Last Saturday night, my roommate and I (at our usual level of Saturday-night hedonism) decided to try out the ‘instant watch’ option I’d recently discovered on Netflix. At first, my roommate thought she could hook her laptop up to the television, but the cord turned out to be for her camera only. Then, we thought we could at least watch on her laptop (which is faster than mine). But she has a Mac, and this Netflix option is not available on Macs. Then, we finally decided to just use my laptop, propped up on a stack of old TimeOut New Yorks on the coffee table. After perusing the selection (which is hit-or-miss), we finally decided on Ordinary People. My roommate’s friend really loves this movie, and neither of us had ever seen it. So, we clicked on it!
. . . Only to be told we needed to download some software. Slowly. We went for cake. We came back. The software finally loaded, we shut down, we booted up, we installed, we shut down again, we booted up again…and we pressed play!
. . . And got a message that, due to our internet connection, the movie would take nearly two hours to load.
“You know,” I said at this point. “I’ve never seen Say Anything.”
“Really?” said my roommate. “I have Say Anything!”
“I know!”
So, now I can knock that one off the list.
My mother once said to me that she didn’t understand why all movies and books and plays had to be about terrible things happening to people. I replied that I couldn’t think of a way to tell a story about everything going swimmingly.
I stand corrected. Say Anything is a story about everything going swimmingly. Two hot, nice, well-liked young people meet, go nuts for each other, and everything goes well for them about it. Oh, sure, the girl has the momentary “I’m going to London, we should break up preemptively,” panic, but then she’s all, “Or, why don’t you come with me?!” And there’s the whole thing with the dad, but seriously, what movie watcher is really all that upset about a dad going to jail for white-collar crime when there is hot teen sex to be had? Nobody cares about John Mahoney’s hypocrisy when John Cusack is standing in the rain with a boombox over his head. Especially since the fall-out with dad has no hugely negative effects in the heroine’s life – sure, she’s disillusioned with him (although I must say here that the thin reasoning behind how he rationalized his crime is super belabored – you can practically hear the writers’ gears grinding as they try to find a way to inject some sort of plot-necessary conflict into this movie that won’t put even a slight shadow over all the good-feelingness), but he still loves her and is there ready to resume their relationship whenever she can reconcile herself to his shortcomings, and too – she has a full, merit-based scholarship! So, conveniently, she need not even sweat over whether or not to use Daddy’s ill-gotten gains to fund her already planned-for dreams. She’s her own woman now, with a bonus Cusack along for the ride.
Which is not to say that I didn’t like Say Anything. I did like it – how could you not like it, is my point?
At some point during our Say Anything viewing, Ordinary People finally downloaded, so we started to watch that on my laptop. Ordinary People . . . was very brown. Everything in it was brown, which is typical for movies made during the time period – it was a very brown country around 1980. There was a lot of snow. There was swimming, and a suicidal boy, and Robin Williams was a kind, but no-nonsense therapist, and everything was pretty much Sally Field’s fault, because she was such a cold, self-absorbed bitch for no real reason. And Christina Ricci’s boyfriend got electrocuted, and there was a giant robot bunny that issued proclamations having something to do with string theory, and everybody got new sneakers.
Or something like that. I don’t know. The main thing I know about Ordinary People is that it took us about seven hours to watch it, due to the Netflix “instant” watch feature being (a) a piece of crap and (b) about as “instant” as osso bucco (you like that one? I worked hard on it). Every fifteen minutes, the movie informed us that it would need to spend 30-45 minutes re-downloading itself, to avoid viewing difficulties (by which I can only assume it meant cause viewing difficulties). But we watched it all the way through anyway, because we are ladies who finish what we start. It was the most gruelling Saturday night I’ve had in months.
This past week, I went with some friends to the free showing of Wet Hot American Summer at the McCarren Park Pool. The Pool is a couple blocks from my apartment – it used to be an actual pool, but now it’s a drained pool that’s used for summer concerts and movies, at which times it gets terrifyingly packed with hipsters. This movie was the first one this summer, and I unintentionally went in costume. I had never seen the movie and didn’t know anything about it, but I have in my wardrobe two pairs of shorts: one is a knee-lenth pair of cutoffs, and the other is a pair of red cotton short-shorts with white trim, which I now know are the exact same pair that the gay guy in WHAS wears throughout the movie. It turns out coming in costume to these outdoor movies is encouraged, so I ended up displaying far more enthusiasm than I’m normally comfortable with, completely by accident.
At any rate, movies at McCarren Park Pool are really fun, especially if you get there early enough to put down a blanket and enforce a small zone of personal space around it (which we did). You’re not supposed to bring your own food and beer, but everybody does, so next time, I’m bringing a 40. The other thing I will do differently next time (other than not dress up like a character) is wait afterward until the crowd bottlenecking through the narrow entry gates has disbursed. The crowd inside is not too bothersome, what with the open sky and all, but the rush through the gates was terrifying, and required bodily contact with many strangers dressed for (and all asweat with) the hot summer night. It was a wet hot American stampede (you like that one? I worked hard on it).
At some point in the past week, I also watched Indochine. For the first 2/3 of this movie, all I had to say about it was: ‘a bunch of French people act like assholes in Vietnam. The especially good-looking French people show some small compunction about their bad behavior.’ But then (around the time the daughter shot the guy) the movie got much, much better, and by the end, I’d decided it was a great movie. This had something to do with the perspective of the movie broadening out from being entirely through the perspective of the French, and becoming more objectively about Vietnam itself and the colonization conflict overall.
But, boy, if I’d been the daughter, I’d have totally gone for the revolutionary, enlightened childhood sweetheart who’s all “you and I don’t matter – join the resistance” over the “I’m sort of useless and intermittently cruel and racist, plus I slept with your mother, but man, look at these eyes” French soldier.
On a sidenote, I always take note when theatre people are portrayed as the political underground in movies or plays. This happens a lot, because people who write and do theatre and films really want to write their ilk as hugely politically significant, and while I know that in some situations playwrights are quite influential and active (Prague Spring, early-19th c. Russia), I think that, especially during the red scare, playwrights got way too much credit for their influence on public opinion. Was anybody really ever inclined toward Communism just because Brecht’s plays were oh so thrillingly entertaining? Please. Charlie Chaplin, maybe. Brecht, no. And as for more active forms of subversion, theater people are the most feckless, inactive, self-absorbed people on Earth (I can say it – I kind of am one, albeit in a reluctant, half-assed sort of way). Performers might kick up a stink if they’re censored, but they’re highly unlikely to go around assassinating officials and circulating broadsheets. Because those activities require discretion, and the only thing that theater people want out of life is to be widely and constantly observed. “Underground” is the last place a performer wants to go.
