October 11, 2013

Hello, Hello. It’s October, and I’m enjoying being home in Illinois. This is my favorite time of year.

The image to the left is an ad that was made by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It’s going to be on display in NYC’s Times Square starting today. I guess there was an ad up last week by a religious organization that read something like, “Thank God they’re wrong.” It was directed at the non-religious. The FFRF asked me if I would be part of an ad that responds to the first ad. I wa s happy to oblige. We’ll have to see if it gets much attention.

On a vanity note: I have ditched the dyed brown hair and am now back to my natural gray. I love it. I can’t believe I ever went brown. I’ll have to get headshots for this website in the near future.

Okay, here are the movies I watched in September 2013:

1.) My Fair Lady, 1964, directed by George Cukor

2.) At Any Price, 2012, directed by Ramin Bahrani

3.) Amour, 2012, directed by Michael Haneke

4.) We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011, directed by Lynne Ramsay

5.) The Hunter, 2011, directed by Daniel Nettheim

6.) In A World, 2013, directed by Lake Bell

7.) Sunrise, 1927, directed by F. W. Murnau

8.) History is Made at Night, 1937, directed by Frank Borzage

9.) The Company You Keep, 2012, directed by Robert Redford

10.) Love is All You Need, 2012, directed by Susanne Bier

Wow. There wasn’t a terrible dud among all the films that I watched last month. I guess that’s not surprising. I have nearly total control over what I watch, and I put effort into deciding what to see. I’m uninterested in watching widely just for the sake of watching widely. I don’t care if I see just-released films.

I’ll admit, there is that element of surprise that I do miss when it comes to seeing new films in a movie theater. And not knowing - in any way - whether I’ll like it or not. And there’s a cost to not seeing current films when everyone’s talking about them (I’m thinking of Amour right now.)

I do feel off in my own little world of movies, often with hardly a soul I can talk with about them. But fortunately I have the Internet where I can look up reviews, find essays, and generally have a feeling of community (however disjointed and time-fractured.)

I do not stream movies from Netflix. I get the actual DVD. This may prove to be so archaic in the near future that they’ll stop the DVD-sending all together.

I don’t like to download films because I know me.

I know I would get carried away downloading films and then, not watching them all the way through. Getting the DVD in the mail offers me a discipline that circumvents my promiscuous attention span. Don’t get me started on people who just turn on the TV and watch whatever is there. There is something positively sinful about that. (Even though, I do get it. I’ve done it. Many times.) I

Now, onto the movies I did see.

My Fair Lady was something Mulan wanted to watch. It was so much better than I remembered it as a kid. It’s nicely directed (George Cukor) and the performances are great. The lyrics to the songs are clever and funny. I walked around singing “The Street Where You Live” for a couple of weeks after we saw it.

However, the ending is horrendous. Eliza comes back to Henry after he’s said the most terrible things and behaved despicably. It doesn’t even make sense that Henry “needs” Eliza to keep his appointments straight and get his slippers. Henry Higgins has a staff of servants! It would be so much better if the ending had Eliza leaving and opening a flower shop on her own in a posh neighborhood which was her original dream. Then maybe a hint of a continued relationship when they would be on more equal terms. (This would be possible if you ignored the fact that Henry is obviously in a long-term gay relationship.) Mulan and I talked about My Fair Lady on and on afterwards, for weeks. It was really fun to watch (although quite long, nearly three hours long.)

At Any Price is so good! Dennis Quaid - wow, it’s one of his best performances, and Zac Efron is wonderful, and so is Kim Dickens and Heather Graham. Why wasn’t this film nominated for more awards? Or any awards? I thought it was complicated and dark and emotionally twisted and yet hinted at the common. Just - what a great movie.

Amour, Amour, Amour. What a masterpiece. I was riveted. I expected it to be a long sad slog, but I found it compelling, almost like watching a mystery. I love Michael Haneke. (The White Ribbon Ah!) I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I liked the older-parental view of middle-aged children and their (at least in this case) uselessness. There is so much sentimentalizing about age and family in film, it was refreshing to see something much more realistic and complicated.

We Need to Talk About Kevin Lordy - there needs to be more movies about fucked up relationships between parents and kids - is that a terrible thing to say? I seriously mean that. I can’t get enough of that.

Sunrise, wow, I’ve seen that film four times now. Beautiful. So modern even though it’s a silent film. Breathtaking in scope and the depth of feeling. This time around I was obsessing over George O’Brien’s hair. Ha! I have already obsessed over Janet Gaynor’s hair - her sad blonde wig - in Sunrise. But this time around it was George. He is so alive, so young, so thoroughly contemporary.

The Company You Keep was probably the weakest movie of the month (in competition for that spot with Love is All You Need.) And yet I enjoyed watching them. In The Company You Keep I was distracted by actors in their seventies playing characters whose children are teenagers or younger - the time line was off - but still, I had a smile on my face for the whole film. In Love Is All You Need there were a million impossible plot holes, but I didn’t care, it was so nice to see Pierce Bronson just hanging around and the female star, Trine Dyrholm was really good. Again the ages didn’t add up. Trine played a character who was too young to have two children well into their twenties and how old is Pierce Bronson? In any case, they were good together and I was able to suspend my disbelief. Both of these movies were ones I would have dismissed a few years ago. I think I’m getting more forgiving and more appreciative that a film exists at all.

In a World I saw in Spokane while visiting my mother, at the Magic Lantern Theater in its new space (new to me, at least.) The film was funny. I laughed a lot. Lake Bell is good, she’s deadpan, she’s every woman, she’s utterly unique too.

History is Made at Night I watched this film with Jill Sobule and Dave Carpenter - we were on our way to Madison, Wisconsin. Jill and Dave flew in a day early so we could watch movies. I watched Sunrise with them too. Neither one of them had seen it before, so that was a real treat for me, watching them watch it. It’s the third or fourth time I’ve seen it. I think Jill is very Jean Arthur-ish. Charles Boyer is so handsome and flirty. Great chemistry between those two.

Now, onto books read in Sept. 2013.

I fell down on my discipline last month when it came to reading books. I have a rule that you have to finish one book before you start the next. But things got out of control. I would lose a book and pick up another. Or in the case of Bill Bryson, I wanted to read as much of his new book as I could before seeing him at an author event.

Embarrassingly, here are the books that I half-read - seriously I’m about half way through all of them. I am committing myself to finishing them by the end of October.

Books read half of in September 2013

1.) Dissident Gardens, written by Jonathan Lethem

2.) How Should A Person Be? Written by Sheila Heti

3.) One Summer: 1927, written by Bill Bryson

Books I have half-read on my Kindle:

1.) Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life, written by Barbara Fredrickson.

Books (audio version, obviously) I have listened to half of, on my iPhone:

1.) The World Until Yesterday, written by Jared Diamond

And then,

The only book I listened to all the way through last month. I loved it so much, I did it again. All I can say is that I hope the insights I learned from this book help me finish the books I started, using willpower.

1.) The Willpower Instinct, written by Kelly McGonigal.

I’ll write about the half-read or listened to books when I’m done with them.

But The Willpower Instinct, let me tell you how wonderful this book is. I learned so much. You have to read or listen to this book right away. I became a little bit obsessed with Kelly McGonigal. There are lots of videos of her. She’s really good. There are so many insights in her book about the science of willpower. It really is a muscle that can get tired out - you have to almost treat yourself like some sort of professional athlete when you are tackling something hard - stopping a behavior, or cultivating a behavior. You have to get enough sleep, you have eaten right, you have to exercise, you have to create an environment where your willpower can be maximized.

One interesting thing I learned was this: negative self-talk backfires. There is no upside to negative self-talk. Your brain hears yourself tell yourself shitty things about yourself and it reacts to it as if it were another person saying those things. Then it (you) look (subconsciously for the most part) for rewards to make yourself feel better about yourself. That’s why, when someone berates themselves for being fat, for example, they end up eating an ice cream sundae a few hours later. I mean, if your way to reward yourself is with food. But it applies to anything.

I found The Willpower Instinct to be revolutionary. I think it’s required reading.

All right, until November, people, whoever reads this, whoever you are. Thanks for listening.