(*still far fewer times than I have seen that film which shall not be named here)
I intended to write this week about La La Land, and compare it to Sing Street--we're nine days after that film--deal in modern movie musicals and why Moana--twenty-three days and eighteen days after that film--is a better musical than either of those two, though I loved La La Land and thought Sing Street was amazing. For the record, I wanted to really use La La Land to write about what some reviewers are calling the "whitesplaining" of Jazz. A nice big racial discussion, room for political tangents and big, opinionated commentary on the state of (white) film today, and maybe some open wondering on how +OscarsSoWhite was going to be this year.
(If you are somehow reading this and have never read any of the entries in my previous film blog, you should know that I tend to get rather obsessive about the Oscars every year, making an effort to see all the nominees, and in recent years having seen most of the nominees (except of course the short films, the documentaries, and the foreign-language films) by the time their nominations are announced, and last year in my other blog, I wrote for days about #OscarsSoWhite.)(Also, you should know that my sentences sometimes get convoluted. I had toyed with deliberately limiting entries in this blog to only 500 words. I rejected that limitation almost immediately.)
I intended to write about Passengers and the misogynist notions at the core of its plot.
I was going to twist the discussion of La La Land into the discussion of Passengers (or vice versa) to talk about what I was going to call the "white male problem" in Hollywood.
And, to be fair, Hollywood absolutely has a white male problem.
But, then Carrie Fisher died, and though I did not have a particularly emotional reaction to her death, I did get to thinking about Princess Leia and about Star Wars and how bound up in my entire life that series is. I mean, I was barely more than a year old when the original was in theaters. I do not know exactly when I first saw that one but I knew it well enough when The Empire Strikes Back came out. I cannot, of course, remember just how I understood that film at the time, what the experience of seeing it for the first time was like. I have seen the original Star Wars trilogy so many times--watching the three of them together when I was home sick from grade school more than a few times--that each viewing affects the memories of the ones before. Those films (and many others) are part and parcel of my being. Not just inasmuch as they influence the way I look at movies but also the way I look at life. Princess Leia was probably my earliest crush. I was one of many young boys (and, I assume, girls) moved, as it were, by the sight of her in that outfit Jabba made her wear, but I think there's something much more important than a preadolescent crush there. It occurs to me (now, if not previously) that the conservative notion that Leia needed rescuing got twisted up in the progressive notion that she was quite capable in her own right, and probably shaped a lot of what I thought in the intervening years about cinematic and real-world women.
And, I am rambling a bit.
And maybe grasping at straws.
Or maybe quite accurately measuring my past self and his growth into who I am today.
I really do not know.
Plus, I find myself pulled in too many directions in what I should be writing here. So much so that I regret (and may very soon change) my plan to write here only once a week. I do not think I would try to force myself into the corner of having to watch a film every day again (not that I do not regularly make an effort to see nearly that many anyway), and certainly not the same film every day again, but I think I would like to write every day again. There are several throughlines to my life at present; I am a father, I am a teacher, I watch a lot of television and what some people call too many films, and I play Dungeons & Dragons (and other tabletop games), and I'm into politics. The thing is, I have proven many a time in my old blog that I can use films and the discussion thereof to talk about pretty much anything. Anything and everything. And, maybe it is the order that it provided my life for a few years, or maybe it is that I need a regular outlet beyond 140 characters to...
What is it that I want to do?
(I ask that rhetorically, so that I can immediately offer up an answer, but I also ask that of myself here, now, as I write.)
I want to write about film again. I want to write about life again. I want to take my experience with something like 5000 films seen in 40 years of life and use it to comment on... well, anything and everything.
You can never watch too many films. You can never have too many opinions.
Though, for the record, some films are not good. And some opinions are awful.
And, elephant in the room, yes, I know this blog has a white male problem, too. But, unlike Passengers, trying to have its misogynist cake and eat it with a deus ex machina Laurence Fishburne and the sudden ability to not only save a woman's life but also offer her up some interstellar hibernation, and unlike La La Land which, well, actually doesn't really make any effort to solve its white-guy-saves-jazz problem, I tend to be up front about my biases. Like, sure, Leia in that slave outfit was hot (or, to my seven-year-old self, probably just "pretty") but hey, her turning the Sail Barge's cannon on its own deck was pretty hot, too (or, to my seven-year-old self, probably just "cool"). And, Carrie Fisher was always far more than Princess Leia anyway. She was also a brilliant writer and a hilariously honest memoirist and interviewee. She was someone who acknowledged her flaws and moved on past them as best she could. Like we all should.
Says the white cis-gender heterosexual male.
Forgive me.
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