Film festival

The radio this morning was all blah-blah-blah, some guy got to pick 24 movies to be shown somewhere, I had the impression Venice. Let’s say Venice. Which movies would you pick? I thought about it, and decided I’d have to pass.

This will really shock you, but it’s been years and years since I’ve had the aesthetic real estate to consider films as art.

Here is what I do instead of considering film as art:

  • wonder when I’ll finally get the radiator painted in the upstairs bathroom
  • clean litter boxes all over the fucking house
  • look for a USB stick with something vital on it
  • run upstairs and unplug the router and plug it in again
  • stick a kitten inside my shirt, eat real fast, and when it sticks its head out, go, “AAAAAAAA! Alien!” and flail around
  • in fact, that’s about the closest i come to thinking about film
  • my family’s pretty tired of that joke, too
  • dishes
  • sometimes I cook, mostly on weekends
  • yardwork
  • climb into my car thru the passenger door because some dork parked me in on the other side
  • put gas in one of our cars
  • wonder what I could do to get along better with my wife
  • wonder if I’m spending enough quality time with the girls
  • think about wasp nests
  • wonder whether I should turn the yard into a vegetable garden, or just plant new grass. I suppose it depends on what the Dow does over the winter.
  • look up at the sky
  • practice cello
  • have a dream about a punk band composed of reformed skinheads, the drummer of which sits behind half an oil drum (as shield against objects thrown at them), a guitarist of which wears a derby hat and says, “look, I’m a Britney” that then morphs into a dream about decapitated children wearing 19th-century suits and dresses, with horrific vermin (gigantic insects etc) swarming out of their clothes
  • wake up and feed all the cats

3 responses to “Film festival

  1. I remember my father, when he was in his mid to late forties, in a discussion about films, saying somethimg like, “When I go to the movies I want to be entertained; I want a happy ending, even if it’s not realistic. I want to feel good when I leave the theater. I have enough problems I can’t solve; I don’t want to see a movie about other people’s problems that can’t be solved.”
    I did not understand that when I was twenty-two; I do now.

  2. I’m agreeing with your father there, Jann.

    But the truth is that I don’t watch movies anyway. In fact, I barely watch television… I watch “House, M.D.” and that’s it. I’m sooo far away from regarding films as an art form. Working in an elementary school, I observed that many of our kids no longer know how to think, and I hypothesize that this is because they’ve grown up with TV/movies just handing them information on a platter and not really sparking their thought processes. In fact, one of the things fifth graders are worst at is making inferences… if something is not explicitly stated in the text, they can’t figure it out. This has led to many afternoons of me and my coworkers banging our heads against the wall and asking each other, “How do you teach a kid to think?! Isn’t that supposed to be kind of instinctive? That thing that separates us from the animals?”

    Argh. Yeah, movies and TV are kind of touchy subjects for me and I like to rant about it. I try to keep my kid as far away from them as possible and so far it seems to be working. He spends his days writing songs, reading books, building with legos and playing outside like 6 year olds used to do before they had pretty picture boxes to stare at for hours on end.

    But if you gotta watch a movie, it might as well be happy one! :)

  3. I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and during the European film festival here I took the week off work and would watch as many as six movies in a day. I’ve stopped going to movies since they closed down the little theaters. I was particularly fond of the one that served drinks before the film and while they changed the reels, and still everybody sat in complete silence, smoking and drinking and being so awesomely European about it. Now even people here act like they’re in their living rooms, talking on their cell phones and stinking up the air with their farts. So yeah, I don’t go to movies, and DVDs, although great, are too small and private, and feel more like willful distraction than active observance of art.