“Hipster Goes On Food Stamps” (or “I Quit My Job”)

“That’s what I’m going to call my next one.” I told Rob.

“What?” Rob asked loudly.

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon in a quarter-crowded movie theater up at the Walter Reade Theater of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Rob (of moderately well-groomed beard) had convinced me to come out to see two Clint Eastwood movies (“A Perfect World” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales”) with him, mostly through lack of anything better to do with a Sunday afternoon on my part.

I got to the box-office early and thought about trying to mug the whole “I write for you guys” thing to get in free, but I didn’t know the dude at the box office so instead used my one-month-left student ID and forked over my 8 bucks.

I sat around playing video games as Rob showed up late, or on time, depending on who’s telling the story.

“Hipster goes on food stamps.” I told him, again oblivious to the surrounding crowd trying to watch the movie.

(Actually not that oblivious; the people behind us were poppin’ beers.)

“But you’re not on food stamps.” Rob smirked.

I gave him a face in the dark theater that amounted to “fuck you”, but I’m afraid it was lost somewhere near the pro-Confederate Clint Eastwood smackdown on screen.

The reason I had decided that would be my blog title was not in fact that I was on food stamps (though I was recently unemployed, more on that later) but that our mutual friend and Bummer-filmmaker Zach Weintraub had apparently recently gone on food stamps.

“How’d he do that?” I’d asked Rob during the first Eastwood flick.

“Just applied, buddy.” Rob told me. “Gaming the government.”

Rob knew something about this, as he’d spent the last few weeks working a temp government job that comprised mostly of reading the collected stories of Rambo.

The thought hit me kind of odd. We had been making fun of Zach, whose new movie The International Sign For Choking we had recently read in our bi-weekly writing group, for living out in hippie-capital Olympia, Washington and going to work in a suit everyday for a not-even-film-related job.

“He made a fucking feature.” I told Rob over a chief-on-squaw Eastwood love-scene. “I mean, c’mon.”

“Don’t mean nothing bro.” He replied, looking forward. And then:

“Do you know you can used food stamps to buy beer?”

“Great.” I replied. “So that’s why Zach is going on food stamps, so that he can trade them for beer.”

My thoughts went racing back to my extremely limited knowledge of food-stamps, wondering whether any of the drug dealers on The Wire had accepted them.

“No he isn’t.” Rob told me disgustedly. “That’s a fucking lie.”

“And whatever you do don’t print it on your blog. Zach’ll fucking kill me.”

“Yeah.” I replied. As I wondered at Civil War-era Native American virility.

The movies were both pretty good. A Perfect Year ended up being about a surprisingly top-form Kevin Costner kidnapping a Jehovah’s Witness kid who doesn’t have a dad and their relationship.

It was sort of like a non-sexual Badlands except for the scene where the little kid shows Kevin Costner his dick (I shit you not).

The Outlaw Josey Wales was fun too, a good western, though I admit little tolerance for that “The North was evil” civil-war crap, as I’m one damn Yankee.

Rob and I ended up eating too much popcorn and coffee and Belgian pastries as we struggled to kill a Sunday.

***

So I quit my job on Wednesday.

I wish it was some sort of long-brewing Jason Lee act of defiance or else the opposite, a professional-style exit, complete with two weeks notice.

But the truth was my bosses were some sons of bitches who were going to fuck me no matter what I do.

A cynical attitude? Perhaps.

I remember marveling in a previous blog-post about my friend Selom’s optimism and how it found her  interning endlessly until she got a big-name gig, before the rest of us.

But my bosses weren’t just underpaying me (illegally) or threatening me (implicit and/or explicitly).

No, in my mind, they committed the greatest sin they could have: they made it not about the movie.

I had been working on an indie feature film and that comes with what you’d expect: long hours, a lot of running around and a constant invocation of Murphy’s law.

But I really never had a problem with that. As I say on all of my job applications, I’m looking to be a part of something. To make something, of a movie, of a company, of myself.

But the problem was by the end, I wasn’t working on the film: I was working to suit my bosses’ petty whims.

It wasn’t all so obvious.

Sometimes it was, with people asking me to pick up scripts or copy DVDs or even, doing personal accounting work (something I almost quit over several times).

But other times it was just in the way they treated me, calling me with no respect for my time, not to problem solve or fix something desperate, but just to complain, yell or ask me to do something later.

I was the personal gopher, paid for 4 days a week, but on call for 7.

I ended up spending each day and hour tense, worrying not about the movie, but about another stupid thing I’d be called about, another call I’d be required to answer.

Because if I didn’t pick up, there’d be more calls, text messages emails. There wasn’t any telling these people I didn’t have time. All that elicited was an argument, bargaining. They held on to my time like they would die if they didn’t get it, going through the stages of grief for it.

And then there’s my initial comment, that it wasn’t about the movie.

I remember working for my old teacher, Robby Benson, a mentor to me at school. He brought me on for a feature he was making, as a makeshift script supervisor. I ruffled a few feathers with bad jokes I’d have gotten away with on a student set and I found myself not getting in edgewise with his crew, shunted farther to the back with the PAs. When I asked him at lunch what had happened, he was honest with me and told me to just keep my distance on set.

“You messed up, you’re learning.” He told me.

“But I can’t do my job.” I told him.

“Then someone else will.” He replied. “Just remember: it’s not about you, it’s about the film.”

The next day I came to set with no attitude. I was super-polite, super high-energy. Suddenly, everyone took a shine.

I didn’t make jokes, but I laughed at other ones. What mattered was the shot. The film. We were all working towards.

The breaking point came for me on this project when I got a call at 8:30pm asking me to be available at 10 to be chastised and then 9am the next morning in a group session.

There were problems about the film, but these meetings were not about them. They were about seeing how well my bosses could control me.

And suddenly I snapped. I consulted my friends. I told them I was too busy to work on their film anymore.

And I felt great.

Until the next day when I was ambushed by both of my bosses and forced into work and more pointless excoriation.

I ended up feeling pretty bad about it.

Until my bosses asked me for help the next week and I said I wasn’t able to help.

Or something like that.

I want to say that there’s a good ending to this tale.

That I was rewarded quitting a bad job. For getting out of there when I could. For not causing a big “scene” like what happened in my last few jobs.

Well, at least not as big of a scene.

I’ve got some interviews. Some semi-paid day-PA work.

Theoretically speaking I’m a “freelancer” at an agency.

I’ve written nice thank you emails and sent out nicely-written cover letters, I didn’t have time for before.

I’ve thought about Alaska or Prague or wherever the hell my dad wants me to go.

I’ve even thought about graduate school, though thankfully, it’s way too early in the season to think about applying.

Which is when I went into see my therapist, who I had left five minutes early last session, I described it like this:

“I no longer live in a state of constant terror; only a state of vaguely uncertain and occasional terror.”

“Sounds like an upgrade.” She told me.

And I agreed.

***

My old net-obsessed boss Amanda, who Rob still asks about for DTF availability, invited me out with fifteen minutes notice to a hoity-toity museum gathering.

“Free booze.” She told me and I was there.

We talked about mostly how I wasn’t an art person and she wasn’t a theater person and how neither one of us belonged there.

She also ordered a bourbon on the rocks that she ended up pouring most of into my bourbon-and-ginger-ale.

“Can’t drive drunk.” She reminded me.

“Bike drunk.” I corrected her, as we’d just locked up her bike on the Bowery.

“That too.” She replied, sipping the remains of her drink.

It was only a few minutes there, looking at some mash-up hippie stuff and discussing job politics.

A typical bit of conversation: “I can’t log on to Foursquare.”

Our two-person nerd-fest ended quickly as she unchained to go back to her beer-brewing-boyfriend in Brooklyn.

As I stumbled home, half-drunk, I picked up some cupcakes from a place I had not initially impessed by, called Baked by Melissa, famous for selling you 3 button-sized cupcakes for 3 dollars.

This did not exactly excite my Jew-boy value-meter, but my Jew-boy low-alcohol tolerance wasn’t paying attention and I got the ‘cakes.

Surprisingly, alcohol or no, they were near perfection.

For some reason, their small size concentrated their cupcake-richness and made you value each bite.

It almost seemed like prophetic insight: that part of the problem with any cupcake is “too much”. To make such a large thing too rich would make it inedible, while erring toward heartiness would cause the same.

The cupcakes (Cinnamon Bun, Cookie Dough and Cookies and Cream) were just rich perfect little morsels, concentrated nuclei of a flavor and rich texture.

What more did I need, I thought?

They came in a coffee filter and soon they and the coffee filter were gone.

***

A final note.

When I was getting ready to write this post, I called up Zach to give him half-a-warning.

“You’re kind of the main character in this one.” I told him.

“I’m touched.” He replied. “Now why don’t you hurry up and tell me what you thought of Choking.”

The last time I had talked to Zach after all, had been when he had sent me a text message referencing the film “Babies”, saying “THEY’RE COMING! I’M COMING!” (NSFW, kids.)

When I woke up this morning, I found this on my pillow.

And I decided to keep the byline.

Sorry, Rob.

***

BAKED BY MELISSA

3 Micro-Cupcakes- $3

NW Corner of Spring and Broadway

6 to Spring St. R to Prince.

A Letter to Cousin Nick

This was what the box of cookies I got from Ruby et Violette looked, already partially eaten.

I had eaten mostly through the first layer, containing some I had already tried (the mint double-chocolate “Cool Seduction”) and some I hadn’t (A vanilla-looker called “Berry Blueberry”) but I had left the brownie, deciding that it was too good to eat immediately.

A special occasion, perhaps.

In fact, I had meant to bring the whole box into work on Friday, where I was supposed to be helping my mom out packing gift bags.

“Really? You would do that?” Eva asked me over the phone. “I would just eat all of them. And then tell people about the box. And then tell people, oh wait, no I ate all of them.”

I love her.

But the point was moot anyway, since I forgot to bring the box into work and there wouldn’t have been time for it anyway, since there were t-shirts to be folded and bags to be stuffed and so on and so forth.

But Eva was there and so was Rob, freshly de-bearded, as we found ourselves suckered into a room together, replacing blue ribbons with red ribbons, tied to big, bronzish medals.

We talked about friends and beards and haircuts (I had just gotten one) and what our friends were doing now and, more saliently, what they were doing then. The sort of idle conversation to go with the busy work we were doing.

The rest of the evening was a hodge-podge trapped between attempted cab-rides on Canal St, Michelob Ultra at the Malone-pad on Ave A and a movie we didn’t even get into for the opening night of the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

I tried touting my press-credentials at the door, only to find out that no one really cares if you are a (former) “Contributing Editor to the Film Society of Lincoln Center Blog”. We ended up getting drinks with the directors afterward, who were friends of friends.

I read one of the reviews that was propped up outside of the venue which talked about the amount of “nudity and sex, as a poor-man’s special effects”.

My friend Zach Weintraub was in town (His film Bummer Summer screened on Saturday) so I asked him and his collaborator Nandan Rao:

“Would it be strange to say I want to see that movie to see how all those people look naked?”

“Yes.” Nandan replied.

I wanted to discount his reply (Nandan is a Mormon), but Zach quickly agreed.

“Yeah, pretty weird.” He told me.

“But I mean, like,” I continued. “That’s a natural thing to think right? To wonder?”

“Yeah,” Nandan replied. “But I think that’s the sort of thing that gets filtered out around the first time something passes through your brain. You know, as something it might not be best to say.”

“But it’s perfectly natural to think right?” I asked.

“Well, yeah.” Zach admitted.

And I felt vindication at last.

Later, at the after-party that featured free whiskey-and-wine, I asked them for a screener or a ticket to the next show. They told me they’d get back to me and I realized, awkwardly, that it wasn’t smart to press it.

The next night, I asked Zach a question about Mumblecore at his Bummer Summer Q+A.

His response was a roundabout Q+A answer that, after parsing, meant “shut the fuck up”.

***

I’m not allowed to talk about my work for the census all that much, though it takes up a lot of my time.

It’s a government secrecy thing, a jail thing, a thing-thing.

I talked to a woman though, in my rounds., who had cancer.

I had tried going to her apartment before, but she had told me and my partner, a young lady about my age, that she was about to vomit so we should leave.

“Fuck this job.” I told my partner. But we still went to a few addresses more before we finished the day.

I came back by myself later and she was much nicer.

I sat in her apartment. I listened to her talk about her life. She had a chance, she told me. The doctors thought they got it.

But she was sick. And it was still difficult.

I talked to her about Howard, my family friend, who’s been dying of cancer these past months.

She reminded me of him, her stoicism, her living alone.

I didn’t refer to him by name. I called him “my uncle”. Because to call him a family friend wouldn’t adequately place where he fits in my life.

He’s the person who I would go to with intellectual queries, the person I look up to for his asceticism, his self-imposed rigor, his monastic lifestyle.

Here was a man dedicated to his art, his livelihood. He didn’t need fame or even recognition. He just wrote because that was what there was for him to do.

To be honest, I’m not smart enough to understand him. My parents would place me in front of him, as if I were, talking to him, since they thought I with my rudimentary Latin and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths could understand his discourses on Dante and Vergil. I couldn’t, I never could. It was like facing a waterfall or a cliff: You know enough to understand the gap without being on the same level.

I didn’t tell all this to the woman I visited. But she commiserated on some of it.

It made me feel better talking about it.

It was the only time so far I’ve cried about Howard.

Later that week, when I went door to door with my census partner, someone refused in front of their family and when I tried to go in the building, confronted me.

We argued and he seemed to physically threaten me. He told me to “get a real fucking job”, which felt like a particularly bad jab, since between the two of them I have, I have none.

My census partner suggested peeing on his doorstep.

No, I said. Let’s just leave the notice of visit form. That’s what we’re paid to do.

***

I read an interesting article the other day on Jewish exceptionalism, written in the Times by Michael Chabon.

I gave it to the person in my life who best exemplifies my connection to Judaism, my cousin Lenny, whom I respect and admire and see not so often.

He wrote a whole response to my question, asking what he thought, on his own blog, called: “Letter to Cousin Nick”.

It was thoughtful and measured and contained explanatory stories from Jewish lore, a quality I admire in Lenny and in learned men all.

Much of his reasoning has to do with the idea of a moral consensus versus a higher ideal.

It’s an interesting treatise on the predicament of Israel, a country I visited only to become more confused by.

In other news, a Jewish boxer was defeated this weekend after slipping in the ring, opening up an old injury.

His wife called for the towel to be thrown in, in the eighth round, seeing her husband barely standing.

His manager through it in, but it didn’t matter, since the boxer still wanted to fight.

He was badly beaten and needs to recover now. He lost his welterweight title.

When asked about it afterward, he told the press that when you have a belt, you don’t want to give it up. You fight until you can’t.

Take from that what you will.

F-bombs

A bird took a shit on my pants today and I was unsure whether or not to be grateful.

After all, it didn’t shit on my head.

At first, I thought the drop that fell on to my pants was condensation, maybe from a heater or even some residual melted snow that had held out through the recent spate of 40-something-degree weather.

But it felt a little heavy. And out of the corner of my eye I could see that little dabble of chalky white that somehow ends up composing the “eggy” part of bird feces.

Looking back on it, I kind of wonder about the biological reason for something so white coming out of there.

Anyway, like I said, I was kinda grossed out but also at the same time a little thankful.

A bird shitting my head during an outing to Central Park as a young-un had only reinforced my previously-held assumptions, based on my wide range of seasonal allergies, that Nature did not particularly like me and in fact, would like me to stay a nominal distance away from it at all times.

Subsequently there had been either one or two more times of cranial depositions, much further along in my development, but they paled in comparison to the first time.

Somehow, you never get over that smiled wiped off your face when you’re playing and you’re 8 and you realize that that drop on your head isn’t a snowflake.

At least I wouldn’t have to wash my hair, I thought.

That would be a bummer, summer.

All I had to do was go upstairs from the old-lady bench next to the steps of my SoHo building and change my jeans.

Which Eva had hated anyway.

***

“Why don’t you go back to Hot Topic?” She said.

“I’m hurt.” I told her, before we grabbed each other and continued a previously engaged-in make-out session in the lobby of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU.

Eva was there for a conference on Wallace Stevens and to try to find a professor who taught at her school on the intersection between mathematics and storytelling, her particular passion.

Unfortunately though for the scholars, academics and self-unsatisfied-looking Gallatin kids who were waiting with us in the lobby, I had just slightly overcome a bout with intense depression, the relief from which mostly manifested itself in the need to constantly be making out.

But Eva pulled away again.

“The jeans!” She exclaimed.

“What’s so wrong?” I asked. “They’re black jeans.”

And then, to exculpate myself further:

“I bought them at Old Navy.”

“Ugh!” She groaned. “I need to sew them or something. Better yet you need to not wear them.”

She crossed her arms and grabbed her iPod to resume her game of Solitaire.

“Either that or go back to Williamsburg, you tool.” She informed me.

Which I countered with a kiss.

Which was returned.

***

As for the defamed jeans, later the subject of much defecation, I feel I should explain myself on these pages.

You see, as comes as no surprise to those of you know me, I’m not much the “shopping type”.

Usually the purchase of clothing for me either involves an extremely rare buying of an in-jokey T-shirt on the web, or to satisfy minimum credit card requirements at a movie theater, or, much more embarrassingly, asking my mom for more boxers, as a purported way to reduce the amount of times I had to do laundry. (The lack of a clean pair of boxers always being the limiting factor).

The jeans purchase had been inspired by a surprise phone call I had received on Tuesday to usher at the Cherry Lane Theater for a show I’d never heard of, called “Love and Contempt”.

When the woman told me to dress in black, I tried to tell her I didn’t own anything that was solid, unpatterned black.

But I guess at that point, I was so desperate to do anything, that I told her I’d buy a pair of black jeans and be ready for Friday.

“See you at 6.” She told me and hung up.

***

“I think I know why my interview didn’t go so well.” I told my therapist. “It was because I wasn’t on message enough, I wasn’t hyping the company, I didn’t sounds like TV was my first priority.”

I paused.

“Well that and I kinda cursed when they asked me a question.”

I retold the story to my therapist that I told the H.R. Lady from LA on the phone interview that I must have mangled so badly that they eliminated me.

It was the story answering the injunction: “Describe a time at work when you absolutely failed.”

I was taken aback. The first round of questioning I had somewhat expected, it was all industry stuff and even though I had been having a nervous breakdown at the time, I knew the answers, because I knew the industry.

But here, I didn’t know the answers because H.R. was different than whatever department you were applying for. They were looking to weed out the crazies.

Which was a problem, since all the real stories I had, that came to mind, about failures I’d had at work (some of which have been chronicled here) all involved massive conflicts with authority, meltdowns and irreconcilable differences, usually followed swiftly by a departure.

“Those stories might not be the best to tell.” My therapist offered.

That, at least, I knew.

So what I told to the H.R. Lady from LA was a story about going to Toys R Us on Black Friday to purchase Zhu Zhu Pets from the Times Square store. It was an action packed tale fulled of crazed mothers, harried employees, a ticking clock and a props matter who threatened to send “someone else who can do the job if you can’t get it done”. I talked about my wit, cunning, charm and final discovery of the mechanical gerbils/hamsters, only to find that they were over my budget given.

“That sounds like a good story.” My therapist remarked at this point.

And it was except that when I called the props master to let him know the cost and that I’d put it on my card, he told me to “Fuck it”.

Which is exactly what I related to the HR Lady from LA.

Which maybe for a New Yorker might not be so bad, but when you are being interviewed to give tours to Midwesterners as a representative of a multinational media corporation that doesn’t allow such language on the air, saying that word in the interview is not a good sign.

“Well that’s good that you’ve found some lesson to be taken.” My therapist told me. “However it turns out.”

The next day I found out that I hadn’t gotten the job, but not before my therapist ended our session by telling me that I was beginning to experience the part of a reactive depression where “you are unable to feel happiness”.

And that’s pretty much what Wednesday was all about.

***

Even though I had had my encounter with that upbeat puppeteer the day previous about having a bunch of eggs, Wednesday was the day it felt like each egg shattered individually.

Or maybe I fell on them.

Or maybe they just fell on my pants.

In addition to the news that I hadn’t gotten the job,  delivered in a “Dear Candidate” form letter:

-my meeting with a producer about my feature was canceled an hour beforehand with no attempt to reschedule

-my meeting with some old friends from school about a new short was canceled with “uncertainty” as to when it would be rescheduled

-my pages from my new feature were panned at my writing group

AND no day is complete without:

-two more rejections from film festivals for my short.

At one point, during that day, I got happy for no reason. At another point, after the writing group, I just kept grinding a piece of pizza crust into mush with my teeth and then, grinding complete, circling it around my mouth.

I felt unsure how I had taken the puppeteers advice incorrectly:

Had I just been too focused on each egg individually?

Were eggs like children that needed to be treated equally and recognized for their faults?

Was I just, myself, a bad egg?

I lacked the prerequisite experience to know anyway, since I had not had the famous “egg parenting” course at my middle school. Since I went to school in New York, the teachers recognized that perhaps the rough situation of sidewalk and subway were not the best place for ovine welfare and instead tasked us with bags of flour upon which to shower our care.

Anyway, I think my bag broke.

Which is why when someone offered me a chance to usher, to do something. I took it, even though I didn’t know the show.

I took it, and I bought those jeans.

***

I remember asking my teacher, Amos Poe, about the differences between cinema and stageplays and what delineates the two.

I remember him, in that subterranean classroom we inhabited, where he still wore his hat and detached post-stoned manner.

“Well,” he told me. “I think the difference is that if you see a bad movie, you can just leave.”

A point which I took as something of an evasion then, but found myself reexamining when faced with ushering for “Love and Contempt”, a production affiliated with, though not produced by, Montclair State University.

It was a vanity project put on by a drama professor at that fine institute of learning who, having fancied himself something of a “dramatis persona” (his actual title in the program for himself), decided to cast his students in a production of his own fashioning, written and directed by him.

The work of an auteur, one could call it.

Well, they could.

What it mainly consisted of was generic suburban people saying things like “all men _____” and “all women _____” in ways that played out just exactly as dictated in the characters actions.

Well then, didn’t see that one coming.

But as I sat in the back of the theater, calmly observing the students and their Jerseyite parents who had sold out the house, I felt not only like I couldn’t watch this anymore, but that I now had a list of things that I couldn’t watch.

Movies I had worked on, shows I’d worked on. The movies and shows that had rejected me.

When I watched “The Office” on Thursday night, I was unsure whether I’d ever lose the queasy feeling I had trying to enjoy the show.

The play was a wash that night, though the Jersey parents clapped into the after-hours, much to the chagrin of the house manager and I who were tasked with the impossible mission of keeping them quiet while a different show went on in a different theater closeby.

Eventually though the Jerseyites cleared out and the house manager, Jonathan, and I got to talking.

He was comfortably older than me enough so that he couldn’t be my peer, but at the same time not so old that he could be my dad or a yuppie either.

He had an easy going attitude and a background in playwriting at NYU.

We talked about Martin McDonagh (“brilliant but watering it down for America…”), Neil LaBute (“a great ear, bad with other people’s material”) and the job of a theater director (“to give the actor space, while guiding them away from the worst decisions”). We joked about the Jerseyites.

He even recommended a covert piece of dark chocolate- and toffee-covered matzoh available at the concession stand that was homemade from Brooklyn and the perfect balance of crunchy, salty and sweet.

And the show was over. The parents went home. I said goodbye to the house manager and asked if I could volunteer again and he told me he’d be around.

But as the house manager went back in and I exited to the street, I felt a pang.

The show was terrible, the actors a joke and the writer/director/creator the biggest joke of all, except for possibly me, who did it all for free.

But I had a great night.

Because when you work in something you love, everyone around you has that energy, they love it too and you are bonded to them in ways impossible by blood or planning.

You are made a family, unconscious of each other, waiting to be revealed.

And then you go home and go to your bed and go on.

But there’s that itch inside of you, to get back in it, to find something else, to be around these people who are “charged” so that you will be too.

That’s the business.

The next morning, I kept wearing my black usher’s jeans.

***

Is it a fallacy to be grateful when something less bad happens to you?

Or foolish?

I’m not sure.

But eventually I had that meeting about a new short and it went not too badly.

And the next day there was a Jia Zhangke retrospective at MoMA.

And then sometime there I could see Eva again and look at her until we grabbed each other and started kissing in other institutions of higher learning.

And this time, we wouldn’t have to stop for jeans.

Thanks.

***

THE CHERRY LANE THEATER CONCESSION STAND

Dark chocolate- and toffee-covered matzoh- $4.50 (show nights only)

Commerce St. between Barrow and Bedford Sts.

1 to Christopher St, PATH to Christopher St.

My (little) Nervous Breakdown

I was at work when I got the email.

Well, at my internship.

But for a day at my internship, it hadn’t been a bad one.

Things were coming to an end there either for me or for them or for both. They were running out of funding fast and office space and a good chunk of time had been spent that very day with the director, trying to convince him to store things from the office at his apartment in preparation for “the move”.

One of my two bosses, an annoying-pert-anorexic-type with an MBA and a Com degree, who talked to me like I was 12, had recently left for an associate producer gig on a reality show and while I resented her ability to obtain solid work, I was glad to have her out of my hair.

And anyway, that day, I was working for the producer, a guy who once cheered me up by improvising a song about how much my office sucked on acoustic guitar, and who resembled what I might like look like in the future if I laid off the neuroses and started wearing hempen shirts.

What’s more even, is that even though I wasn’t getting paid, I was working directly for someone I liked and not only that, but I was actually doing something fairly important for him, tooling around with Final Cut Pro, cutting selects and exporting a DVD for a meeting he had in a few hours.

Even if I wasn’t paid, I felt valued and valuable, which is really all you need at an internship.

Which brings us to the email.

I was putting motion on some sketches that artists done for the movie on spec, to give an idea of some material they might be adding to the film.

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I turned it on as the producer checked out reals for post-houses on his laptop.

“Fuck.” I said and dropped my phone.

“What?” He asked, his back turned, intent on his screen.

“I’ve been rejected from my own school’s film festival.”

***

The night before the Bummer Summer premiere/Director’s Series at Cantor, Zach Weintraub proposed a plan to me.

My phone buzzed. I was at work. A text:

“wanna get some old crow and street meat and hand out fliers?”

(To be fair I’m not sure if those were the exact words–it was a while ago–but that was the sentiment.)

We met up first at Sammy’s Halal over on 4th and Broadway, which is known for its liberal use of onions and the Vendy award it had gotten a few years past.

The Old Crow (or Jim Beam?) we got from Warehouse and we sat down in Weinstein’s freshman outsourced-dining-hall to eat our food and mix our drinks.

Zach had gotten a Dr. Pepper to mix with his whiskey, while I had gotten a Welch’s Grape Soda, a bottle of which had been difficult to find.

When Zach emerged from the downstairs bathroom, alchemy complete, he handed me my bottle which, combined with the spicy sauce/uncertain quality of the Sammy’s, caused me a big, disorienting tummyache.

As we ate, Zach examined a postcard stuck to a dining room napkin holder, situated in between us on the table.

“This is a great idea!” Zach exclaimed and summarily removed the postcard, sticking on a postcard-sized Bummer Summer flyer.

We spent the rest of the night handing out fliers, in that dining hall and at Tisch.

In one encounter, a graduate student took a flier, only to complain about Cantor’s preference for undegrads and accuse me of being drunk.

“Yes, he’s drunk.” Zach said excitedly.

“Bastard.” I muttered under my breath, since he must be as drunk as I was, or if not, he was a big douche.

When we were done handing out fliers inside, we went outside Tisch, to where the smokers stand, to bother them too.

“Hey, do you uh, like movies, you know? At all? Sometimes see them?” I said, giving the pitch I’d given before.

The smokers laughed as I endorsed and introduced Zach and they said they be there as they passed and left Tisch and Zach and I took their place.

“Did I ever tell you about the greatest moment I ever had at this school?” I asked Zach.

He looked at me, with a mix of amusement and resignation.

“No, but I guess I’m gonna hear it now.” He replied.

“I was a Freshman and it was early in my second semester. No one had like my sound project I had did, but everybody thought I asked good questions and the teachers all knew me, ’cause I would knock on their doors and bother them all the time.”

“I lived in a small dorm room and my roommate was handsome and popular and a skateboarder, which all made me insecure, so I spent all my time at Tisch.”

“Sometimes I would just prowl around the common room, looking for people I’d know, ‘running into them’, ‘accidentally’, ‘by chance’”.

“It was just a way to keep my energy up, I guess.”

“But one time I did this, I ran into this TV teacher, James Gardner. And I never taken a class with him, but he knew me, from all the questions I asked, and he had a class where he brought in special guests, old buddies from his TV days, to come talk to the kids and impart some wisdom.”

“Today, he told me, he was bringing in an executive producer from Arrested Development, which I fuckin loved. He told me I could come on one condition: that I go and announce in the freshman colloquium that this was happening and that any freshman who wanted to come could.”

“I show up and I’m there early and the guy’s not on yet. They’ve got this guy from The Love Boat there who’s talking about his path that he took and teeling us that everyone gets a chance and that’s it what you do with it that counts. I nodded my head, but I waited.”

“And when the guy came on, Jim Vallely, he was really funny and he pointed at people and made fun of him as he took questions. And I was embarrassed, so I stuck my shirt over my face and he called me, ‘guy-with-his-shirt-over-his-face-deargod-why-are-you-doing that’ as he spasmed with his shirt over his face and the whole class erupted in laughter.”

“But it turns out he liked my question. And he took another from me. And Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of the show showed up and he took a question from me too.”

“And as the class ended, the students pooled around Jim and Mitch and I felt shy and inadequate and not as cool or funny as these people, I didn’t even know why I was in film school. So I thanked Jim for my taking questions, poking in in the crowd that surrounded him and he thanked me too, an honest thanks. I left the classroom, but stood still. And all that stuff The Love Boat guy had said sunk in. And I turned around and went back.”

“And then Jim offered to buy me a drink. And then he offered to buy everyone a drink. It was the day it was announced that Arrested Development wasn’t being picked up for another season. He had decided that he just wanted a bunch of people who loved the show who he could talk and exult with.”

“And we drank and smoked and ate Mexican food with giant margaritas. And I came home, thinking it wasn’t even real.”

A pause.

“Wow.” Zach said. “Nah, you never told me that story.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You wanna know what the things is though?”

I didn’t wait for him to reply.

“Out of all those kids I’d made the announcement to in my freshman colloquium, I was the only one who went.”

***

My producer once commented on how bulky my iPhone case was, a comment I replied to by throwing it against the wall and then picking it up and showing him my Facebook page on it.

Ever since then, he had been suggesting to me, when I saw me, that I should make a commercial on spec for the company that makes my iPhone case.

Looking back on it, parts of the day I found out I had been rejected from First Run would probably make for a good commercial.

I’d bounce my phone on the desk, throw it under the counter, slam my fist into it and yelp in pain.

I had somehow managed to complete the selects that the producer needed for his meeting, while muttering and tilting over all the while.

I even did the customary things: calling professors, emailing to see if it was a typo or deletion (it wasn’t), calling my parents.

I didn’t call Eva or my friends.

After all this, I didn’t even know if they wanted to be friends with me, wanted anything to do.

It felt at the time like I’d built my whole identity coming to school as a Tisch man, a film student who knew the ins-and-outs of the school, who was friends with the teachers and who was loved or hated by everyone.

It was grandiose identity, but it gave me room to function, a platform of sorts, a place, however imaginary, that I could make art from.

In other words, at Tisch, improbably, I felt accepted.

I guess all the phone-bouncing, the calls, the illogical fears of further rejection by my friends, my peers my girlfriend–they were symptoms of that, ongoing.

As for the office assistant and the producer, they watched on in a sort of stupor for a while or would go back to their computers, like it was some sort of dance or strange Shakespearean display.

At one point the producer came out and looked at me as I paced around the office, dialing and redialing, and he mock-whispered to the office assistant:

“Well shit, I wish he had gotten in.”

***

In the days after that, I came to varying conclusions, some healthy, some not, as I tried to get over the rejection.

I had been rejected by 20 film festivals already at that point (with 30 more to hear back from), but this one hit home more, you know.

It was the first year the festival had ever been “competitive” to get into. And sure a film could not get an award or have a bad timeslot in previous years, but the plan was this year to show some films in Cantor and the rest in a classroom downstairs in Tisch, three weeks later.

They were literally throwing me in the basement.

So I did a lot of things.

I got real depressed. I reached out to teachers. I wrote mass emails to the administration asking for notes, or an explanation. I tried to figure out what was wrong with my movie, what was wrong with me.

What started out as one rejection pooled into a perceived string of failures that struck the chord of one of my greatest fears:

That I am out of touch with the reality of my life.

That I’m a joke that everyone is in on but me.

In between these further mini-meltdowns, these aftershocks, one of the emails I wrote to the administration (posted here) snowballed with more people sending emails out to the administration expressing their dissatisfaction.

I was cc’ed on emails and received direct ones thanking me for what I’d done, telling me I was “right on” or urging me not to stop.

But even as I was egged on, the fact still stood that a judgment had been made and that I hadn’t “made the cut”.

***

Later that week, I saw the new Martin McDonagh play, A Behanding In Spokane, in previews, with my friend Langston, who was in the city to commence cat-sitting my parents’ apartment, while they went on a much needed vacation to Texas.

My dad kept insisting I need a vacation too, but I kept shrugging him off, asking him where I would even go.

(“Nowhere I wouldn’t feel like a failure.” I thought to myself.)

As we left the play, an odd and somewhat unsatisfying affair, we descended through the snowy night to the 42nd Street Subway, where at first I thought I saw a classmate and then was sure of it as we shook hands and talked, coldly.

Because the first thing I’d recognized when I’d seen him, was that he had made the cut and I hadn’t.

“Is this how it’s going to be?” I asked Langston as we got off the train. “How people are going to treat me?”

“I don’t think he treated you different than ever.” Langston said.

“Even worse.” I muttered, through the snow.

And as I head through the weekend now, I still don’t know what comes next or how to feel.

I’ve been told many times that if you don’t take rejection well, that this isn’t your business.

But even though I’ve graduated, I’ve always come back to Tisch.

Through those halls, looking for someone to run into.

Maybe this is growing up, or maybe it’s saying goodbye.

But even with some nice emails–

I’m don’t think I could hand out fliers there, drunk, on a cool winter’s evening with a good friend.

That, I guess, won’t ever happen, again.

***

SAMMY’S HALAL CART (“street meat”)

Chicken and Rice w/hot sauce, white sauce, onions– $5.00

SE Corner of West 4th St and Broadway

RWto 8th St. BDFV6 to Broadway-Lafayette.

***

A final note:

One of the films that didn’t get into the festival I happened to be acquainted with and it happens to be online.

It’s an excellent 3-minute animated short called “CUBES” by Kelly Goeller.

One of the ways I’ve kept sane through the film festival process is by seeing my friends, whose films I KNOW are good, get rejected from the same film festivals I have.

In my mind, there is no excuse why this film should not be in the running.

If you care to watch it, the link to it is right here,

If you like it, feel free to email Kelly here and let her know.

_________ the point

“Wow jason it’s like you’re in film school again”

I guess one of the residual benefits of forfeiting your soul to something like Twitter is that you get to see pictures like that.

For those of you who don’t know, the person featured above is quite-possible better writer, Feitel-described “depressed asian” and current Austinian Jason Lee, prepping sound equipment and re-entering the production world that he forswore (or at least complained about) on his blog, in favor of writing short-short stories, complaining about his boss and reinterpreting the bible through intermittent poetry.

In fact, I’m just making a good-natured jab at ole’ Jason, since if you know the figure crouching in the corner to the lower right, you’d know it was Zach Weintraub of the 500 Days Of (Bummer) Summer, filming his new movie on the road with Rob Malone, “Fresh Starts For Stale People” which will (begin insider reference here) apparent be marketed as “the Couch Potatoes movie” (end insider reference, for more information see here).

Anyway.

Zach and Jason and Rob are old friends, all of whom get off on saying ridiculous things to me in deadpan and watching me try to squirm to figure out how serious they’re being which is always a little serious at least.

Which would mean it would be normal for Jason to help Zach and Rob.

But I guess the reason I thought of this is because Jason did something else I never thought he would do.

He resumed his massive “on-air” job search on his blog, which had amassed hundreds on listings from which he had been abused, humiliated or simply not called back.

And me?

I just got fired from a volunteer job.

Which I didn’t know could happen.

But here I am.

Courtesy of http://blog.lotlmovie.com

***

It was Wednesday.

I had a morning meeting with one of those “gatekeeper” people in the film industry, a friend of a friend, a person who makes her living finding financing for indie films, something I thought I’d only afford with my short in a festival and some good buzz.

But there I was with a DVD in my overstuffed jacket pocket, scrambling to find the email on my iPhone that had my script attached to forward her and trying to explain that the budget would be apparent “through the tone”.

All in all, it went well. I came back later to give her a copy of Frownland, which she hadn’t seen, and a tube of Chocolate-Covered Espresso Beans from Jacques Torres, which she promptly told me “of course” she’d given up for Lent.

Being a Jew, I am always unaware of Ash Wednesday.

I always assume that some people just have dirty foreheads.

It’s New York.

After all.

But I’d told my supervisor that I’d be in late for my volunteer job at the syringe exchange and that I’d try to come in quickly since the paid person was off today and I’d be the only one there.

I grabbed my “saddy meal” from Popeye’s, my usual depressing 4-dollar lunch, before heading over, my New Yorker in hand.

Someone else was on the computer in the exchange when I got there, so I stuffed my coat in a cabinet and went to talk to my supervisor more about movies and whether he still might be down for March.

I was beginning to feel at home, or at least a little comfortable in the exchange.

Like I had hoped, it was a place where I could get some reading or blogging done. Where I could meet some real people and provide a service. Where I could maybe be nice to people who might not get anyone else to be nice to them otherwise.

I also felt more at home when I learned about some of the mysteries I wondered about from Jamal, my Paki-bro co-worker, who had turned out to be friendlier every day.

It turned out that the people who hung around the drop-in center, not the exchange, were mostly not active heroin users.

“Why not?” I asked Jamal.

“Because the heroin sucks nowadays.” He said cheerily. “They cut it with so much shit that you get very little bang for your buck.”

“But these guys are definitely out of it.” I replied, gesturing back toward the drop-in center, its large metal door shut for a support group.

“Yeah. That’s true.” Jamal  said. “See what they do, is there’s a methadone clinic around here, not too far. And methadone gives you a buzz, but it doesn’t get you good like heroin. So what they do is they get there metahdone, take some benzos like Xanax or Clonopin, prescription shit and then they’re good and out and have that heroin feeling and get to kick back.”

It made sense. The people did act real out of it, like the kids I’d known in school who’d used pills.

“Thing is, the methadone and the benzos use two different pathways. So it’s very easy to OD.” Jamal finished.

It was the most helpful thing anyone had really told me at the exchange the entire time I had been there. I had read the volunteer manual, but it was mostly about respect and what a needle looked like and not as much about the reality of the place.

I guess on Wednesday, a week after Jamal had told me that stuff, I finally felt like I knew what was going on.

And with no one else to man the exchange, I even felt important.

When my supervisor and his boss busted in to the exchange and started yelling.

“Whose water bottle is this?” James, the boss, asked.

I was taken aback. I had been told not to have water in the exchange but I had never seen the harm in it. I kept it in my drawer or in my jacket for most of the day but figured it was easier to drink it at my desk than risk leaving.

“Mine.” I fessed up.

“No water in here!” He yelled, turning to my supervisor. “What the hell, man, you’re this close!”

James kept on yelling at my boss about things I had done wrong, most of which I hadn’t even known about: my magazine, the NYTimes website I was on, my coat stuffed in a closet. He yelled like I wasn’t there.

“Hello, are you James, my name is Nicholas.” I tried to intercede at one point. But he just ignored me.

At some point, my supervisor just told me to go on break while James just kept on yelling.

As I left the exchange I was upset. I felt like  I had been disrespected. I had just had everything that was wrong about me yelled at and used against someone I respected. I had been shamed. I felt like I was treated like I wasnt even there when I was giving my time to be there.

Yeah, and that’s right. I was a volunteer. They had to be nice to me! They couldn’t offend me like that! Ignore me! If they treated volunteers like that, no one would ever do it! And if no one volunteered then they couldn’t function!

I was indignant. I was offended. But most of all, I was pissed off.

So first I called my pops and asked him what to do, him being the resident expert on office politics. But when I talked to him, I remembered, remembered the stupid project I had been spending all my Saturdays on, the tape transfers I had been digitizing.

Digitizing for the executive director of the program!

Done!

I called her up and spoke to her and told her how upset I was, how this guy had yelled at me and ignored me and treated me like I was nothing. I told her I didn’t know what to do. She told me to come back after my break and talk to her and we would sort it out.

Checkmate, I thought. Done and done. This motherfucker would find himself flanked by me. He done fucked with the wrong volunteer.

I got a bowl of ice cream at the old-style luncheonette on Canal and returned head-high to my work.

“You feeling better?” My supervisor asked me.

“Hell yeah.” I told him. ” I talked to Raquel and told her how that guy treated me. She told me she would sort it out with me. I figure since I’m doing this video thing for her which is pretty irreplaceable, she’ll probably back me up.”

“No, she’ll back him up.” He said in a dull tone.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He told me.

And sure enough, five minutes later, James walked into the exchange pointing his finger at me, “We need to talk”.

“Look, first off, I know who you are. You’re Nicholas. You’re that film guy.” He told me, closing the door to the intake room behind him.

“I’ve introduced myself to you before. I’m James. But for some reason you keep calling me Ajami. I don’t know why that is.” He paused for effect. “But you’ve done it like four times.”

I felt a pang in my chest. Ajami was another co-worker at the center. They were both black, with similar haircuts and glasses. Still, the intimation was clear.

“But let’s be clear, did I yell at you?” He asked.

“You yelled about me, in front of me.” I told him.

“But did I yell at you?” He asked again.

“No. You treated me like I wasn’t there.” I replied.

“You don’t work for me. You work for the gateway coordinator. It’s his responsibility to tell you these things. So I told him that. If our partners and funders see somethings wrong, they go to Raquel and Raquel goes to me. I go to him.”

“You continued yelling and talking about me, even after I left” I told him.

“Well I didn’t know you were there.” He said. Bullshit.

“So, I know who you are. You keep calling me Ajami. But I know who you are. And if you choose to stay here, I hope that all is clear.” He told me.

And offered his hand. I took it and averted my eyes.

***

“What are you going to do?” My boss asked me.

“I’m going to get my stuff.” I told him.

“Are you going to come back?”

“I don’t know. I just gotta go.”

I felt like shit.

I felt betrayed by Raquel since she had never talked to me and let James sic himself on me as soon as I got back.

I felt stupid for ever thinking she might value me more than one of her top lieutenants.

I felt angry that I had only been humiliated further.

And lastly, I hated myself for having a public fuck-up on this scale, since along with what had happened at my last job, it made me feel like a child, like I couldn’t handle it, like I couldn’t even hold down anything.

“I know a suicide prevention hotline you could volunteer at.” My boss suggested as I tried to ignore him, walking up the stairs to retreive my jacket.

“But,” he said as I opened the door. “It’s the same bullshit everywhere, the same people.”

I took my jacket and I left.

Later, I got a text message from my boss telling me that with what was going on with my sister I wasn’t “in a place emotionally where the job was right” for me, which was his way of telling me I was fired, except he called it “too hard”.

He took a while getting back to me and when he did, he sent me an email with the info for the Suicide Prevention Hotline and a line saying “shudder island was great”.

In other news, I saw Shutter Island this weekend.

I thought that it sucks my dick.

***

CUP & SAUCER LUNCHEONETTE

Scoop of Cookies+Cream ice cream in a small dish- $2.50 (plus whatever tip)

On the NW Corner of Canal and Eldridge Sts.

BD to Grand St.

Oscars and Others

Do I have to?

After receiving two (!) messages from my mom on how I was late on my blogging (thanks mom?), I figured that if I was going to go back to this, I would have to tackle the Oscars.

Frankly, I don’t want to, for a number of reasons.

First, I’m burnt out from being on set all weekend, a fairly good time and low-maintenance as sets go (the shoot was in Manhattan and I was a DIT, not a script sup), but the process still tires you out as I huddled against cases trying to make sure that my drives didn’t un-mount via falling off the half- and quarter-apple boxes that they were precariously perched on.

Secondly, I’m at a soul-crushing internship that leaves me with so little self-worth that it makes me wonder whether I would be better or worse if I left, a choice even mostly denied to me by the fact that our office lease seems to be over and its a question of when the people will actually muster the energy to kick us out. There, the people treat me like I was 12, while asking me to do video-editing and outputting jobs that they don’t even begin to understand while my boss desperately looks for a job as a waitress.

“You know,” I told my dad, as we drove one morning from set to get a sandwich. “It’s like a Woody Allen joke. You know there’s something wrong with the production your working at when you’re boss is desperately trying to break into the restaurant industry.”

The building is rickety and cold, with windows that are uninsulated and so streams of chill air seep in from the wind outside. Meanwhile, the water delivery that was supposed to come last week never came, so I’m drinking from the faucet out in the hallway with the lock-broken door.

It’s all enough to make one wonder about their previous state of joblessness and whether this unpaid limbo is any better, really, at all.

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly to those denizens of these pages who are well tired of hearing me complain about my employment situation, the Oscars this year are pretty boring.

I wish I could even muster up the vitriol to denounce the Oscars for this, but it’s because, mostly, for once, they’ve gotten things pretty right.

I agree with a lot of their picks. I think there are some worthy choices to be had.

I might even have some small modicum of confidence that things could actually go right this year and some good movies could win.

But anyway, there’s some choices to talk about, so enough of my yapping: Let’s talk about the nominees.

***

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

The Messenger

A Serious Man

Up!

Should win: A Serious Man

Will win: The Hurt Locker

It’s a close call for me in the “should win” category, since I really like The Hurt Locker and even rated it above A Serious Man in my top 10. Still the Coens are nothing if not excellent architects of story and drafters of dialogue in their own idiosyncratic and fully-realized worlds. Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski should prove that pretty well, for those needing proof of their skill. This story is among their most restrained, most personal and their finest. Which is not at all to disparage Mark Boal’s script of his own reporting, the most accurate and compelling depiction of our current wartime situation since Generation Kill (the product of another embedded journalist). Really, no bad choices in this category, excluding perhaps The Messenger which suffered from a half-baked love story in the middle, though it had fine touches in the crafting of Woody Harrelson’s Sgt. Stone.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

District 9

An Education

In The Loop

Precious: Based on a novel by Sapphire

Up in the Air

Should win: In The Loop

Will win: Up in the Air

Kudos to the Academy, I suppose, for even remembering about Armando Ianucci’s superb mid-2009 Brit-com In The Loop, a satire of both British and American government that managed to be both toothy and funny without even dating itself too much. I couldn’t even believe it in hindsight. Still this is a much weaker category than the previous one. Precious‘s script wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty, what with some cut-out feel-good character and what felt like a lot of off-the-book from Mo’Nique. Still, I will sacrifice gladly this category to surely the worst of these films, Up in the Air, if it acts as the consolation prize that augurs that the film won’t win the BP Oscar. I think that’s probable. NB: Have not yet seen An Education. Chadd tells me it’s a “B+ Movie”.

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM

Ajami

The Milk of Sorrow

A Prophet

The Secret in their Eyes

The White Ribbon

Should win: The White Ribbon?

Will win: The White Ribbon

Of this category, I’m not sure if I can say what should win as Haneke’s Ribbon was the only one I saw. I can say that it’s received an awful lot of critical raves (and some notable flames), but that I found it fairly extraordinary. Anyway, with an Almodovar there or a comparable name, expect Haneke to win. Possible dark horse in A Prophet which has been garnering some great reviews.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Burma VJ

The Cove

Food, Inc

The Most Dangerous Man in America

Which Way Home

Should win: ???

Will win: ???

What the fuck happened to this category? Really, the one category I’m actually upset with at these Oscars. This year I have not one but two documentaries on my top 10 list and neither one of them is here. Not only that, but no one I know has seen let alone talked about these docs to me all year! The only one’s I’ve really even been aware of was the Michael Pollan doc Food, Inc, which seems like a Fast Food Nation re-dub, notable mostly for Chipotle’s re-screening of it and The Cove, which i hear is kind of good, shot like a thriller, about people who kill dolphins. I don’t feel informed enough to comment, but I know that The Beaches of Agnes which was a life-work masterpiece and Anvil! (which wasn’t even on the shortlist!) must have been due inclusion on this list.

BEST DIRECTOR

James Cameron, Avatar

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Lee Daniels, Precious

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Should win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Will win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

If there’s a Team Bigelow and a Team Cameron, put me squarely on Team Bigelow. The Hurt Locker was an exquisitely directed film, evoking the heat and claustrophobia of Iraq with the tense/intense relationships in an army troop. A straight procedural that doesn’t hit you over the head with messages, Bigelow made nearly no missteps in my opinion, though Rob felt like the film fell apart in the second half. Cameron made a great film too and in some ways deserves the award just as much, if not more, for his pioneering new methods of filmmaking and taking the medium that one crazy step further. Either way’s fine I guess, just don’t give it to Reitman. Worst director of the year, more like it.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Coraline

Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Princess and the Frog

The Secret of Kells (Some Irish movie no one has ever seen/nor heard of)

Up!

Should win: Up!

Will win: Up!

Alright, well I haven’t seen Princess or The Secret of the movie that no one has ever goddam seen or heard of why didn’t you guys just give it to Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs I hear that movie was actually good and it made a whole bunch of money unlike whatever the fuck this movie was that wasn’t even distributed and whose trailer is on some german site on which it doesn’t even load really guys, german, come on.

That said, Coraline, while an interesting premise, was a little short in execution. Fantastic Mr. Fox was a giant disappointment, a Wes Anderson movie that reached for merely “good”, without immersing itself in anything other than Andersonian self-love. Up! was miles better than either and probably my favorite Pixar film, in a three-way-tie with Ratatouille and Toy Story 2. Congrats, Pixar. You did it again.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Penelope Cruz, Nine

Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart

Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

Mo’Nique, Precious

Should win: Mo’Nique, Precious

Will win: Mo’Nique, Precious

A few “WTFs” in this category, specifically for Nine, a movie that was universally panned (though I, like many others, appreciate Ms. Cruz generally) and for Anna Kendrick of Up in the Air and Maggie Gyllenhaal of Crazy Heart. While I can see Ms. Farmiga, a hard-working actress self-possessed and standing up to a bunch of idiotic men in a movie like Up in the Air getting a nomination and deserving it, Ms. Kendrick fell amidst the many actors in that film blighted by Reitman’s cartoonish and inadequate direction. I almost feel bad for her for how bad she was in that film–just not bad enough to nominate her for an Oscar. As for Gyllenhaal, she’s serviceable but unspectacular in Crazy Heart, playing the stock role of “single mom”. Maybe they’re just playing make-up for Secretary back in the day. Mo’Nique, even for her over-hustling and stingy lack of self-promotion, will almost certainly win the award and deservedly so. Lee Daniels wouldn’t fucking dare to take credit for her performance as he did for Halle Berry’s in Monster’s Ball, so brazenly. Congratulate her and see if she ever does anything again. Side-note: Whatever happened to Jennifer Hudson anyway? I liked her better. Less ‘tude.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Matt Damon, Invictus

Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Christopher Plummer, The Last Station

Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Should win: Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Will win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Sorry, Chadd. Sorry, everyone really. Harrelson’s performance is the performance of his career, nuanced and tight and fully-formed. It’s a tour-de-force in a way that redefines the cliche. A compressed ball of pain and longing that spills out and explodes only to be mopped up and reconstituted in a Sisyphean hell. It is the finest performance of this year, supporting or not. Look though, I love Christoph Waltz. Welcome to Hollywood, sir! We’re going to like you here! Ever considered playing Dracula? Lenin, maybe? Some sort of thinly-veiled Iraq War allegory-general in Avatar 2? Oh, don’t worry, we’ll talk about it later. For now, just take your award and we’ll talk.

Also, “MATT… DAY-MON”

BEST ACTRESS

Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Helen Mirren, The Last Station

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia

Should win: Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Will win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

Again, surprisingly for a year in which I’ve both seen many movies and there were not too many movies to see, I haven’t seen several of the movies in the category. An Education was just an oversight, perhaps it came out at some weird time when I was focusing on other films. On the other hand both Julie and Julia and The Blind Side held no particular interest for me, especially the latter. That said, I saw Precious and thought that Ms. Sidibe gave a spectacular performance especially for a first-timer. She was wounded, but strong, projecting beauty through a peculiar kind of grace and self-confidence. That said, whatever Hollywood tastemakers have decreed that Sandra Bullock win an Oscar. So that’s that I guess. Please let that appease you Oscar gods so that The Blind Side doesn’t win BP in some Tea Party putsch.

BEST ACTOR

Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

George Clooney, Up in the Air

Colin Firth, A Single Man

Morgan Freeman, Invictus

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Should win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Will win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Not much to say here. The nomination for Gyllenhaal seems like a good augur that it’s just Bridges’s year. Everybody loves him, I’m pretty sure and he’s been nominated a bunch of times. He’s great and himself as “Bad Blake” in Crazy Heart. Renner gave a great, perhaps arguably better performance, but he doesn’t need the Oscar. Freeman’s a great actor but Invictus was a terrible movie. Ditto Clooney. Firth might be the dark horse here. His performance was pretty universally acclaimed and he’s been around for a while too. Look out for him to get it if the Academy thinks “Blake” is too “Bad”.

BEST PICTURE

Avatar

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Precious

A Serious Man

Up!

Up in the Air

Should win: The Hurt Locker

Will win: The Hurt Locker

Maybe I’m being optimistic here. There’s a gut feeling in me that says “AVATAR”, partially owing to the farce that was the Golden Globes and their blatant acknowledgment of that film’s primacy. But there’s something else in me that says “look at the PGA and DGA awards.” Those are the people that vote in the Academy, not the foreign critics and those are the people who picked The Hurt Locker. I think both movies are great and I won’t really be disappointed if Avatar wins, it was a cool movie and I like the scale that Cameron dreams on. I just think Bigelow’s film was masterful and that it deserves the award. That said, the 10 are mostly pretty good and I don’t think many would be complaining about an award for A Serious Man or Up!. Just please, god, let this not be the year that we get blindsided or thrown up in the air. That would truly be a disappointment.

So basically, like I said. Boring. But I like Alec Baldwin. So maybe, just maybe, it’ll be fun to watch.

***

A couple more things. This has been a long post due to Oscar prognostication, but this past week marked the first major screening of Zach Weintraub’s Bummer Summer, the premiere of Robert Malone’s Puppy Whistle and the departure of both of them on their road-trip-cum-feature-film-shoot for their improv’d movie Fresh Starts For Stale People or FSFSP for mercifully shorter. While I’ve heard different descriptions of the plot from different people, I’m not as excited for it as Chadd was, who seemed to summon a smile to his face at the mere thought of the coolness of it. Perhaps, it was because I am necessarily more cynical about road trips, having had a few bad ones of my own. Perhaps it was because I felt disinvited from this one, a road trip my friends were taking across country to have an adventure while I stayed here and struggled with shitty internships and shitty jobs I couldn’t even get. Or perhaps, it was because in some way, with the departure of Zach Weintraub and Rob Malone from New York City for an unspecified amount of time, some of the semblance of continuity I had after graduation was dissolving, the dissolution of a community.

“It’s the end of an era.” Mike Sweeny told me via text message as I simul-texted Zach about festival acceptances (none here). Mike told me he was only half-joking, but even in his bookishness and intellectual-sometimes-pessimism, he thought that even if the people who had been a sort of center of our community were leaving, it might be an opportunity for us to branch out, to reform, to make the rest of our lives. At least, that’s what I intuited. Mike just said “it could be exciting”.

The Bummer Summer premiere/Directors’ Series went over well, due to some good Facebooking and Zach and I’s handing out flyers at Tisch the night beforehand. We had, at Zach’s suggestion, met up at the Weinstein NYU dining hall previous to the leaflet campaign, where we proceeded to mix a small flask of Jim Beam with fruity sodas (Welch’s Grape for me, Dr. Pepper for Zach). I can attest that the combination, while exciting in theory, quickly turned disgusting as a sugary overload mixed with some end-of-the-day Halal food we ate to give a queasiness that was, indeed, reminiscent of Freshman year.

As we handed out fliers in Tisch, I’d speak effusively, pitching woo to the students on the virtues of the “home-made mumblecore film’ while Zach would stand idly beside me and try to disown me and my film. At one point a graduate student even accused me of being drunk to which Zach answered for me “yes”, much to her disgust.

“Why the fuck did you do that, Zach?” I demanded of him in the dimmed-up lights of the 10th floor of Tisch. “I’m not drunk and you gave me the Jim Beam anyway.”

“Because it was funny, dude.” Zach told me. “And we got a ‘Laurel and Hardy’ thing goin’ on besides.”

The movie went over well. The crowd dug it and even my friends who hadn’t seen it enjoyed the film. Jeremiah Newton even liked it, whose film has recently been selected for play at Berlin (where I had been rejected among, at this point, many other places). Jeremiah came up to Zach afterwards with festivals he could submit to as we all headed over to the Puppy Whistle premiere/afterparty at Andres Cardona’s house. On the way, we toured with Marc Dickerson, a Pennsylvanian and Malonely co-conspirator whom we introduced to the joys of Baoguette and Pommes Frites, once the rest of the crowd headed off for College Night at McDonald’s. Eva even stopped by a truck for a “liege wafel” piled high with 8 toppings and called a WMD (wafel of mass deliciousness). She ate sloppy-happy as we ate our sammys and fries.

Puppy Whistle was fun and weird with a star turn by Eva and a cameo by yours truly and the party that accompanied it was fun. It was only later, the next day, that Blake would point out to me that the film could be seen as autobiographical, a story about a filmmaker who goes away and the party he hosts. There was even a scene within the film that mimicked the exact circumstance of the audience as they were watching it, huddled in to a similar apartment, many of them having participated in the scene in the film they were seeing as well. Regardless, the uncomplicated of it was that I was going to miss Rob, miss Zach and that the movie, however fun, wasn’t going to help. And I had to be on set tomorrow. And Andres had cats that I was allergic to. So I left.

As Eva and I walked out, down to Houston St and through the cold-air-night, she told me about a girl who had come up to her and told her how much she’d loved her performance in Puppy Whistle and asked how she’d “gotten that greasy”.

“It made me realize,” She told me. “That being famous must suck.”

I hugged her close to me as I nodded and went home.

***

For those nostalgic for some Weintraub-o-philia, here is an interview with him from the Cinequest website. The picture is laughable, but then again, most times, so is he.

Bon chance, fellows.

No Such Thing As

Did it help that I felt guilty?

Or that I felt bad afterwards?

Or that maybe I had been drugged as part of a plan to euthanize the homeless?

I don’t know. I don’t know if this is the same as “the white guilt” that Rob accuses people of having during Avatar or whether it just sticks something in you to take a free meal.

***

It was cold on Wednesday.

That’s what I remember.

I had come out of my apartment wearing my fleece and my jacket, since I remembered Eva telling me it was going to get colder as the week went on.

Pursuant to what she said, it was, colder than the 56 degrees it had been on Monday when I had walked to meet to Eva in a long-sleeved-shirt-and-jeans down Bedford St for dinner.

Wednesday it was below freezing and biting as I walked down Canal, my fingers glued to a burrito I had left over from the night previous, munching on it as I regretted that I hadn’t microwaved it (I didn’t want to unwrap the tinfoil) and that the air outside was even colder than it was.

It was my first day at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center doing “outreach”. The past few times I’d been there had been, I had been manning the needle exchange, sitting by myself in a small corner of the center, handing out 4 sugars to people who asked for 6 and trying not to feel guilty when I used the syringe database computer to look up whether anyone I know had heard from festivals. It was whatever you could do to beat the boredom.

But today I was going out on a mission to the streets with volunteers, interns and staff. We were walking to Tompkins Square Park to set up a table on the perimeter with condoms and lube and female condoms and syringes that were tucked tightly in the bottom of a box so that they weren’t visible and people wouldn’t steal them.

For the first 45 minutes or so I was sitting in the exchange, waiting for everything to be ready, but when I finally got out the sun was out and the breeze was low and I took off my fleece for the long walk down Allen.

We had a new volunteer, Katy, a petite Asian girl, an anthropology major from Brooklyn College who had concentrated in school on studies of the homeless. She just seemed happy to be there.

Near her, coordinating us was Jamal, a built, bald and goofy-looking Ameri-Pak bro, the outreach coordinator from the center who was roughly only a year older than me.

As we walked down Allen, towards the park, Katy tried to do her best to glean information from people, what was the center about, who we’d be dealing with, while I chatted up Jamal about New York City real estate, the efficacy of owning a car and his party-loving Russian girlfriend and her Russian Judo champion father, whom he admired.

The conversation Jamal and I had was fun and easy, a side-effect of the fact that no matter who you are in life, your early 20s are always a jumble, thrusting you into different situations, but at least givng you a basis to relate.

Still, my stomach was knotted as we approached 6th St. I had jobs to hear back from, festivals to be rejected from, Eva had just lost her health insurance and I wasn’t sure who I was going to see in Tompkins Square Park. My sister’s crazy ex-boyfriend had just been released from prison and was residing in parts unknown at least to me. I knew Tompkins was somewhere he used to spend time and I comforted myself knowing that at least Jamal could cut an intimidating figure if we did end up running in. Looking back, even thinking that, makes me feel like a coward.

But we didn’t run into him as we handed out condom packs throughout the park.

Jamal, with his sunny gym-room attitude would go up to old people bent over carts in the park, approaching with effortless aplomb.

“Hey, pal, wants some free condoms today?” He’d ask as if he was offering a sip from his Muscle Milk.

Most people turned us away, but a few took them, one guy even taking several in ecstatic glee.

“Condoms, I need em condoms!” He said, laughing and stuffing them into his many different pockets.

I remember getting into a discussion with one man, older, who we approached as he was sitting on a bench.

Our instructions were if we saw someone who was homeless who might want housing to talk to them, as we had social workers and a housing specialist back at the center.

The older man said he was clean, that he’d been off drugs for years, but he’d been on the street for 6 of them.

“We have great people there.” Jamal told him. “We’re on Canal and Allen.”

“What are they going to do? I have a sleeping bag.” He said, pointing in his cart. “It’s warm. What are they going to do, put me in a shelter, put me on Ward’s Island? What do I want to go to Ward’s Island for.

I had been to Ward’s Island for a film shoot and had seen and even entered the homeless shelter there, looking for the bathroom that wasn’t provided on set. I squirmed as I remembered how cold they’d been to me, telling me that I needed to see a social worker before I could get a bed and when I told them I just needed a bathroom, repeating the same sentence.

I felt the man had a point, but I believed in the organization I worked for.

“Listen,” I told him, speaking for the first time so far in our rounds around the park. “We’ve housed people before. And no one is going to deport you to a shelter at our place without your permission.”

His look softened.

“I mean, look. The worst thing that happens is you lose the 30 minutes of time. The best is you get somewhere to stay.”

A pause.

“Sorry to bother you.” I added.

“You ain’t bothering me.” He told me. “I got cops, noise in my ears, cars and loud people and a shitty bathroom. You of all things ain’t bothering me. You’re just trying to help.”

Later that day, when I came back to the center to pick up my fleece, two men were ejected from the center. When I asked what happened, as I often don’t see things from my sequestered corner of the floor, my boss told me that they had met with case managers from the center and deemed ineligible for the program. That was all I had been told, but they’d left and not been invited back. I wondered, guiltily, if I’d set the man I’d met in the park up for something similar and what exactly the criterion was for joining the program.

Another woman came up later to the table outside the park with a story, telling how she used to volunteer at the center, how she got clean, how she was working and how as soon as she got clean she couldn’t get any more help. Her voice sounded wanting but her smile was broad as she asked for some needles and we gave them to her after giving her a card. She kept smiling as she walked away, poised in that wanting still.

As we waited there it got colder and I got more nervous as I realized the last reason why my stomach had been hurting me: I hadn’t eaten since that cold burrito in the morning. A truck stopped next to us and started unloading with food and my mind quickly grew to skepticism as I asked Jamal who they were.

“Nice guys” He responded and so it seemed.

The men were Indian-looking for the most part, ladling out what looked and smelled like curried dal with a fresh-greens salad with endive and cherry tomatoes and crumbled blue cheese, from a large plastic rectangle.

“They’re smart.” I told Jamal. “Dal is vegetarian, but it has protein in it. The salad has fresh greens and cheese and tomatoes. There’s calcium and vitamins in there.”

And as I stared at the men in line, the hot tea they ladled out to the hunchers who waited in front of the table, I thought that it looked very good indeed.

“Could I?” I asked Jamal, my body facing the food.

“Sure,” He replied, non-chalantly. “We all do it sometimes.”

I got in line behind the others and I got to the front, I asked what was in it as they only called it “rice”. It was dal, like I suspected, with broccoli and celery and onion and cauliflower swimming in it, stewed along with the rice. They piled my plate high up, even though they could probably see The New Yorker peeking out of my inside-coat-pocket, first with the stew and then with the salad. As I headed past the table a bald, white man stopped me and proffered me a large, frosted piece of Banana Bread.

“Here, have some Banana bread.” He told me.

I looked at him sideways and he clicked. He was a Hare Krishna priest who had been interviewed by someone from my documentary class in Sophomore year. He had come off very well, as a former hippie who had gotten involved and stayed since it meant to him a life of virtue and tolerance and work. When he spoke, he sounded happy in a way some religious people often do not.

I recalled seeing books on the food table next to the pots called “Chant and Be Happy” and “Krishna!”, but when I mentioned that I’d seen him before to the priest, he told me he talks to a lot of people and began ministering banana bread to the next person on line.

Regardless, they told me to come back at 11:15 on Monday, Wednesday or Friday if I wanted another meal.

I ate it in the park with Jamal, who came with to hang out, but didn’t partake. It was delicious and spicy and filling. The banana bread was sweet and had dates or apricots hidden within it, which one I couldn’t tell.

“I don’t like dates.” chimed Jamal.

In the end I couldn’t finish it and again asked Jamal whether it was “ok” to throw it out. He reassured me and I tossed it as I headed back out of the park, towards our table.

***

Before I left to go back to the center, I ran across the street, next to the Odessa Diner, to buzz up to see Rob and Zach, who were doing some of sort of Photoshop/YouTube shenanigans on their collective computers. When I told them I ate the food, even Zach who had been mooching and eating at the “iron stomach” 5-combinations Chinese Buffet gave me a disgusted smile as he told me: “Yeah, you shouldn’t eat that.”

Rob in his half-deadpan voice also told me that Zach was going to have a Directors’ Series next week at NYU, the industry screening series in the film program wherenoted alumni and other come to screen their feature films and talk about them.

I balked, but they showed me the email. I shook my head.

It looks like Bummer Summer was going to have its NYU premiere.

“I can’t believe you’re having a Directors’ Series.” I told Zach.

And he shrugged as he showed Rob the latest changes he’d done to his poster.

***

When I got back to the center, I talked to a few people. I was worried still about Eva’s insurance situation. She was just starting school after a long and complicated battle with the CUNY system over registration and I knew it would help for her to have one less thing to try to worry about. I figured with all the users coming through the center, someone on staff would have to know about health insurance and they were helpful a bit. Eva was worried she’d have to pay for all her sessions and medicine, a hefty sum, in the interim time before she found insurance. But we found out as a student she qualified for HealthPlus, a free New York City plan and that her sessions would most likely be covered.

When I got back home, she put a heart on my bed full of Reeses’ cups and two Gatorades, one red and one blue.

“I might run out of insurance,” She told me. “But at least I know who to go to for heart-care.”

And we kissed.

I felt sick the rest of the night as I thought about the food I’d eaten, my sinuses were bothering me and tingling and my nose was stuffed it up. It was hard to tell what was physical and what was all in my head.

But as Eva I lay down and watched Whit Stilman’s “Barcelona”, I felt weak and tired and asked if I could take a nap.

She let me and didn’t hold it against me when I slept past the 30 minutes I told her and she kissed me again and again before she left to go home to prepare for her first day of school.

The thoughts still gave me nightmares as I dreamed that I had become a cannibal and was merry about it, a refined cannibal, until I looked down and saw myself excreting whole body parts.

I don’t know if what I did that day was ethical or whether it’s overblown or whether even talking about it like this is worse even than what I did.

But here, among other things, I write about what I eat and where to find it.

So I’ll do that again.

After waking up in the middle of the night, a few times, checking my email and taking some generic-brand Sudafed, I woke up again, in the morning, opened my laptop and applied for jobs.

***

HARE-KRISHNA FOOD-TABLE-

Dal (curried lentils) with vegetables and salad and banana bread- Free

West side of Tompkins Square Park (Avenue A between 7th St and St. Marks Pl.)

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 11:15am.

L to 1st Avenue. 6 to Astor Pl.

Because All The Cool Kids Are Doing It…

Yeah, I know.

I saw Sam Song’s list though (which Blake pointed out to me) and what can I say: I got list envy.

Also I finally clinched seeing Avatar last night, which was (other than The White Ribbon) the last “awards season” movie I needed to see this year.

Which doesn’t mean I saw all of the movies I needed to see this year, far from it. I’m merely trying to play catch-up with end-of-the-year buzzes; a failing, I suppose.

So here, in no particular order are some of the movies other people might be considering which I did not see this year:

Tulpan, Still Walking, The White Ribbon, The Sun, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, Bright Star, An Education, Treeless Mountain, La Danse, The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, The Informant!, The Headless Woman, Police, Adjective, Nine

It should be noted that I saw Afterschool, but now that I’m acquainted with the dude it feels weird to talk about it.

It should also be noted that I very much enjoyed my friend and peer Zach Weintraub’s film Bummer Summer, but that it was not commercially released, thus making it ineligible for this list, which brings me to:

WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN MY NUMBER 1 MOVIE IF IT HAD ACTUALLY BEEN RELEASED:

(Sorta)1. LIFE DURING WARTIME

Todd Solondz’s opus shows not only the filmmaker’s most concerted effort since Welcome to the Dollhouse, but an intense appreciation of the universe and people he has created. Like the show The Wire, from which Mr. Solondz draws one of his stars, Michael K. Williams, Life During Wartime serves as both a self-contained film with its own pleasures (and plentiful sorrows), but also as the continuation of a world he has established, a sense of anti-abandonment. Which really, is what Solondz’s cinema is all about. Throughout his about 20-year career (give or take), he has presented us with character who are pathetic, risible, disgusting or repugnant, and he has consistently embraced them. His filmmaking is a celebration of the outcast risen to signature level, a show that even as the world rejects these people, like the father in Happiness or Dawn in Dollhouse or Scooby in Storytelling, we stay with them, on their level, living through their travails. In Life During Wartime, Solondz provides no easy solutions and little redemption, only the promise of living in a flawed world with flawed people and seeing the beauty in their struggle. He is a humanist filmmaker in the truest sense, like few others since Tod Browning.

***

Alright, so now that that is out of the way, here’s the real thing:

A FEITELIAN TOP 10 of 2009 or “WHY THE FUCK ARE THE OSCARS EXPANDING THIS YEAR WERE THERE EVEN 10 GOOD MOVIES PERIOD?”

10. AVATAR

This movie was the nail-biter (read: procrastination excuse) for when I was going to write this list this year. My idea of the film began at a groaning “well, I have to see it” to a somewhat-less-groaning “well, when is it even coming out” to me apparently stealing my friend Chadd’s tickets, while holding him to a promise that he would give them to me even after the conflict he had was gone. What did I get for my dastardly act, my IMAX goggles and my 16 dollars owed to Chadd (currently unpaid)? Something that was surprisingly fun and silly, which I hadn’t expected. For those imposing a “white-guilt” or “Dances With Smurfs” narrative on to this movie, let me suggest to you something: you are taking James Cameron to seriously. You counter, “What are you talking about? The guy spent 250 MILLION dollars!” I reply, “Yeah, but yakno, that’s his thing.” Unlike some of the stupid films of last year for which I wondered why indie movies weren’t getting the cash, Avatar delivers a director’s loopy dream, as fully realized as possible. Is it plot-holey and overstuffed? Yes. Is the dialogue often laughable? Yes. Is it possibly racist? Quite possibly. But these things are only apparent if you have so thoroughly squelched the child inside of you that you cannot enjoy the spectacle of the world that James Cameron has created, hopefully if you saw it right, in IMAX 3D. Was it an insane venture? Definitely. But no more insane really than Cameron’s previous production process of submerging his crew for 12 hours a day in making The Abyss. And in a way it heartens me to see an auteur gain such creative control, to really go out and make his visions, no matter how crazy they are. Even though Avatar is ungodly expensive, it serves in someway as a beacon of hope for aspiring filmmakers everywhere, that a dream sometimes, even if it is crazy, can come true. It can happen to you. But much more likely if you are James Cameron.

9. PRECIOUS

For those of you who have not seen the movie, that picture up above is Mariah Carey (yes, formerly of Glitter) and no, she does not look like that in the movie. In the movie she looks so pale and weird that Lee Daniels actually cast her as a Jewish character (take that, Philip Roth), Ms. Weiss, whom the eponymous main character often alludes to, in their social-work sessions as “Ms. White”. I am sure I will get some flack from people for putting this movie on this list, but what can I say, except that I really thought it was a very good movie. Just like Avatar, it was silly and often insane and over-the-top, but like Avatar, that’s what you sign up for when you go to see the film and unlike Avatar, the messages and purpose of this zaniness is clear: to offset a difficult story. As many have heard by now, yes, Precious is the story of a morbidly obese, mostly illiterate, HIV-positive teenager, who, subject to physical, sexual and emotional abuse, completes the film with two children sired by her father, one of whom has Down syndrome. However, to look at the film in this way is like reading statistics and making assumptions: it forgoes the human story. What Precious is really about is Precious, the main character, a woman coming of age with more struggles than most, but with grace and intelligence and most of all, a good and enduring sense of humor. Her circumstances are worse than most, for certain, but in many ways it is a story about growing up and finding one’s self, a journey that itself can be perilous, even taken without those factors. The interviews with the director, Lee Daniels, are abhorrent and he comes off as a self-aggrandizing, self-important asshole, a fact which sadly, as my Pops points him out puts him “comfortably in the world of filmmakers”. Regardless, Daniels the director never looks down at Precious or her journey, he allows her to shape her own story, to make her own world, as she find people to love and have love returned, herself included. Great ancillary performances by Lenny Kravitz (whodathunkit) as a male nurse and Precious’s classmates (a vibrant and talented young group of actors) seal the deal. If it’s racist, I feel I’m not the one to judge. But take for instance this conversation I had with my cousin Lenny, the family rabbi:

I had come for Shabbat dinner, in response to an invitation I had received from another cousin of mine, Lenny’s daughter, and I was excited to use the opportunity to ask a rabbi what he thought of A Serious Man (spoiler alert?) He told me that he enjoyed it as we discussed the messages we took from it and found several agreements we could make, which made me feel less ignorant in my sophomoric comprehension of Judaism. When I told him that the Jewish film critic Richard Corliss had found the movie to be “anti-semitic”, he told me that “A Serious Man shows a full portrait of the Jewish community, with some of its unsavory aspects. Some Jews are insecure and when they see a portrayal of the community like that, they jump on it as anti-semtic.” While the two movies are not analogous (and nor would I suggest that the Black and Jewish experiences are), the comparison might stand that the subject of the movie might be arousing more difficult than the substance, which I feel is at least, meritorious.

8. BIG FAN

What a remarkable debut. Coming off the tremendous funny/sad/insightful script that Robert Siegel wrote for that hack Aronofsky with The Wrestler, Siegel did the true film student thing to do with another script he had sitting on the shelf: he sat around Aronofsky’s set and convinced all of the assistants to come work as full-fledged crewman on this small script he was working on for little to no money. Thus with a half-baked crew and a rented RED camera was the best comedy of the year and this year’s true heir to Taxi Driver (beating out the universally odious Observe and Report) made. Siegel, with little to no knowledge of directing and a pedigree that included editing The Onion and one script, put a lot of trust in his DP, his editor and most of all his actors, who seemed to take the deep and funny script and run with it, as far as they damned pleased. Shouts go out to Kevin Corrigan, who seems to be coming up in the model of a John Tutturro or Steve Buscemi given his presence in indie movies and the oft-underused Michael Rappaport, another great TV actor who rarely gets his due as the film’s ultimate villain, Philadelphia Phil. But really, a lot of the credit here goes to Patton Oswalt, who had alrady proved that he could do a lot with his voice in Ratatouille and here proves that not only can he act, but that he can act! His loser portrayal of a glorified meter-maid who sits in a booth all day and lives with his mother rather than abandon the sports-radio life he loves is as nuanced as it is stubborn and real, a character whose un-desperate madness recalls the passions of real characters like the players from last year’s The King of Kong. The finale does a great job of coalescing your hopes and fears into a victory unimagined, but delightfully true to the world of the film. It is Siegel’s sort of moviemaking that not only draws nostaglia from me for the early films of Scorsese and Forman, but makes me optimistic about what a lot of heart, a little bit of money and not a lot of experience can still accomplish.

7. THE BEACHES OF AGNES

Man, this film was the biggest guilt trip I have ever seen. I hadn’t even watched a goddam Agnes Varda film before this one. Shit, I hadn’t even watched a film by Jacques Demy, her late husband. And even though the films of both are excerpted, often to stunningly beautiful effect in The Beaches of Agnes, one can’t help but feel a profound sense of guilt and loss, that one hasn’t seen the films of what are obviously two masters. Because even looked at without those films, The Beaches of Agnes is clearly a masterpiece, in the sense of its craft, but also, more profoundly, in the sense that is the cap, the finishing touches on the career of a filmmaker. Resembling nothing less than a much more refined and elegant though just as personal Tarnation, Varda’s film takes us seamlessly through her life, her films, her marriages, lovers and friends and, inexplicably, wonderfully, to the beaches she has been near and far away from in her life. She discusses Jim Morrison, her husband’s death from AIDS, the French New Wave from a first-person point of view and her friendship with the filmmaker Chris Marker, here represented by a giant blue animated cat. Somehow nothing is incongrous, this is not the cinema of Errol Morris, a detective story where one roots around for meaning in search of discovery or revelation. Instead, The Beaches of Agnes is the cinematic equivalent of a warm embrace, a taking-into-the-fold of the viewer by a woman who loves cinema and thus you, the audience, as well. It is a beautiful film, the sum of a career, indescribable in its completeness and clarity. I can only hope one day that I might be able to make something so clear-sighted about myself, looking back on my life.

6. 35 SHOTS OF RUM

I admit being mostly unaware of Clare Denis. When I went to go see Medicine for Melancholy, an honorable mention this year, I heard from Barry Jenkins, that film’s director, that he was inspired by Denis’s Friday Night in making his own film, one that if you asks me bears more of a resemblance to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise than anything else. Still, I hadn’t seen Friday Night, nor had I seen any of Denis’s movies. When I finally did see 35 Shots of Rum upon its release, I was absolutely charmed by the feel of it. Denis certainly had a feel for both the easy and the complicated relationships that we enjoy, the dynamic of the privileged and the underprivileged, the French class dynamic and the particular perspective of one man. Just as Lionel (Alex Descas) sees his life as a train conductor as one that allows him access to his daughter, his neighborhood and his “family”, his fellow train conductor feels trapped and kills himself on the rails. What separated these men is, if not the main subject, the point of the film; the way our societal bonds complete us and coterize our wounds. If the end left me dissatisfied, it is a fitting homage to Ozu’s Late Spring and admirable it’s unconventionality. After all, 35 Rhums ain’t an American film and thus is excused from giving all its characters a “happy ending”. I think Ms. Denis, in my small exposure to her, prefers “complex” to “happy”, as more true to life.

5. A SERIOUS MAN-

I forget who I was talking to the other day, but somehow the conversation came over to Mel Brooks (who Amos Poe recently accused of bad taste, I think) and History of the World, Part I, which famously ended with “JEWS! IN! SPAAAAAACE!”. Looking back, I’m amazed to think what a golden age for Jewish Cinema it must have been with Brooks operating around the same time as Allen and Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex… coming out within a fear years of History and even closer to Blazing Saddles. Look at what we’ve got now? Some old Holocaust drudgery, some tired Spielberg crap and Daniel Craig playing some badass Romanian Jew who in reality, unlike Craig, was wider than he was tall. It’s a shame, but at least thank G-d we’ve got the Coens, who have decided to take a break looking at Midwesterners and George Clooney-types to instead focus on the home team. As I mentioned in my blurb on Precious, they may be fairly critical of the home team, but at the same time they pay it the greatest respect: honesty. The Coen’s take on the Book of Job (much like their take on The Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou) doesn’t seem to take itself so seriously, but actually manages to capture the tone of what it was inspired by. In Job, G-d takes everything away from a virtuous successful man bit by bit, until he cries out to G-d, asking him why he’d inflict such terrible things upon him, to which He replies by pointing to the universe and its greatness. Here that pointing comes in the form of a biblical-style Tornado and a modern phone-call in a character-split between virtuous father and mischievous pot-smoking son. The film is littered with good performances by relatively unknown actors (here’s hoping Michael Stuhlbarg gets at least a nomination for his part in the lead) and the “wisdom” of Rabbis as men try to interpret the will of G-d. What we are left with though, from both the film and its folkloric prologue, is the unknowableness of G-d. Just like in the Book of Job, the Coens point to the vastness of G-d’s power and creation in explaining that G-d and his works are a question posed to us all (here, Jews) and that it is up to us to interpret them as we will. There are no answers in G-d, only in ourselves and the world around us, the Book of Job seems to say. It’s a very Jewish-intellectually idea, a very Jewish movie and one of the Coens’ finest.

4. TWO LOVERS

This movie feels like in came out in 2008, when it was made, but really it was just a sneak into the first couple months of 2009, placed their ignominiously so as to be ignored, an example of Indiewood’s estimation of director James Gray after his thriller We Own The Night failed to make inroads at the box office. And even though it felt like a 2008 release and came out so many months ago, its pleasures and its resonance are such that they remind me all the way to so high on this list. Leonard (an Oscar-worthy Joaquin Phoenix) is a late-blooming Jewish kid out of Brighton Beach, but this isn’t the place of Aronofsky’s hyperboles, puffed up with music and drugs, but a dark and colorful prison replete with the expectations of family, society and culture. Like a mental patient just off his meds, Leonard is reeling at his lifestyle and questioning the strange and strangling existence of “love” and “tranquility” that he’s experienced up to this point living in his parents’ apartment. He is like a man lobotomized or an amnesiac, trying to figure out what he’s missing. Enter the namely Two Lovers. Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) is the perfect neighbor next-door. Beautiful, elegant and rooted, she represents one form of manhood, the manhood of responsibility, sacrifice and domesticity that comes with running a business and raising a family. Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), on the other hand is a bottle-blond hot-headed flower, a Wall-Street mistress tucked away in Brooklyn for safe keeping. To Leonard, she represents something exotic and new, a life beyond the one he knows, a voice and a sense of freedom. As Gray guides us through Leonard’s dalliances and flirtations, it’s easy to see that what he’s talking about in his self-penned script is not just the allure of women, but the allures of adulthood and reconciling one’s dreams with one’s reality. In the world of Brighton Beach though, dreaming is ephemeral and the dreams themselves immaterial, existing only long enough to be a platform for Leonard’s tragedy, all the more devastating for its presentation to us as something “happy”.

3. UP!

The only movie I cried at this year, is perhaps Pixar’s finest, and the first animated movie I’ve seen in a while with a serious chance at Best Picture. I remember walking along a hilly road one day in Vermont, during my tenure as an assistant counselor and dormhead at the Putney School Summer Programs. As we scouted locations for our students’ films, the head teacher Jon and I discussed our favorite Pixar movies. As I mentioned the favorite at that time, WALL-E, as well as the other popular ones, Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles, Jon asserted that there was one film that was beyond all the others for him and that was Monsters, Inc. A fine movie, I never thought it a contender until Jon explained the basic humanity of it to me, the bond between a child and a father figure and the restorative power of joy in the world. Looking back on that film, I remember it better now and I am all the more certain that Up!, by Monsters, Inc‘s Pete Docter, is an even better film. In a story that never gets boring, Docter manages to tackle the hopes and inequities of middle age, remembrance, longing and loss in a way that’s surprisingly head-on. I remember watching films like The Incredibles and Finding Nemo and being impressed that films marketed as children’s movies were even skirting serious adult issues, like adultery and the loss of a child. Here however, Docter makes clear that he believes in us. He believes in the children in adults and the potential for maturity in children. He believes that we have something to teach each other and something to learn. We see that our heroes are not also who we want them to be and just as we may not be able to hold on to childish admiration, we have to let go of our baggage at some point and live in the moment, a point in spectacular visual fashion in the film. At one point, maybe sometime after WALL-E, I hated Pixar because I wanted to hate them, frustrated that they managed to be so commercial and yet so good. But now with Up!, I realize that I’m throwing my emotions the wrong way and should be thankful for something that educates and delights us and causes us to think, just like the animated TV of my youth did to me.

2. THE HURT LOCKER

When I first saw Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it was not during its buried summer release, but during a FilmComment Selects screening that Chadd convinced me to go to, primarily based on the fact that it would have free booze. I knew nothing about the movie, except that the woman who had made it was apparently married to James Cameron at some point and made a movie that Rob really liked about surfer-crooks. What I got, I was floored away by. Not only was the movie stunningly good, a procedural look at the day-to-day mechanics of war which owed much to films like Escape from Alcatraz, but the director was stunningly hot–at 57. And if that shit was Botoxed, it did not look it. She must have found the fountain of youth. All comments about the director aside (a likely candidate for Best Director this year), the film was a day-by-day depiction of the war in Iraq, the likes of which (and apparently the accuracy of which) we have only seen in the misjudged, almost-forgotten HBO mini-series Generation Kill. As a touchstone, it helps that both that show and this movie were based off the testimony of journalists embedded within the armed forces as they described their circumstances. And while The Hurt Locker may lack Generation Kill‘s sublime sense of indifference to society, like the scene in that show where the soldiers “borrow” their journalists picture of his girlfriend to masturbate to–and decline to give it back, The Hurt Locker makes up for its lack of grand scheme, by its moment-to-moment precision of the sights, sounds and thrilling uncertainties of war. Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner, in yet another Oscar-worthy performance) is our hero, the savior of many lives, but he also dangerously unbalanced, an adrenaline addict who lives off the thrill of defusing complex IEDs with their Radio Shack parts; every day he stays alive is another fix. His fellow soldier Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), doesn’t understand his insanity, but is only barely holding off the thrilling madness that grips James, with his only exercise of joy depicted as an expression of violence. However, the most damning and most perfect scene in The Hurt Locker, for all its heat, claustrophobia and evocation of Iraq, happens at the end of the film, where James, having returned home to the normal choices of a married father, looks at different cereals in a big box store, and the an who makes choices to stay alive is left impotent and unable. In the next scene, he’s back in Iraq and we’re back there with him. It’s a tragedy from a distance, but to her credit, Bigelow never gives you that distance by which to judge James. You’re always caught up in the same thrill he’s riding. The best Iraq War film ever made and close to the best movie of this year. That is, except for…

1. ANVIL!: THE STORY OF ANVIL

It says something about these times that my favorite movie of the year, I saw not in theaters, but at home, uncut on VH1. To be fair I had wanted to see Anvil! this past summer when it was out there, but it was one of those movies that I could never get anyone to go see with me, the sort of film that’s good, but as not as sexy as a blockbuster or a new release in the elusive game of trying to get people to go see movies with you. Ultimately there was a collective shrug, as summer turned to fall, my life was wrapped up in a play, new movies came out and Anvil! was mostly forgotten. But when I finally did see it, browsing through the channels with Eva one night, even what I had heard about it turned out to be far more paltry than the glorious truth. I knew the film had made a convert out of that high-society curmudgeon Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, who Armond White once described to me aptly as “the sort of film critic you love if you hate movies”. Even he had been floored by the film despite his lack of knowledge of, as he put it, “the Jewish-Canadian Death Metal scene”. And no knowledge is required. We are given two middle-aged Canadian Jewish guys, Robb Reiner and Steve Kudlow, who knew their lives that they wanted to rock and committed to it. This meant playing in shitty bars and working with terrible, undermining managers. This meant dropping out of high school and having only a few die-hard fans. This meant, for Robb at least, taking a job making middle-school meals en masse, carrying trays, all to service their need to rock. Robb and Steve, known as Lips, through it all have become brothers, best friends, occasional enemies and partners in keeping each other from suicide. They may have never been Metallica or even Megadeth or Slayer, but they never compromised their ideals, never sold out, so in the end it is impossble to call them failures. In Anvil!, lovingly made by the band’s former roadie, Sacha Gervasi, we get the best story of the year, the best characters, the most complete world, fiction or otherwise. We are given two men and see them create themselves and live with it. They don’t give up and most of all, they rock. Amen, my Jewish brothers. And Rock On.

HONORABLE MENTIONS (In brief):

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY- A black mumblecore film might be a strange duck, but this highly personal journey film by Barry Jenkins was one of the most honest and well-felt movies of the year. Here’s to a long career, Mr. Jenkins.

ADVENTURELAND- Greg Motolla’s follow up to his superb Superbad casts him out from Apatow’s grand shadow and shows his pessimism and his remembrance of the time immediately after college, where life is about picking diamonds from the shit you’ve only just realized the world has taken on you.

LORNA’S SILENCE- A metaphysical and intense drama about European affairs, identity and the extent to which one can quell one’s own conscience. A daring lead performance, if an uncertain end.

TONY MANERO- Bizarre and brilliant, barely released/mostly unseen. The best film I saw at NYFF last year and a deeply critical political statement. Intensely worth the watch.

TYSON- The most frightening movie of 2009. In this man, we, society, has created a monster. James Toback shows us how the man who wished to “punch through” his opponents’ skulls came into being, through the violence and indifference of our culture.

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR THAT I SAW-

TIE!

INVICTUS/ANTICHRIST- When “auteur” directors pull ploys for some sort of “greater meaning”, they tend to fall flat on their face (see: Kundun). Clint Eastwood and Lars Von Trier both made some grab for self-importance and elitism with their films that ended up feeling either hokey or disgusting, but both ultimately pointless. They should go back to taking themselves less seriously and reflect upon the pieces that they did in past years (Gran Torino, Manderlay) that better showcase their talents, as opposed to these trumped-up shitfests that amount in their indifference and idiocy to a waste of a collective 21.50 and several hours of my life that I wish returned.

OVERRATED (briefly)-

FANTASTIC MR. FOX- An Anderson-ian mess, lacking in the real sentiment Anderson used to reach for so easily in his first three films. In turning into a megalomaniacal animator, Anderson has gained little except some hipster-y animation moves (“Real fur, ooh!”) and his same old style. One good brit-kid song, doesn’t erase all the overplayed rock he uses in the film.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS- I liked QT better when he was having chicks kill people with swords as opposed to his current Jew-o-philia. Eli Roth sucked balls in the movie, as did most people who weren’t named “Hans Landa”. A fun and dissonant action movie that stumbles upon its own length as well as its two opposingly-toned stories.

HUNGER- Irritatingly serious and fake “intimate”, the directorial debut of Steve McQueen (no relation) is often monotonous when it isn’t occasionally gripping. An art-house-style disappointment.

UP IN THE AIR- God, should this be my worst movie of the year? This film was awful! The National Board of Review voted this somehow the “Best Movie of the Year”. I reiterate my buddy Dave Broad’s sentiment: “It’s a series of music videos strung together by bad dialogue.” Bad direction too, I would add, with a tack to obtain relevance that borders on seriously offensive.

PONYO: The worst Miyazaki movie. Half-assed toward the end, though parts of it are beautiful. After an only partially satisfying Howl’s Moving Castle, here’s hoping that Hayao can get his groove back somehow.

OTHER MOVIES I LIKED BUT WHICH WEREN’T INCLUDED FOR SOME REASON

Beeswax, Summer Hours, The Box, Bad Lieutenant: POCNO, Where the Wild Things Are, World’s Greatest Dad, Coraline

As Ro-In-Control-Of-His-Beardo would say:

Clom out.

Imaginary Conversations, Movie Consolations

I used to hate people like me.

I’d had a turmoil in my life the past week or so, as well as a lot of running around the city, both on account of my now defunct job. One of the few pleasures I could derive from this, other than an ample opportunity to catch up on “60 Minutes” or “This American Life” was the “voice control” feature of my iPhone. Thrusting my iPhone into my compartmental winter coat, I’d let the cool-style iPhone Remote headphones peak out from the unzippered edge and instead of breaking it out to call someone, I’d order it “call Zach Weintraub” or call “Pops Feitel”. I’d marvel as it would repeat their names back to be, mispronounced in a helpful, computerized accent. “Calling Zatch Wine-trob” or “Calling Pops Fetal” it would reply back to me, as if that’s what I said and then, well, it would do it.

When I was in college, a time not so long ago, but seeming longer every day I try to figure out what to do with my life, I hated people who talked with their “Bluetooth Headsets” and walked with their earphones in, mumbling down the block. It seemed like a giant fuck-you to the world around them and a sign of self-purported self-importance that the people they were near were less important, less real than the people they were connected with, unseen.

But when you get used to being ordered around by other people, to the uncertainty, tentative disappointment and easily-broken hope of your own plans, it helps to have a voice that will respond to you, wherever you go. It helps to have something order around that will do it; to be empowered when it is your place to be powerless.

And anyway, it proves a good excuse for the interior-exterior mumbling of my own internal conversation, which periodically leaks out when I become embroiled in memory, reliving situations I’m angry or tense or happy about and talking in those situations as if I was there. It sounds nuts, but it’s natural to me, a way of working out what’s happened in my life, reliving situations and, sometimes, dishing out things I wish I would have said, but just probably-it-was-good that I didn’t say them at the time.

Friends of mine had been having interviews, I included, as my job wrapped up. I was stuck trying to figure out whether the menial labor that someone like “Zatch” was doing was the path I should be trying to follow with “writing on the side” or whether I should keep vying for the seemingly extremely limited amount of entry-level production jobs that I could find. I had no idea, I felt a voice in the back of my head say “both”. But I also felt like, in leaving my last job, I had invariably burned bridges, like a “last relationship” or a “last not-girlfriend” and finally, or again, I found myself in a place direction-less, mentor-less, waiting and applying as my self-worth ticked away.

So what did I do in this state of existential waiting?

Well, duh.

I saw movies.

***

Last night, I went out to celebrate with my friends Chadd and Jake. Chadd had just gotten a pretty damn significant honor: his music video had just been named No. 4 “Music Video of 2009″ by SPIN Magazine, beating out such established directors as Jonathan Glazer, Jody Hill and Eric Wareheim (of the remarkable duo “Tim and Eric”). Not only was this an amazing achievement for a 22 year-old director just out of college, but the video was also made with a barely-known artist for literally, 0.1% of the budget of most of the other videos. So I called him up to congratulate him, only for him to tell me that he hadn’t even found out from the magazine (as a 22 year-old, he has no publicist), but from a friend of a friend sending a congratulatory Facebook message.

“Let’s drink to that.” I told him. “But first, Crazy Heart at 7:45?”

Well, I told you I was a film student.

Crazy Heart had been a movie I was looking expectantly to, since it featured one of my favorite actors, Jeff Bridges. The man seems unable to do wrong (at least in the films I’ve seen) whether he’s playing the ubiquitous “Dude”, playing a self-serious burnout writer in The Door in the Floor (severely underrated) or whether he’s just a youngish hapless hacker in Disney’s TRON. I love him. And in this film he delivers the goods. As “Bad Blake”, a Kris Kristofferson pastiche, Bridges sells his part like he was hocking churros on the side of the road: with a smile and a greasy, homey feel. His character is an alcoholic who has abandoned his child and pukes in the middle of sets, but damn if he isn’t likable. As Bridges plays him, “Bad Blake” seems to be channeling something unspoken about country music, something I don’t even enjoy: the purity of an uncomplicated lifestyle, acceptance of your vices and your mortality and embrace of the ever-shifting road. In short, he has all the self-awareness that George Clooney’s character didn’t have in Up in the Air. While lesser actors like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Colin Farrell (not believably “country”) disappoint in minor roles, Bridges never does and while the director can sometime hew to poor choices with his average-to-good screenplay (It is Scott Cooper, the director’s debut), Robert Duvall’s warm presence tied up with the superb songs of T-Bone Burnett (a national treasure at this point), makes for an overall good viewing experience.

As Chadd pointed out last night, Crazy Heart did have the easiest rehab scene of all time (Jeff Bridges stares at some trees and in the next scene he’s at Maggie Gyllenhaal’s door saying “I’m sober”), watching Jeff Bridges in action was a pleasure and I hope he gets the Oscar this year (him or Michael Stuhlbarg for A Serious Man), though somehow, just like how success eludes Bad Blake, I feel recognition might elude him again.

***

Not to keep on going on this story, but Chadd and Jake and I did drink a few after the movie, admiring dirty bars (like the one we were in), complaining about old hook-ups and discussing the confluence between the two. While that lasted for a bit, we were still film students and the conversation eventually turned to the actor Michael Shannon and the film Chadd and I had both seen separately, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

Ostensibly a bit of play-within-a-play adaptation of a classical work (see: Kiss Me, Kate), the Orestes, the movie was actually the attempt of director Werner Herzog to pay homage/mockery towards the films of David Lynch, the film’s executive director. Within the film, which concerns a wacked-out bug-eyed son (Shannon) as he takes some hostages and kills his mom with a Greek sword as figures from his life try to piece together what happened,  their are various Lynchian elements, from the presence of Grace Zabriskie, who acts (marvelously) in a particular Lynch-ian style within the film, to the idea of dissecting performers in their method (see: Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr.), My Son, My Son is filled with allusions, but also Herzog’s particular style of madness and absurdity. While this sounds kinda wonderful here, My Son, My Son is really only fitfully engaging as Herzog seems to be having too much fun making the movie to really give us anything that too strongly resembles an actual narrative or a sensible plot. What it did offer was some funny performances (a weirdo Werner Herzog-surrogate in Udo Keir’s theater director is well remembered) as well as some other gonzo elements.

In the theater, before the screening, I saw the director (who gave a brief introduction to the film) talking with Willem Dafoe, who plays a not-so-effectual detective in the movie. As they stood in the lobby of the IFC conversing, Antichrist, which Dafoe also stars in, appeared on one of the screens.

“Vat’s that?” Werner demanded jovially of his star. “Vat are you doing ova thair?”

Dafoe gave a crisp laugh. “Acting.” he replied.

I wondered if the implication was that he wasn’t sure how much of that he’d actually done for Herzog.

***

But while Chadd and I disagreed on what we thought of My Son, My Son (he thought that it wasn’t Lynchian in any way and, also, brilliant), we both pretty much agreed on what we thought about Armored.

Namely, that it was fucking sweet.

A few days previous, Chadd and I had grabbed large cans of beer (Two 24-ounce Modelos for Chadd and a 33-ounce can of Sapporo for me) and snuck them into the Loews 42nd St E-Walk 16, in a mostly empty theater to see what turned out to be a damn good B-movie (that it is a B-movie is something that me and Rob-going-to-PA-too-much-to-cultivate his-Beardo Malone and I can agree on). “Zatch” Weintraub would later tell me that it had been receiving bad reviews over on the secret stock floor at Topshop, where he worked, but I didn’t see much proof or reason for badness. A genuine “heist-gone-wrong” movie, Armored actually was about Ty (up-and-comer Columbus Short)  a saddled war-vet older brother who, recently returned from Iraq, is promoted to a guard of an armored truck line, serving with men who call themselves “his brothers”. As Ty is pressed by the foreclosure of his home and his brother’s errant behavior, he reluctantly agrees to the heist, but begins to back out as he sees the eroding souls behind his “brothers” eyes. Obviously what we are talking about here is not the heist, but the War in Iraq, fought for dubious reasons and with atrocities committed in an uncertain warzone. His crew’s decision to kill more and more innocents as the heist goes more and more wrong, echoes that of an out-of-control military operation and what began as serving your brothers, ends up being a question of whether you wish to step in to hell with them.

Or it’s just a fun heist movie with a lot of explosions.

Take your pick.

For this morality play/allegory, we receive an all-star team of actors including Matt Dillon, Lawrence Fishburne and even a recently unseen Skeet Ulrich as another guard with a shred of conscience. And while everythng wraps up perhaps a little too neatly (though it could be read as a deja vu/repeat), the film’s conscious style, its framing, its colors and really, its overall intelligence, suggest the work of other auteurs working in B-cinema, such as George Miller or even Nicholas Ray.

Make such conclusions or not. But when Chadd and I left the theater, our beer cans were empty and we both felt we’d gotten our money’s worth.

***

I’d elected not to see one movie with Chadd, that I decided to take my dad to since I felt like it might be his kind of flick.

The movie was Invictus and I was wrong, not because a Clint Eastwood movie is a bad choice to see with your dad, but because this particular movie sucked balls.

In the vein of such other wasteful, conspicuously self-important Clint Eastwood fare as last year’s Changeling, Invictus is a movie that is conventional, but not conventionally satisfying in the way of some Eastwood’s best films. In the film’s much better first half, we get to see the decisions of Nelson Mandela (played with slightly-concealed self doubt by Morgan Freeman) as he attempts to reform a nation. The messages are obviously similar to Obama-style rhetoric (though that could be as much of Obama’s take-off as Eastwood’s portrayal), but the problem is the delivery system. For you see, while it is fairly thrilling to see an exalted head-of-state attempt to reform his country while his former jailers stand dumbounded, there is no such thrill with watching a bunch of stupid, barely-sketched white people playing rugby. Matt Damon is in typical “Matt… Day-mon” fashon here playing a blond kid who looks stupidly at things and attempts to play Rugby, at first poorly, but then for mostly unexplained reasons much better. The film seems to suggest that national pride spurred on his team to great heights, but if that were true the Red Sox and Phillies, with thier fanatical fans, would win every game. It also seemed to suggest that rugby, more than the Truth-and-Reconciliation committee (here barely alluded to) was responsible for South Africa’s reformation, the idea is laughable, leaving Eastwood to resort to hokeyness to try to win the audience over. What we are left with is predictable schlock with little of Eastwood’s token fear of death or stylized humanity. Instead, the good guys win, the bad guys are humbled into good ones and everyone’s a winner, in a finale that might as well be the Special Olympics.

Hoo-ray.

***

Finally, a shout-out to my friends Jake and “Zatch” who both received festival acceptances this past week, Jake to the Festivus Film Festival, “the festival for the rest of us”, that begins with a director’s paintball ceremony and Zach who auspiciously got word that he was accepted with his feature, “Bummer Summer” into Cinequest. In my teacher Sharon Badal’s word: “That’s big.” Now, he’s off to make postcards and I’m off with a final question:

Me next?

Please?