City Island

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, 3:30 pm today

After the houselights came up, I was the last one in the number two auditorium at the Lyric. Ben came in to walk through to the projection room. As the last credits rolled, he asked me, "So how was it?"

"My kind of movie," I said. "It's a New York neighborhood-family movie, which I like a lot."

I added that Andy Garcia's performance was superb. "You know how every year the Academy nominates an Indie performance for the acting Oscar. Last year it was Richard Wright."

He knew what I meant. "Well, Garcia could be it for this year."

Then I added that the movie got a little goofy at the end, and got fairly Postmodern when Garcia's character actually goes from being a prison guard to an actor, and Martin Scorcese is explicitly invoked.

The story here has a Postmodern dysfunctional family that is healed by bold Classical honesty and courage. It occurred to me that in Scorcese's earlier films, and also in Saturday Night Fever, the New York Catholic Family that Screams (NYCFTS) was not so much Scorcese showing us a New York phenomenon (witness his own personal upbringing), but rather the Postmodern one, albeit in New York garb and patois. In City Island, it's come full circle---the New York screaming family now looks normal American, because we've all become that, somewhere along the way.

But like I said, some good performances by a great cast, and I learned a few things about the place where I dined on lobster on my 35th Birthday, having visited all five boroughs in one day of fun. The film did not let down any of my memories.

Letters to Juliet

Seen at: Carmike 10, two weeks ago

It's almost cruel---over the past three months we have gotten three incredible performances by Amanda Seyfried, my favorite 20-something actress. What a year so far for her.

The cruel part? I felt it strongly while watching Letters from Juliet, a lighthearted and fairly straightforward romantic comedy set in Tuscany, in which Seyfried stars (and holds her own against Vanessa Redgrave). The story is fun and predictable, but earnest and quite watchable within its genre. And yes, Taylor Swift makes an appearance in the soundtrack in Act Three.

Watching Seyfried cross the screen in the echoing streets of Verona and Sienna, or sitting on a Tuscan hillside in the sun, or under a starry sky, was for me, in that moment, to feel the majesty of film to capture the beauty of creation on screen, and to ache in my soul to know that such beauty exists. It is not a longing for possession of the actress herself, or even desire for her, but something more transcendental that springs from the power of art itself. It is cruel in how fleeting it is. It is the tragedy and triumph of cinema, as it reflects life, when something is so beautiful that it hurts in your soul, pleasantly so.

One of my favorites of the year so far. If Amanda didn't appear in anything else for 2010, she'd already be on the shortlist of my Actress of the Year.

The great cinematic experiment ends---but goes on

Wow. It's late June already, and I've been busy not seeing lots of movies. In fact, I've been really enjoying not seeing movies lately, after the expiration of the two-year project to see "as many movies as possible that are released in theaters in the U.S."

That last statement in quotes is what this thing evolved into. The two-year timeline is what it became when, as it approached this spring, I could started to get increasingly unenthusiastic about cinema-going, even to movies I wanted to see.

Since mid-May, when I decided I'd had enough and could call it quits (because I'd seen nearly every movie released since mid-May 2008), I suddenly felt as if I had lots more free time and energy. I was no longer a slave to the movie listings.

But we like our chains, don't we? So immediately I began to miss the weekly regimen of cinema strategizing that became combined with trips to the Denver suburbs to catch movies that had left Fort Collins already.

Since then I've seen about a movie a week, on average. All of a sudden, I like going to movies again. I can pick and choose. It is delightful.

Ironically I could pick up again with the "see-everything" plan and hardly have missed a beat, since most of the movies released since mid-May are still in theaters. But I've already decided to pass, for now, on many of them. Just as I left several 2008 and 2009 missed movies unseen, so too will these become future DVD watchings, perhaps, years down the road, when I want to see this time in cinema history with fresh eyes, to verify if my judgments back then (that is, now) were (are) on the mark.

What will I leave unseen for now? I think the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, released in early May, is where I decided to call a halt to this. Technically I could have invoked my "didn't see the others in series" rule, on which I have passed on the Saw sequels recently. But really it was because every time I thought about wasting an afternoon in the Carmike seeing it, I suddenly could think of better uses for the five dollar bill in my wallet.

I've also decided to pass for now on Shrek 4, Robin Hood (probably), Killers, Toy Story 3, among others.

My regrets are that I didn't act quickly enough to see Magruber, which came and went out of all theaters in Colorado/Wyoming within about three weeks. When a movie bombs that bad, something is compelling about seeing it, especially since it spent a week in the two dollar cinema. What a shame. It's not even playing anymore at the Elvis Arvada.

This still leaves me with a raft of movies I've never written up. I think I'll have to shotgun them with one-paragraph reviews if I can.