Life as lived watched

I haven't been watching films recently but in the last 5 days, I have managed to watch a film a day. When you do this, you lose somewhat your grip on the reality of your own life. You are awake, let's say 16 hours of the day, and a movie is say 2 hours. Assuming that 1/2 the time you a zombie, then for the last 5 days, 2 out of the 8 hours of my waking time was absorbed in a fantasy world. that's a quarter of my waking time.

Here's a rundown:

Friday night, I went to see the "Yes-Men", a modern update on the theatre of the absurd. A bunch of jokers leverage their satiric web-site of the WTO by accepting invitations from humorless conference organisers that mistake the fake web-site for the real thing. They are invited to the conferences where they have carte-blanche to say and do things to an audience that the Yes-men have not one iota of respect for. The highlights include a gold-lame suit and some not-so-hidden freudian imagery. unbelievably funny.

Saturday night at the nearby Dolores park, I saw the ever-popular "Harold and Maude". Come to think about it, it seems to be ever-popular mainly with the womens. This is a classic film about the romance between a 20 year old boy and a 80 year old woman. Kind of like a "As Good as it gets" in reverse. Apart from the over-acting and the look-at-me-I'm-being-so-rebelious tone, the Cat Stevens soundtrack managed to beat me into submission. Now, I'm a bit of a sentimentalist and will go for a well-placed acoustic guitar song somewhere just after the climax of a good story arc. But surely there can't be 20 different arcs in the one story. Or can there? There was a Cat Stevens song, regular as clock-work every 10 minutes. A plaintive rhythmic strumming of chords and then the soothing sounds of Cat Stevens poetically summing up what you had just watched in the last ten minutes since the last song. Although our young protagist manages to get it on with our octogenerian friend, all this is shown quite discretely in a very buorgeios kind of way. Oh, what some of these new-wave violent-femme french directors would have done.

Sunday night, "Maria Full of Grace" was a Columbian movie I had wanted to see for a very long time. I managed to go by dragging my only Columbian friend and his entourage with me to the cinema. It's the story of a Columbian woman who becomes a mule - a human drug carrier. This film is the type of film making I most admire. Nothing flashy, no special effects - just a taut story, grounded in highly believable characters, revealing a real world that ostensibly exists but is just out of sight. No need for artificial plot devices, absurd elements, or edgy characters to make it interesting. The movie moves a measured naturalistic pace so that you can truly experience the nerve-racking middle of the film. And I think the scipt-writer judged the tone of the ending perfectly - not too down, not too up, a sort of unresolved hope.

Monday Night, I saw the delirious "Angels in America: Part One". Adapted from the Tony Award winning play, this was an all-star HBO production. Some guilty delights - Al Pacino playing a wheezing, duplicitous homosexual politician and Emma Thompson in a cameo as an Angel (of death?). The film is a sprawling look at homosexuality and aids. The conceit of the film (which works wonderfully) is the seguing of magical realist elements into the world. The writing is top notch and gives the actors plenty to showcase their talents in the full three hours. I eagerly await the next 3 hours of Part Two.

Tuesday Night, at my french film course, I saw "Le Gout des Autres", a sly comedy of manners involving a variety of characters floating around the world of art. Le gout, or taste, is the tenous thread that runs through the movie, whether it be in art, in people or in interior decoration. The film poses questions about how we use taste, the funny moment when you decide that you really really like something or someone. An irrevocable act that cannot be changed as you watch your life veer off in pursuit of it.