Tag Archives: Movies

Their Name is Jonas

For a guy who shovels all sorts of information into his brain, hoping some of the better stuff will stick, I can occasionally be very particular about what I don’t want crossing my eyes and ears and somehow lodging itself in my long-term memory. I don’t need to see certain horror films, say, or grainy beheadings at the hands of monsters. Sometimes it’s to spare my sanity, others my stomach. Sometimes I just don’t think a certain piece of information deserves a place in my head.

Enter the Jonas Brothers.

I’m surprised how well I’ve done avoiding these kids. Most of it is unintentional, thankfully -– I’ve aged out of their target demographic. They’re not on the TV shows I watch, in the books I read, and seldom on the websites I flip through.

What started as a convenient litmus marker –- I can define myself by what I don’t know about the Jonas Brothers –- became an unexpected (and petty) source of pride. My accidental evasion of their self-promotion gave way to a puff-chested renunciation of them and their hype, as their hype symbolizes the Hype of Something You’re Supposed To Listen To If You’re Young and Want to Fit In. A smaller moral victory has yet to be recorded on this earth.

The clearest way for me to remain at a cool remove from all this, to ensure my place outside their kingdom, was merely to remain ignorant of their first names, specifically the third one’s name. I was sorry to think I picked up the name “Joe” at one point, and “Nick” at another, though I was content not to be sure of either. Not knowing the remaining name presented me with a paradox that a nerdy control freak and pop culture enthusiast like me is generally unfamiliar with: I was gleeful not to know this bit of trivia.

I didn’t think it would be hurtful or embarrassing not to know. However big the Jonases are now, they’re not the Beatles, whose whole was comparable to its individual parts, whose first names also crossed so many boundaries and really were world-famous. Neither would it be awkward for me not to know: I once had an engaging philosophy professor who, when the title popped up in class, didn’t know what The Matrix was. And this is not me being cute, all “What is the Matrix?” philosophy professor ha-ha-ha –- no, the movie had simply not entered her world in the two years since its release. I’m not judging, I’m only saying that the situation, when this came up, was awkward.

Now, I have also been known to shy away from similar cinematic information when it comes to trailers for movies that I’m sure I’m going to see: I didn’t need my appetite whetted for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was going to see that movie, no matter what. It was fated from before my conception. Our paths would eventually and necessarily cross. All that was yet to be revealed in this material world was the lucky theater that would get my money.

This avoidance of trailers is partly to do with the fact that nowadays the entire movie is given away– I’m not ruining it by saying Frost/Nixon hinges on five seconds of material – you know which ones – and being so informed by the advertising deflated in me more than half of the tension the rest of the movie took the time to build. That’s a particular kind of blissful ignorance. It’s certainly neurotic, but I’ll argue there’s a nobility there, too — a sign of respect to the filmmakers and a bump of the wrists to the marketers who sacrifice so much of the product for their own sake.

The ignorance is useful, then, but it naturally runs its course: I avoid the movie until I see it. I remain in the dark long enough for the waiting light to seem at its brightest.

My Jonas Brothers project is the dark side of that coin, ignorance first for the sake of ignorance, blossoming into other signs of a hardening heart. I’m getting crotchety. It is on this tiny soapbox that I make my stand, apparently on one foot–

Or, it was.

The streak is over. Ended two days ago. Entertainment Weekly. Turned right to it, actually. Big spread. Like the laughing dog in Duck Hunt, there, in big bold letters, was the third name, once relegated to the ether like the tenor that wasn’t Pavarotti or Domingo. Now this given name is branded on my hippocampus and elsewhere in my brain, perhaps near Larry’s other brother Darryl and the Santa Maria. I can’t bear to share it with you and risk paying this misery forward.

I don’t know. Maybe my curiosity won out. Maybe I did really want to know. Maybe I just didn’t want to expend energy in ignoring it further. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does.

Hours Away from The Oscars

I find myself in a weird position this afternoon – and for once it’s not slouched so far down the couch I’m almost falling off. No, I’m sitting upright – for a change – but I’m still not quite right, and this has everything to do with the Oscars that’ll soon unfold like a red carpet stretching well into the night.

I am excited about the Academy Awards, as I always am: for trivia purposes, to see some familiar faces, to see those lucky few succeed in their pursuit of excellence.

This time around, though, it’s like watching the NBA Finals – I know who’s playing, I’ve read about the personalities involved, I’ve seen clips of their work, I’ve followed their success. But in the end, it’s mostly been without sitting down and actually watching the full performance from beginning to end.

I could list a dozen reasons why this negligence is the case. I won’t, but I’ll list half that:

1. Movies are expensive, we know. At the same time, TV is cheap (even free TV isn’t free), Netflix is a pretty good deal, and except for the visionary tentpole movies you must see in a theatre (The Dark Knight), one can generally go the home theatre route as less is lost seeing a taut family drama on a smaller screen (which gets bigger every year, incidentally).

2. I’ve been watching more TV than movies anyway because of how good, good TV is and because of my fractured schedule and atrophied attention span for which more than 60 consecutive minutes of anything overloads the system.

3. Going to see movies is increasingly irritating and time-consuming. To get a seat that’s at all decent, I have to arrive at least 30 minutes beforehand, just in time to watch (or try and fail to ignore) 30 minutes of commercials. Then the trailers show up and by the time the movie starts, I’ve been there an hour and I’ve forgotten what I came to see and why I was excited for it in the first place.

4. The theater where I lived most of last year didn’t play the best of the best, just the more popular movies on more screens. It was the only theatre in town, but then Astoria didn’t have many bookstores, neither – just one I can think of, a retailer specializing in outdated encyclopedias and computer manuals from the early 1990s. It remains a fun neighborhood full of people smart is different ways than I, where residents find company and solace in each other at sidewalk cafes and smoky bars, not in books and movies and in his own head like I would.

5. I’m older now and more easily tired, surely more jaded and unfortunately not as easily impressed, it seems. I also have responsibilities to other people in addition to myself, and different responsibilities to myself at that. I was lucky enough for movies to be my life for three years, and books for another two, but now with less chance to see movies, I’ll only see a few of the very best ones. It hasn’t recently been the case that I’ve had the time, energy, enthusiasm and opportunity to see twenty or thirty movies, then know from my those experiences which ones would or should be nominated for awards, and seeing the process along from the very beginning. So it was six years ago, and perhaps so again shall it be. But not now.

6. “They don’t make movies like they used to.” Fight Club. American Beauty. The Matrix. Three seminal movies, two more alike than the third, but all centered on a single man in a search for meaning in his life. Existentialism, fatalism, secular humanism, ism ism ism ism, lots of philosophy tossed around among the three. Get this: all three were released in 1999. I know how little I know, but I still don’t know of three current movies that would inspire me in the same wonderful, primal, intellectual, complementary way. Sure, it was a moment in time. It was trendy then. I can’t expect all movies to be as meaningful to me. But if that’s the case, I don’t have to be as excited about them.

Such is life.

With All Due Respect to Bettie Page–

I thought she’d already died, no more recently than twenty years ago.

I actually remember Ms. Page mostly through ads for the biopic starring Gretchen Mol.

Again, no disrespect, but I think without a face (or a body) to the name I would always mix up the real identities of Bettie Page and Bette Davis… and Bette Davis and Betty Grabel… and those last two with Greta Garbo… now you’d think I’d mix up Greta Garbo with Eva Gabor (because their names are anagrams of each other) but no, I wouldn’t mix those two up. Eva and Zsa Zsa I could tell apart, though. Small victories.

You’re Living a Dream, Don’t You Be a Slob

I’ll say this: I vividly remember my first crisis of profession. I was in the passenger seat of my dad’s car. He was driving me back home from school in Boston. It was right about the magic hour – night was just about to fall on us. It was very cloudy but not overcast. The brake lights of the cars ahead didn’t blind so much.

I might have been too young to be worried about What Kind of Real Job I’d Get, too young to realize I was still full of so much of the potential it takes most people their entire 20s to fritter away. But I remember being fed up with my probable future and said flat out, “I just want to stand there on a street corner and tell people what I think.”

It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time: Me standing there, literally on a soapbox, or milk crate, spouting off about philosophy and all. Tony Shalhoub’s possible prophet character from Life or Something Like It became the closest visual analog when it came around.

As time mellowed me and my brain reconfigured my past, as it continually does, that moment of panic became an instance of clarity, one of those rare times when all this fiddle becomes the vapor that it’s always been. The crisis was in the beginning and the end the opportunity to be aware of me being self-aware enough that I more or less do know what I want and have to do with my life and that what my ego has chalked up to be the indecision of a brilliant mind is really the fear and laziness of a man-child who must keep going even if he does not know the way.