Watching movies at home, to pass the time and learn more, something new…something we didn’t know, about the human experience, that is how we managed some of our season of self-isolation this most revelatory of years.
I know you know. This summer’s been a moment – and it ain’t done yet. This…is 2020, and 2020 is a motherfucking international sensation; this year is the captain now.
We are burning up, alright, and it has been a time for adjustment and for reflection. Film helped with the latter, as always. Magazines, too. (Print shall rise again – you wait and see.) A combo of both, that’s what led me to the frothy Shampoo. I read about Lee Grant in January’s Vanity Fair, after I rescued our home-delivered copy (thanks, USPS!) from a pile of unreads. Fun movie. What a story, Lee Grant’s – I look forward to checking out her oeuvre as a documentarian.
Harvey Milk is a hometown hero here in San Francisco, and I’ve already considered Milk, so that’s why the real he is here – and it was about time I finally sat down for class on Marsha P. (how embarrassing that I didn’t know about Sylvia Rivera). Portrait of Jason is reality verité at its most intense and beguiling, a visit with a personality at time before everyone could become one.
Class ennui of a time gone by – the mid-aughts – reigns supreme among Jennifer Aniston’s post-Must See TV new crowd o’ Friends (mo’ money, mo’ problems, kids), in a film directed by Nicole Holofcener that I first discovered at the 2006 Miami International Film Festival. And you gotta watch Magnolia, especially now that climate change is literally making birds drop dead from the sky.
A what is up with What’s Up, Doc? What is up is director Peter Bogdanovich shot a quite-funny-and-impressively wild car chase for his slapstastick rom-com, starring Barbra and Ryan O’Neal, out on Alta Plaza here in town, guerrilla-style, hunty (that means sans permits). Production barely got in trouble for damaging the park’s iconic concrete steps. Ain’t that some privilege. Give it up for (white) gumption.
The human experience is so diverse. We can’t be mad about it – el que puede, puede, as one of my uncles says. All we can do is remember ir and try to have a laugh about it.
Shampoo > The Times of Harvey Milk > The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson > Portrait of Jason > Friends with Money > Magnolia > What’s Up, Doc?
King of Cups 