Moving to, Going on
Listening to my Itunes, and going thru viral videos one after another, I finally came upon the inspiration for today’s little ditty.
I have spent the last week or so stockpiling a bunch of posts for some larger, week long entries of a theme. To kill the suspense, they’re all rather bitter and likely will suck. But I have some rage I gots to get out of me. That and a long piece on love and Radiohead I will probably keep like Capt. Miller and his wife’s rosebushes.
So let’s go the other way.
The song, Kingdom Come off of Coldplay’s X & Y. It’s the only acoustic track off of the album of any merit, and it’s a dandy.
And the line comes: “For you, I’d wait, till Kingdom come.”
Part of me goes, “hey you bastard, you already got Gweneth! You get to have X mas at the Spielbergs. Or Chanukah, but it’s in December and they get to tell the stories that would make anyone’s heart overflow.”
The other part: “It’s like, yeah, it’s an easy line, but it’s delivered well enough. Damn I am lonely.”
It’s probably my favorite part about love, solidarity. Whether it’s the old couple finishing each others sentences or the guy talking about the girl in the white dress all those years later, the notion of one love, for all of eternity, captured in your heart… it’s enough to wait for on distant shores.
It’s always joyous, but most bittersweet; that whole better to have loved and lost part, because it’s fuels the resonance (both audible and memory) of a heartbreak, it was that strength and devotion that created love which still stays.
Whether you stay by their side, or wait for their unlikely return, keeping that promise in your heart is achingly human and renders poetic all emotions about love.
Movie canon moment #10:
Brief Encounter – 1945 Directed by David Lean, written by Noel Coward.
This is my favorite romantic movie of all cinema. It’s short, told in retrospect, and aching in all functions of the cinema. From the bleakness of the cinematography, to the melancholy, muted performance of Celia Johnson, the abruptness of the story; all of the film leaves you wishing there was a better outcome for those involved, but in your sensible mind, you know it was never meant to be.
The movie is based on the play by Coward, which tells the tale of a married woman who meets a doctor in the railways of wartime London. They begin an affair, they fall in love, and then he is sent off to another place. The details are useless for me to recap; the setup is familiar, it’s the way it happens that matters.
In the end, they split, and they aren’t even given a proper goodbye. Even the final farewell is ruined. It’d be wonderful for the characters and a terrible movie if everything didn’t seem to go against them.
In their final speeches to another she says, (as best as I can do from memory):
Her: “Oh I wish I’d die. I don’t want to go on like this.”
Him: “I don’t want you to die. If you die I’ll be forgotten. I want to be remembered.”
Moments later, she is ready still to kill herself, and she thinks to herself:
This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don't want that time to come ever. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.
Waning moments… there is that slow few seconds where you’d rather feel nothing at all. One comes to their senses, but part of the soul aches, wishing that they didn’t have something to hold on to when they can’t hold on to the person themselves.
In the 70’s cinema, she would have killed herself in the tragic way. In the 80’s and 90’s, she’d run back to the doctor and figure something out. The 70’s version would have proved the point about defeatist life. The 80’s and 90’s version would have been about good things happening.
Yet, of all of the 100 or so years of history, why do I cherish this film from the 40’s about wartime London? Because it’s story and theme exist out of time, and for the cinematic adapdation, few settings could do better than the bleakness of trains in war torn London. It’s cutthroat in it’s realism, and allowing it to be the ultimate film about what could have been.
++++
I never expect to get a feeling of heartbreak from movies like the closing moments of Brief Encounter. Casablanca has the friendship coda to ease things over, as well as the sense that Rick letting Ilsa go probably was good for the war. In the great romance films, most either end with reconciliation or death; few of them leave the characters to go back as if nothing ever happened.
And yet, I got this feeling from a movie two days ago. And, baby, I’m Amazed.
Amazed to see a moment so heart wrenching.
Amazed I didn’t see the film in the theaters.
Amazed it came from a movie that essentially was a female version of “Big.”
++++
If anything detrimental is to be said about the cinema of the 2000’s is that in most years, the best/dominant films have been, in one sort or another, fantasy- from kids films, comic book movies, or sci-fi/ fantasy films .
2000 – Almost Famous, Crouching Tiger
2001 & 2002 – Lord of the Rings
2003 – Bend it Like Beckham, School of Rock, Lord of the Rings, and Finding Nemo
2004 – The Incredibles
2005 – Batman Begins
There are some left out of there, like In the Bedroom, Traffic, and Lost in Translation.
From 2004:
13 going on 30.
If this is the decade of escapist fantasy in cinema, why the hell not go with it?
13 going on 30 is Big with a girl as the lead. Jenna is turning 13 on the first day of the film. She is ready for the party with her best friend Matty, but wants to be part of the cool clique. She likes fashion magazines, Matty likes photography (important later plot points), and the only way she can get the cool girls and guys to her party is to do their homework.
She is aged a 13 year who wants to be popular and who is sick of who she is and wishes to be “Thirty and flirty and thriving...”Under movie rules of logic and wishgiving, she wakes up in an apartment and she’s thirty.
The next 40 minutes are basic “whaaa… how did I get here” scenarios, like Jenna woke up in “The Trial” as a 30 year old fashion Diva in Jennifer Garner’s body (That’s right, we’ve had a Romantic poetry, Citizen Kane, Kafka and Saving Private Ryan references in one post)
Where it goes from there… well god damnit if it isn’t fantastic. Not only does her character make every measure to do well, we actually see her earn it. She overcomes her obstacle at work with an idea I’d like to see it happen in real life, she re-connects with Matty (a great Mark Ruffalo, second only to Ryan Gosling for best male counterparts in this decade) and figures out why they were friends from him telling her of the ashes of their relationship after her 13th Birthday. She even befriends the 13 year old in her building, partly out of soul recognition, but it functions as the transformation of the soul she would be headed to if she got what she wanted.
There are some great moments in the path.
1. Her going home to find herself and trying to piece her life together. This has two great scenes: where she apologizes to her mother for missing Christmas the year before (the Midwesterner in me loved this to no end), and her crawling into her parent’s bed on her mom’s side during a thunderstorm. On so many levels…. does that work.
2. One of the great dance scenes in non-musical history. The end result: Jenna gets the whole of a party to dance to “Thriller.”
Why this works and so many others fail:
A. You have to have someone with the mind of a 13 year old to actually try to get everyone to dance the moves of the video.
B. You have to have a guy who is in love with the girl be the one to back her up.
C. You have to have an overweight girl with low self esteem join in.
D. You have to have a gay or black man join in at the key moment and do the trademark move (here it’s a gay and the moonwalk)
E. It has to be airy and goofy enough to suspend disbelief.
Check and mate.
The films biggest flaw is that it has one more dance scene set to “Love is a Battlefield” but that’s about it.
And then it comes to the end.
Matty is getting married. All of Jenna’s plans and hard work have been spoiled by her former friend and popular girl (say good bye to these! (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the Arrested Development joke))
And the showdown comes:
Jenna: I am not the awful person that I know that I was. I don't even know that person. And I'd like to believe... I have to believe that if you knew that... ...if in your heart, you really, really knew that... ...you wouldn't be getting ready to marry someone now. Unless that someone were me.
Matt: I'm not gonna lie to you. I have felt things......these past few weeks......that I didn't know I could feel anymore. But I have realized in these past few days......you can't just turn back time.
Jenna: Why not?
Matt: I moved on.
Jenna :You moved on.
Matt: We've gone down different paths for so long. We made choices. I chose Wendy. That's her family down there. We care about each other, you know? You don't always get the dream house, but you get awfully close… I always loved you.
Jenna: Look, I won't have you be late. Just go. Go on. I'm fine. I'm just crying because I'm happy. I want you to be so, so happy. I love you, Matt.
And that’s the moment. She leaves. She is forced to live with the life she was going to lead, and all of her good intentions can’t solve it.
Of course this is a movie in the 2000’s made for teenage girls. So moments later, she winds up with him in a different way.
But that moment, it makes me think of Brief Encounter. I can’t even believe I am making the comparison. Partly because it’s almost treasonous, mainly because it’s true. I can’t think of a more painful love speech to give.
Call it the dreamlike and wonderful.
Call it patched on and manipulative.
Maybe it’s the formula of 2000 cinema, to show the worst and give the best possible.
++++
Tom Hanks performance in Big recently got the ranking of #15 in Premiere’s 100 greatest performances of all time (Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia was #1).
It’s that great of a film.
And 13 going on 30 is almost the same film. The main differences, other than gender, are that Jenna doesn’t know why she is there, but Josh does and Jenna ultimately gets the guy.
In the end, I’ll choose Big. It’s a tad bit funnier, there aren’t as many easy enemies, it’s a little bit more innocent, it’s got Hanks in a white Tux spitting out caviar, eating mini-corn like real corn, and the Chopsticks on the piano in FAO.
And the last shot of Josh being Tom Hanks one second and a boy the next is pure melancholy, as she has to leave the best man she has met in ages, only for him to return to the only woman who loves him more, his ecstatic mother.
Big wins in the end, but it’s close, goddamnit.
Goddamnit, it’s close.
I have spent the last week or so stockpiling a bunch of posts for some larger, week long entries of a theme. To kill the suspense, they’re all rather bitter and likely will suck. But I have some rage I gots to get out of me. That and a long piece on love and Radiohead I will probably keep like Capt. Miller and his wife’s rosebushes.
So let’s go the other way.
The song, Kingdom Come off of Coldplay’s X & Y. It’s the only acoustic track off of the album of any merit, and it’s a dandy.
And the line comes: “For you, I’d wait, till Kingdom come.”
Part of me goes, “hey you bastard, you already got Gweneth! You get to have X mas at the Spielbergs. Or Chanukah, but it’s in December and they get to tell the stories that would make anyone’s heart overflow.”
The other part: “It’s like, yeah, it’s an easy line, but it’s delivered well enough. Damn I am lonely.”
It’s probably my favorite part about love, solidarity. Whether it’s the old couple finishing each others sentences or the guy talking about the girl in the white dress all those years later, the notion of one love, for all of eternity, captured in your heart… it’s enough to wait for on distant shores.
It’s always joyous, but most bittersweet; that whole better to have loved and lost part, because it’s fuels the resonance (both audible and memory) of a heartbreak, it was that strength and devotion that created love which still stays.
Whether you stay by their side, or wait for their unlikely return, keeping that promise in your heart is achingly human and renders poetic all emotions about love.
Movie canon moment #10:
Brief Encounter – 1945 Directed by David Lean, written by Noel Coward.
This is my favorite romantic movie of all cinema. It’s short, told in retrospect, and aching in all functions of the cinema. From the bleakness of the cinematography, to the melancholy, muted performance of Celia Johnson, the abruptness of the story; all of the film leaves you wishing there was a better outcome for those involved, but in your sensible mind, you know it was never meant to be.
The movie is based on the play by Coward, which tells the tale of a married woman who meets a doctor in the railways of wartime London. They begin an affair, they fall in love, and then he is sent off to another place. The details are useless for me to recap; the setup is familiar, it’s the way it happens that matters.
In the end, they split, and they aren’t even given a proper goodbye. Even the final farewell is ruined. It’d be wonderful for the characters and a terrible movie if everything didn’t seem to go against them.
In their final speeches to another she says, (as best as I can do from memory):
Her: “Oh I wish I’d die. I don’t want to go on like this.”
Him: “I don’t want you to die. If you die I’ll be forgotten. I want to be remembered.”
Moments later, she is ready still to kill herself, and she thinks to herself:
This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don't want that time to come ever. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.
Waning moments… there is that slow few seconds where you’d rather feel nothing at all. One comes to their senses, but part of the soul aches, wishing that they didn’t have something to hold on to when they can’t hold on to the person themselves.
In the 70’s cinema, she would have killed herself in the tragic way. In the 80’s and 90’s, she’d run back to the doctor and figure something out. The 70’s version would have proved the point about defeatist life. The 80’s and 90’s version would have been about good things happening.
Yet, of all of the 100 or so years of history, why do I cherish this film from the 40’s about wartime London? Because it’s story and theme exist out of time, and for the cinematic adapdation, few settings could do better than the bleakness of trains in war torn London. It’s cutthroat in it’s realism, and allowing it to be the ultimate film about what could have been.
++++
I never expect to get a feeling of heartbreak from movies like the closing moments of Brief Encounter. Casablanca has the friendship coda to ease things over, as well as the sense that Rick letting Ilsa go probably was good for the war. In the great romance films, most either end with reconciliation or death; few of them leave the characters to go back as if nothing ever happened.
And yet, I got this feeling from a movie two days ago. And, baby, I’m Amazed.
Amazed to see a moment so heart wrenching.
Amazed I didn’t see the film in the theaters.
Amazed it came from a movie that essentially was a female version of “Big.”
++++
If anything detrimental is to be said about the cinema of the 2000’s is that in most years, the best/dominant films have been, in one sort or another, fantasy- from kids films, comic book movies, or sci-fi/ fantasy films .
2000 – Almost Famous, Crouching Tiger
2001 & 2002 – Lord of the Rings
2003 – Bend it Like Beckham, School of Rock, Lord of the Rings, and Finding Nemo
2004 – The Incredibles
2005 – Batman Begins
There are some left out of there, like In the Bedroom, Traffic, and Lost in Translation.
From 2004:
13 going on 30.
If this is the decade of escapist fantasy in cinema, why the hell not go with it?
13 going on 30 is Big with a girl as the lead. Jenna is turning 13 on the first day of the film. She is ready for the party with her best friend Matty, but wants to be part of the cool clique. She likes fashion magazines, Matty likes photography (important later plot points), and the only way she can get the cool girls and guys to her party is to do their homework.
She is aged a 13 year who wants to be popular and who is sick of who she is and wishes to be “Thirty and flirty and thriving...”Under movie rules of logic and wishgiving, she wakes up in an apartment and she’s thirty.
The next 40 minutes are basic “whaaa… how did I get here” scenarios, like Jenna woke up in “The Trial” as a 30 year old fashion Diva in Jennifer Garner’s body (That’s right, we’ve had a Romantic poetry, Citizen Kane, Kafka and Saving Private Ryan references in one post)
Where it goes from there… well god damnit if it isn’t fantastic. Not only does her character make every measure to do well, we actually see her earn it. She overcomes her obstacle at work with an idea I’d like to see it happen in real life, she re-connects with Matty (a great Mark Ruffalo, second only to Ryan Gosling for best male counterparts in this decade) and figures out why they were friends from him telling her of the ashes of their relationship after her 13th Birthday. She even befriends the 13 year old in her building, partly out of soul recognition, but it functions as the transformation of the soul she would be headed to if she got what she wanted.
There are some great moments in the path.
1. Her going home to find herself and trying to piece her life together. This has two great scenes: where she apologizes to her mother for missing Christmas the year before (the Midwesterner in me loved this to no end), and her crawling into her parent’s bed on her mom’s side during a thunderstorm. On so many levels…. does that work.
2. One of the great dance scenes in non-musical history. The end result: Jenna gets the whole of a party to dance to “Thriller.”
Why this works and so many others fail:
A. You have to have someone with the mind of a 13 year old to actually try to get everyone to dance the moves of the video.
B. You have to have a guy who is in love with the girl be the one to back her up.
C. You have to have an overweight girl with low self esteem join in.
D. You have to have a gay or black man join in at the key moment and do the trademark move (here it’s a gay and the moonwalk)
E. It has to be airy and goofy enough to suspend disbelief.
Check and mate.
The films biggest flaw is that it has one more dance scene set to “Love is a Battlefield” but that’s about it.
And then it comes to the end.
Matty is getting married. All of Jenna’s plans and hard work have been spoiled by her former friend and popular girl (say good bye to these! (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the Arrested Development joke))
And the showdown comes:
Jenna: I am not the awful person that I know that I was. I don't even know that person. And I'd like to believe... I have to believe that if you knew that... ...if in your heart, you really, really knew that... ...you wouldn't be getting ready to marry someone now. Unless that someone were me.
Matt: I'm not gonna lie to you. I have felt things......these past few weeks......that I didn't know I could feel anymore. But I have realized in these past few days......you can't just turn back time.
Jenna: Why not?
Matt: I moved on.
Jenna :You moved on.
Matt: We've gone down different paths for so long. We made choices. I chose Wendy. That's her family down there. We care about each other, you know? You don't always get the dream house, but you get awfully close… I always loved you.
Jenna: Look, I won't have you be late. Just go. Go on. I'm fine. I'm just crying because I'm happy. I want you to be so, so happy. I love you, Matt.
And that’s the moment. She leaves. She is forced to live with the life she was going to lead, and all of her good intentions can’t solve it.
Of course this is a movie in the 2000’s made for teenage girls. So moments later, she winds up with him in a different way.
But that moment, it makes me think of Brief Encounter. I can’t even believe I am making the comparison. Partly because it’s almost treasonous, mainly because it’s true. I can’t think of a more painful love speech to give.
Call it the dreamlike and wonderful.
Call it patched on and manipulative.
Maybe it’s the formula of 2000 cinema, to show the worst and give the best possible.
++++
Tom Hanks performance in Big recently got the ranking of #15 in Premiere’s 100 greatest performances of all time (Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia was #1).
It’s that great of a film.
And 13 going on 30 is almost the same film. The main differences, other than gender, are that Jenna doesn’t know why she is there, but Josh does and Jenna ultimately gets the guy.
In the end, I’ll choose Big. It’s a tad bit funnier, there aren’t as many easy enemies, it’s a little bit more innocent, it’s got Hanks in a white Tux spitting out caviar, eating mini-corn like real corn, and the Chopsticks on the piano in FAO.
And the last shot of Josh being Tom Hanks one second and a boy the next is pure melancholy, as she has to leave the best man she has met in ages, only for him to return to the only woman who loves him more, his ecstatic mother.
Big wins in the end, but it’s close, goddamnit.
Goddamnit, it’s close.
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11:21 AM
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