the movies you love. What are the five movies that come closest to defining who and what you are? These are not the five movies you'd want if you were stranded on a deserted island. This is not a Sight & Sound list either--I don't want to know what you think the five greatest movies ever are (well, I do, but not for the purpose of this). And I'm not even asking for your five favorite movies, that's still a little different. I want the collection of movies that in some way tell your personal story. And it doesn't have to be obvious, you can be creative. If you work in a library, you don't have pick a movie about librarians or writers or books. If you're a doctor, you don't have to pick a movie set in a hospital. And you don't have to pick five... pick two, even one. I'm just curious as to what movies hit you on a personal level; what movies mean so much to you it becomes an extension of you, a part of you.

Here's one of mine, to start the discussion:

Sunset Boulevard may be Billy Wilder's best movie, Some Like it Hot may be his funniest, and Woody Allen was once quoted as saying that Double Indemnity is probably the best movie ever made. But for me The Apartment resonates the most personally. There is a scene--a moment actually--that is as good as any in Wilder's career. (I'll try to be slightly evasive as to avoid major spoilers.) It comes at about the midpoint in the movie when C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) opens a compact and sees that the mirror is broken. In a moment, his whole world has turned on a dime. Everything he knows about someone has been turned on its head. "Some people take and some people get took," a character says to him later in the film. And what I love is that the more the two leads describe their own lives, the more they are describing each other. Pain and personal anguish is as universal as it is specific and I don't know if there's a better movie I've seen in capturing that.

Okay, it's your turn... you'll get the rest when I hear some of yours.

Oh, and The Film Club comes out May 6.