I was born inside the movie of my life.

"None of us should be killing anybody. We should be cooking up some popcorn and having a good damn time. Fuck guns. Fuck bombs. Have some snacks and watch a movie. And talk about it after."

Half an hour after the film. Or never after the film. Always before. Always during. Always after, too, I guess. The film tonight was Life, Animated. It is on the shortlist for documentary feature at this year's Oscars. Also, I have Life Itself playing now as I write. I have seen this one a few times before. Watched it and wrote it about for four days in my blog a year ago.

a machine that generates empathy
it was made now and it's about us
reach out and empathize with other people
my blog became my voice

The quote that began today's entry--that is how I ended the third of those four Groundhog Day Project entries about Life Itself...

 

 

 

 

 

It would be nice if it were ever that simple. That we could all use our passions to embrace one another, to talk to one another, to enjoy the world around us rather than be angered by it, hate pieces of it, kill its parts and its soul.

Life, Animated is about an autistic man who learned to understand the world and communicate with it by watching and memorizing animated Disney films.

In The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida, an autistic boy, writes about the time he visited a statue of the Buddha. He starts to cry. "I started welling up," he writes. "It wasn't just Buddha's majesty and dignity, it was the sheer weight of history and generations of people's hopes, prayers and thoughts that broke over me, and I couldn't stop myself crying. It was as if Buddha himself was saying to me, 'All human beings have their hardships to bear, so never swerve away from the path you're on.'"

All human beings have their hardships to bear.

Simple, almost trite. And utterly brilliant.

 

 

 

 

 

It bothers me that we so often fail to communicate ourselves to others. Or that others do not listen when we try.

It bothers me that we have guns and bombs when we could spend the cash it takes to have those things on more movies. On more peaceful pastimes. On hobbies and crafts and games and music and drink and joy.

In the movie tonight--Life, Animated--Owen Suskind, after his girlfriend (also autistic) has broken up with him, asks his mother, "Why is life full of unfair pain and tragedy?" A question anyone might ask. Owen explains at one point that autistic people "want what everyone else wants, but sometimes we're misguided and can't connect with others." Sounds like the story of all of us.

And, that is my point. Like, if we could connect over something, maybe our numerous disconnections would not matter so much.

I come back to Blasco and Moreto (2012), writing in the Journal of Education and Learning about how watching movies creates empathy. But, I also come to the thousands of movies I have seen, the tens of thousands of hours of my life I have spent with movies. And, is it any wonder that I am the "bleeding-heart liberal" I am today? I claimed outright in one of those blog entries linked above that I am more capable of caring about other people than a whole lot of people out there. But, that is not quite accurate. I think that I do care about people a whole lot more than some people do. But, the capability? I would like to think that we are all capable. Too many people seem to have injected their capacity for caring into some zero-sum machine. Like, I have these people over here to care about, and these people over here; I couldn't possibly care about these people or these people. Jingoistic, us-versus-them kind of stuff.

In her introduction to the Love Is Love comic published recently (proceeds going to families of the victims of last year's shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando), filmmaker Patty Jenkins write about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the subject of her film Monster--we are thirteen years after that film. She writes about the hardships of Wuornos' life then says, "I ended up making a film about her--not because I wanted to apologize for what she had done or dismiss its gravity, but because I could not accept the lack of compassion and understanding that was being applied to this incredibly tragic case of damage and destruction." She continues:

Aileen had clearly crossed a line and finally turned into exactly the same kind of victimizer that had created her. I wanted to state that clearly, and did so with the title Monster. Here is one. Let's come and see. But if only she had found more compassion in the world, if only our world could have looked a little more deeply at her story a little sooner, maybe this could have been avoided.

Even a monster should be understand, can be understood. Good movies can actually help. And, by creating empathy in the audience, even a bad movie can help, too.

Or just a conversation in the movie theater lobby.

Anything.

I stand by the lines that started this entry:

"None of us should be killing anybody. We should be cooking up some popcorn and having a good damn time. Fuck guns. Fuck bombs. Have some snacks and watch a movie. And talk about it after."

A New Year without Movies

Imagine:

Something like twelve hours after the film. Or a year. I mean, I have not seen even one film this year. The situation is quite sad.

Or it is New Year's Day. Eve. Day. My sister. My daughter.

The films in question: Cameraperson and The Witness. (I also watched Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but those are not the inspiration for what I would like to write.)

I thought about writing about my favorite movies from 2016, but I think I will save that sort of thing for an entry about the Oscars next month. So, what I wanted to write about...

It was after midnight, the first morning of the new year. I realized after writing just that much that I was too tired to keep making sense for any real length of words. I put the keyboard away, got some sleep, then New Year's Day proper I watched no movies. I was going to get back to the entry once I was watching or had watched my first film of the year.

Then, things got weirder because I watched no movies on the second of January either.

For the most part, I had run out of movies in theaters. The few movies out there that I had not seen yet (notably Toni Erdmann, Silence, Elle, A Monster Calls, Live by Night) were playing far away, were playing only once a day, and/or were playing only at theaters my MoviePass could not get me into. Oscar-qualifying runs. They would be at other theaters soon. If I could just be patient.

I am trying.

Today, on the other hand, I am watching some movies. Well, that is the plan. I am only watching the first of maybe several. I noticed last night that a few of the documentaries on the Oscar shortlist are available on Amazon. Right now, "Weiner is playing.

I had intended to use Cameraperson as a jumping off point to talk about being grounded in reality through films. And, for the record, I do not just mean that a) only documentaries can ground us (i.e. that scripted films cannot also ground us), or b) that documentaries are so consistently objective as to represent reality accurately.

But, what is interesting about Cameraperson in particular is that it is personal. Deliberately personal. Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson presents footage (mostly) shot for other documentaries pieced together as her memoir. She includes as well footage of her mother who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and footage of her children playing wither their grandfather. She grounds her professional footage in personal footage and uses disparate pieces of other stories to tell her own story.

I cannot find where I mentioned it in my old blog but a couple years ago I did this thing in Performance Studies class where I used biographical details about other men named Robert Black to explain who I was. So, I like this approach. Plus, that is a great deal of what the old blog was. My life in movies. My life through movies. My life with movies.

I figure this blog, if I manage to keep it going regularly (but apparently not daily), will be the same. I also figure that, given the Trump administration about to be in office, it may get political from time to time.

Like it was not often political before.

Like film itself is not inherently political.

Like writing itself is not inherently political.

 

 

 

 

 

For the record, this will not be a year without movies.

That is not a thing.