Thoughts on awakening from the collective coma (movie stuff) (July 7, 2001)

[The title is a reference to the several weeks’ pause in posts in the group.]

Aaaak! Hi! What year is it, again? Oh, yeah. Nancy wrote:

<<So what is everyone up to? I saw AI and it really got me to thinking
about the influence of cinema on us. 2001 changed my perception
forever… maybe helped along by something else. AI may be doing
the same thing for another generation.>>

Yeah, now that twenty-oh-one is just the date on the wall calendar it’s lost a lot of the caché it had 30-odd years ago, I’m, like, so sure, to-tally (sorry, I was channeling Moon Zappa’s Valley Girl character for a second. Moon, come back, we need you now more than ever).

I haven’t see AI yet, since where I live, new releases take a while to arrive on the slow boat from H’wood…at the moment, local audiences are glorying in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (I highly recommend), Shrek (ditto) and Being John Malkovich (plan to go shortly, hear good things). I like sci-fi fine (confession: I almost went to a Star Trek convention once), but for a while now my personal muses have been tugging on my sleeve and leading me off in different directions. (As far as The Cinema goes, for what it’s worth, my favorite all-time flick is The French Lieutenant’s Woman, w/Streep and Jeremy Irons. Maybe I just like the clever dual-ending device where, unlike in real life, one gets to have it both ways. The mid-’70s movie The Day of the Locust, featuring Donald Sutherland’s astonishing performance as the original [and very repressed] Homer Simpson, runs second. Is it a coincidence that both those movies concern, to some extent, the making of movies?

Mirrors within mirrors? I don’t really have “favorite stars” of any sort, but I think Jennifer Jason Leigh does serve up the best darn actin’ in five counties: check out her work in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, which is to most types of acting as Michael Jordan was to most types of basketball playing.)