(no subject)

[jfb]

Some things I enjoyed last night:

• Teenagers gasping at, I think, the sheer audacity of Alan Arkin in Wait Until Dark.
  
• Kids in the row behind me helplessly asking their parents to explain what was going on, and this dialogue during the climactic scene, after Audrey Hepburn has stabbed Arkin with the kitchen knife:

  Mom: He's gonna not be dead.
  Kid [bewildered]: What?
  Mom: He's gonna not be--

  Despite her powers of prediction, she screamed louder than anyone when Arkin lunged back into the frame.
  
• This tableau: Two men, mid-thirties, sitting back on a bench on University Avenue, talking to each other. One of them has his arm stretched around where the woman in between them would be, except she's leaning forward, looking up and to the left, lost in thought. She's not left out of their conversation, she's moved beyond it.
  
• A movie theater marquee with two Ns turned on their sides to accomodate the unreasonable title Grizzly Man.
  
• At the PAC/SJMA Cultural Xposure entrance:

  Ticket seller [to guy whose name I don't remember]: Please give this gentleman a wristband.
  Guy whose name I don't remember: This is no gentleman, this is the sound guy from Barefoot.

  At last, I have a clear identity! (And the guy's name is Jeremy.)
  
• "Brides of Frankenstein" features a lot of interactive exhibits; in all cases, interacting with the art is less interesting than watching people interact with it. Especially young children, who are completely unselfconscious about dancing and yelling in a museum.
  
• Dave Hickey's "The Heresy of Zone Defense" (from Air Guitar), on the aesthetics of basketball:

  In professional basketball, however, art wins. Every major rule change in the past sixty years has been instituted to forestall either the Administrator's Solution (Do nothing and hold on to your advantage) or the Bureaucratic Imperative (Guard your little piece of territory like a mad rat in a hole). The "ten-second rule" that requires a team to advance the ball aggressively, and the "shot-clock rule" that requires a team to shoot the ball within twenty-four seconds of gaining possession of it, have pretty much eliminated the option of holding the ball and doing nothing with it, since, at various points in the history of the game, this simulacrum of college administration has nearly destroyed it.

• Struggling, successfully, to stay awake through a midnight screening of Brazil. This mirrors my first exposure to the film, on VHS at the wrap party for a high school play, as our hostess waited impatiently for the movie to stop ending and us to go home.

In 2000, I decided to try to be not just a consumer/patron of art but a producer/creator. I mostly think it was a good decision, but it's good to be reminded once in a while how much fun it is just to take in art until you're stuffed.

Comments

[xythian.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a busy night.

[helloreplace.livejournal.com]

I'd watch Alan Arkin bag groceries.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, although actually I was a little nonplussed by this one--I think I like him better older. Still, I've been meaning to see this since I saw him speak... somewhere, I thought it was Cinequest but I can't find any evidence of that. Anyway, wooooooo Arkin!

[jfb.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that maybe what I mean is that Alan Arkin is more impressive for what he can convey bagging groceries than for what he brings to the role of a psychopath.

[helloreplace.livejournal.com]

Did you see 13 conversations about one thing? he and Chloe Duvall stole that movie (separately). It was so well done even Matthew Mcconnahey seemed as if he could act.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, loved it, loved that moment with the shirt flying in the air--and yes, it's one of the movies I was thinking of when I thought of older Arkin, and Clea DuVall is another favorite of mine. I also liked the Sprechers' previous movie, Clockwatchers, but it was lighter fare.

[copperqueen.livejournal.com]

I love 13 Conversations. Really well-made movie. Arkin was the center of that movie, for sure.