"Everything ends badly - otherwise it wouldn't end."

So wise, Young Tom Cruise. So... so wise.

He is right, you know. And Cocktail is no exception. It ends badly: with Young Tom Cruise reciting crap, pub-poetry on a bar that he owns. Of course, the journey isn't much better. I was certain Young Cruise would be proven-wrong: that any ending would be a cause for celebration. A celebration we get, but it is on-screen, and I realize Young Cruise has stolen my long-expected moment of triumph. Though I am happy the ending has come, it still ends badly.

Damn you, Young Tom Cruise, damn you.

So.... let me get this straight: this would-be captain of industry (self-appointed) is precluded from proving his mettle by a society seemingly structured against his dreams, decides to become a vice-merchant, never stops lamenting his unrealized desire for monetary success, and finds a measure of happiness in his defeat and shotgun wedding? Supposedly he learns something about happiness when he finds Flanagan dead in his yacht (spoiler!). Tearing up $10,000 checks on his way to the middle.

How dated this pursuit of cynical success feels to the larger cultural milieu. We can almost see the last vestiges of Reaganomics gasping for air on the Manhattan sidewalk. Maybe Young Cruise feels the shallowness, but specifically by allowing him to seemingly succeed - when, in fact his dreams have come to naught - without exploring the ramifications of why he is so driven, or what it is that blocks his success, the film does little more than paint a thin veneer of wisdom gained upon the crushing of one's dreams in a society constructed to ensure that upward mobility is largely an illusion.

Who needs a drink?

"The War is Over; Rock Stars Have a lot of Feelings"

If Philip Seymour Hoffman is right (and, it seems, he often is), then the rock and roll war ended before '72 and there was nothing compelling, novel, or challenging left to do. When the outsiders become a larger part of the so-called "big, bad corporate tastelessness," when the central ethos of protest of an entire art form ceases to be its motivating spirit, then everything changes. It must. Was Mark Perry (later) correct: did punk die when The Clash signed with CBS?

And now its about cool. Or so Almost Famous  would dwell on. And that is what struggling rock bands (Stillwater) focus on. Controlling image in a media savvy world that they have not really begun to understand. This leads to, as might be inevitable of comfortable twenty-somethings, a lot of feelings. Yes, just like anything else in demand people will try to own what you have created. Tough. While it is nice to imagine that everyone leaves the tale more self-aware, what is the compelling reason why this type of story need be told? Ignored is how music continues to evolve and remains important, both to the creators and receivers.

For a movie ostensibly about rock music, people and rock remain highly foreign to one another. Beyond the assured nostalgia of a certain generation, there is surprisingly a lot of music over-dubbed, but little about why the music matters. Notions of "family" and "home" could be found in any other, attempted, counter-culture movement of young people. Why should we care about this, specific, movement? What relevance did it carry at the time? What does it carry still? Why did rock and roll continue to matter? What we have is comfortable people exploring a largely safe medium in which the accepted logic of retrospection is secure. David Bowie is hustled through a room of die-hard rock fans of different stripes and no one attempts to pontificate upon a distaste for Bowie? Really? Was the logic of taste and time so agreed upon in the moment?

Seymour Hoffman was only half-right. The first iteration of the rock war may have recessed from the mainstream, but artists continued to feel stifled by the limitations of the medium - and pushed it to new places. The music continued to speak to people because of the fierce urgency of the moment; this must breed dissension, or cease to speak meaningfully. The Clash and the Sex Pistols; Run DMC and N.W.A.; Nirvana and Pearl Jam; in essence, the song remains the same. Innovation continued to be explored; and innovation must always be at least partially uncomfortable.

How do music and personality integrate to form some semblance of a coherent life? How do people find meaning in someones else's art? What can this tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit? I wonder.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

Jonathan Franzen writes of freedom, in his work of the same name. The question, seemingly, is how we are to make sense of ourselves in modern society. The great triumph of the liberal, democratic ideal, is that people should be free (within quite broad parameters) to create the world as they see fit. Unmoored from any sense of binding responsibility - save taxes - any non-legal morality is entirely of our creation. When social pressure is no longer adequate to keeping us in-line, how do we balance our actions?

Lost in Translation, in setting Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson adrift in Tokyo, makes all of these points eloquently, if not a touch heavy-handedly. With nothing else familiar except a like-minded stranger, is it any wonder that they become each-other's only grounding certainty? Which of us hasn't felt the world, and our lives, spinning out of control around us? Sometimes the only anchor-point will be a similarly confused, scared partner; when everything is foreign, even the smallest of common ground might bind us to each other. When everything else drops away, we can still have each other. Irresponsible? Selfish? Perhaps. But, at times, someone else may become our whole world. It is part of the vast panoply of human experience. The horizon disappears entirely and time and being is composed of this one relationship; this here and now. If we are unmoored, then we can likewise recreate our lives at any second. Before this: the past. Beyond here, lies nothing.

Iron Man in Apparent 3D!

Yes, that’s right, I said “apparent 3D”. I hear you asking yourself: “Did he watch this movie in 3D?” And the answer is no. A resounding, childishly enthusiastic NO! Well, sort of…

I have seen exactly one “3D” movie in my entire life. It was one of the Transformers movies (I forget which one), and I found watching the movie in question in 3D to be a decidedly underwhelming experience. Part of the reason for this was probably that it was not the first of the Transformers movies, and it was, thus, a second-rate film. There was, however, another contributing factor to the low level of enjoyment I experienced while watching this movie: I got ripped off!

Like McCoy, I don’t like to pay to watch movies. Well, that’s not entirely true, I don’t mind paying to watch a movie, as long as I do not have to pay the full price—what am I, made of money!? Considering that I had paid full price and then some (an extra R20 or R30) to watch this movie “in 3D”, I was expecting great things. As I walked into the cinema I thought: “This is going to be great! This new technology is bound to greatly enhance my movie-going experience! People have told me that it seems like the animals/monsters/cars are really coming right at you and you’ll be ducking and diving for cover! By golly, I’m excited!”

I was expecting a fundamentally different movie experience, and I was thoroughly disappointed. What I had failed to grasp before watching that movie “in 3D” (i.e. three dimensions) was that every non-animated movie that I had ever watched prior to that was shot in three dimensions, and I therefore perceived the characters to be moving in a three-dimensional space. Thanks to the miracle of film (and the phenomena known as the depth of field and prespective) and my complex human brain, I had in fact watched these movies “in 3D”. Sure, the film executives probably didn’t see it that way, but I would argue strongly against them. Not once, in all my years of watching films, have I watched as a tiny out-of-focus car (in the background) approaches a large in-focus person (in the foreground) in the two dimensions of the screen and thought, “Oh no! That car is about to crash into that person!”

And therein lies the crux of my argument. I don’t need a silly pair of glasses and a film shot and projected “in 3D” in order to see that chain of events occurring in three dimensions. And I am therefore not willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get these things. In my opinion, the “3D” movie is a Hollywood gimic which has been devised to increase profits, without actually providing an enhanced experience for the movie-goer.

The only thing that is worse than paying a large amount of money to go and see a movie in 3D, is paying that amount of money to go and see a movie that you’ve already seen, in 3D! It annoys me that Hollywood directors are recycling plots left, right and centre, and expecting us to pay to see depictions of the same stories over again. What really grinds my gears is that they are now not even bothering to make new movies (and by this I mean at least doing an original take on what might be an old story), but simply digitally “enhancing” these movies and then re-releasing them “in 3D” and expecting us, the moviegoers, to pay more to see them than we did the first time! It’s ridiculous!

And that is why I did not see Iron Man 3 “in 3D”. To this day, I am happy that I made that decision, because I am of the opinion that my movie-going experience would not have been enhanced in any meaningful way had I gone for the “3D” option.

Also, I agree with McCoy—Iron Man 3 was most enjoyable. I got the sense that those who made the movie knew exactly what they were going for. They didn’t try too hard, and they put together an action-adventure film with some great characters, some great one-liners and plenty of big explosions.

"Bullshit Walter!!!"

A Western in the greatest sense, the Coen Brothers The Big Lebowski nestles us nicely into the ethos of the American West and explores the ramifications of living in George Bush's (41) America. The cold war has ended, our global terrors have loosened; the sixties is long over and idealism is for the weak. Gorbachev did indeed "tear down this wall," so to speak. This is Ronald Reagan's American; RICHARD NIXON'S AMERICA!!! Los Angeles style. (These were California men after all.) Pornography? Drinking during the day? Recreational drug use? The occasional acid flash-back? Sure. Why not? This is freedom after all. Death to all those who would whimper and cry. War with Iraq? It's nothing. Pure, unadulterated realism. Dreams: failure. Our better angels have crashed and burned. What are we left with? Bowling?

Well, yeah. Sort of. If Sam Elliot is right, and The Dude is the man for his time and place - a characterization made possible by contingent circumstances, bred by environment, successful inasmch as evolution decrees existence to be a victory of sorts; a great arrival of all that is real Los Angeles - then what other conclusion would we draw. The Dude is a hero, the man for his time and place (again); he fits right in there. Does that mean woe to the American Dream; the idealizations of Manifest Destiny? Is this to be the new paragon of western masculinity? Of course it is.

This is the freedom we fought so hard for. The freedom we wanted. To be loosed of societal and larger concerns and responsibilities. To chart our own course. To create our own identities. Call The Dude lazy; call him a freeloader. A free society will always suffer from free-riders; parasites.

We love The Dude for all that he is - a freak. God bless the freaks, as they say. This is not meant in some sort of carnival barker, old weird traveling sideshow, sort of way. The Dude is specifically not like us; maybe not like anyone we have ever met. He stands in opposition to "the square-community," that everything tells us we are supposed to prize. Woe to the world if everyone listened to whale sounds during a candle-lit bath alone. But he alone who perseveres in the face of the certain spiritual devastation facing us all: that's a good job by him. Viewed in light of our broader, self-imposed roles and rules themselves: this is The Dude.

Maybe he speaks to the less ambitious aspects of our unexplored longings. Surely we might each dream of great things: fame and renown. But can't we not, as well, dream of a small apartment, slippers and robe, nights at our super's experimental theater performances? Where our greatest desires and encumbrances can be spoken of as we also are addressing ten pins, a narrow lane and a ball? Only in our weaker moments? Why? Who says so? This is freedom. We are free to create reality as we see fit. Everything is possible. What do we choose?

We can call him hero; only as we remember that it is contrast to our own deadness.

If indeed, The Dude abides. Then I, too, am left with a measure of comfort in that.

"I Know I Haven't Been At My Best This Past Decade"

A few years ago, I read a biography of Daniel Boone by Robert Morgan (succinctly entitled Boone: A Biography). Knowing, basically, nothing about Boone before-hand, it was alright. (I am pretty sure it inspired a pretty good June Carter Cash song, "The Road to Kaintuck," though haven't attempted to corroborate that with any evidence.) What stuck with me about the work was Morgan's thesis that (great?) men have, roughly, a decade in their lives which is pivotal. If they are prepared properly, and a little lucky, this decade is their best. Everything beforehand prepares them for this, while afterwards their life is largely dealing with the consequences, and, inevitably, a bit of a let down. To whit: Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Zissou is clearly a man past his prime. That he is portrayed by Bill Murray may have seen, at the time, to be a bit of a harsh judgment on Murray - though the past decade has certainly been a renaissance for him. We can read in Zissou/Murray, a man trying to make sense of the notion that while he is still the same, it no longer seems good enough. Of course begging the question: was it ever? Among other ideas, The Life Aquatic wonders what happens after the curtain falls. If, as Morgan suggests, we all have our big performance, how do we make sense of what comes after? Or, as Jack Black asks in High Fidelity:

"Is it wrong to criticize a once-great artist for his latter day sins? Is it better to burn out, or to slowly fade away."

I think he is quoting Patton.

How do each of us find peace when our motivations are outlasted? How do we continually become in a manner suited to our world?

Maybe I AM willing to pay for movies...

... just not that one.

You know how, a few years ago, you'd be watching a movie you'd acquired through completely legal means? The picture would be kind of pixel-y, the sound fluctuated from ear-splitting when anything blew up to inaudible during dialogue, you could see the shadows of people on the screen, frames were missing or repeated, and the experience, overall, was just kind of shit?

But you didn't mind; you hadn't paid any money to watch that movie, because of the absolutely legitimate way that you'd got hold of it, so you had no right to complain.

Well, today I had that experience. But I DID mind this time, because I'd paid actual money for it, and I was in an actual cinema.

We watched Epic today at the "cinema" in Welkom. I wouldn't recommend it.

That's all.