Movie Millisecond: Dinner

Wayne’s World 2 (Steven Surjik, 1993).

GPOY.

Movie Moment: Secrets! Secrets! Secrets! — Brand Upon the Brain! A remembrance in 12 chapters

Brand Upon The Brain! A Remembrance In 12 Chapters (Guy Maddin, 2006).

I don’t often do this, because I’m not keen when people force me to watch videos and I don’t like inflicting that on others, but here’s the full trailer. It’s only about a minute and a half long and there is boobs.

That’s Isabella Rossellini’s voice repeating “The past, the past,” like a bad French student film (in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, 2003, she played a tragic baroness who has two glass legs filled with beer).

The thing with Maddin is that there is nearly always a point, usually 20 or 30 minutes in, while I’m watching his stuff that I’m like, “Oh, come on,” because I’m over the striking visuals that sucked me in to begin with and I’m beginning to be irked by how it’s become over-the-top or maudlin in its cult precosity, like on-purpose cheesily cult or derivative, and I become uncertain.

Are these overtly contrived, look-how-symbolic-I-am moments and their anachronistic cinematic dialogue part of an abstract ironic technique made to make me question the tropes of arthouse garbage, or is this straight arthouse garbage? So often with other deliberately unusual movies I go with “straight arthouse garbage,” because I get like that due to dramatic over-exposure to pretentious hipsters in my short life (I’m looking at you, Portland), but with Maddin I pull back from that judgmental jump. There’s a third category: (1) parody of overwrought indulgent nonsense, (2) actual overwrought indulgent nonsense, or (3) … something else? better? deeper? more effective?

Because right when I’m supressing the urge to roll my eyes and spoil any avant garde cognescenti cred I have accidentally accrued, suddenly some really great moment will have a huge impact on my emotional experience of watching the film and I’ll be sucked in and by the end just sure it’s my new favorite.

But then the next time I pop it in to show some friend, I’m back to thinking I’ve been duped by either the ultimate sly hipster or a genuine savant who sometimes falls flat, and I’m initially embarassed for us both. But then — TUG — in to it again.

It’s a rapid, repetitive cycle, like an awkward date with your own gynecologist — you both have an idea of what’s going to happen but you don’t know what to expect. Or watching a really close friend fuck the lines to a scene badly in a drama class, but totally sell it with their eyes, and you worry that only you can see that though it looks messy it’s probably headed somewhere amazing. Uncomfortable and anticipatory. That’s Guy Maddin movies for me.

I kind of love him.

Uncomfortable is, well, uncomfortable, yeah, but it’s so often just right because it’s the truth.

Anyway, I recommend Brand on the Brain!, is the upshot.

(All the caps came from the trailer because I do not [yet] own this movie.)

Mean Girls Monday: “Sex ed” edition

It feels weird to put “Monday” up because I’m actually cobbling this together late Sunday night after finishing cleanup from a family barbecue, and will be gone tomorrow (today) to my aunt’s for a jazz festival and another barbecue.

Anyway, I took these screencaps a bit ago and wanted to use them to illustrate one of many Awkward Moments that fills up E’s wonderful life.

I was on my first day of a long-term sub job in the fifth grade at the private Catholic school where I’ve been working. I love those kiddos now and I call them the Scamps. More on that when I have more time cause it’s spun out in to a buttload of unexpected summer work. Anyway, I was glancing over the frankly shoddy lesson plans that’d been left for me and wondering why the teacher had noted on the agenda for Science in the afternoon, “Boys will go to room 8 with Mr. V—, girls will stay with you. Video is cued up.”

“Video? What—” I had not even finished thinking it when I realized, oh, man. It was That Day. I think you remember That Day, you know, the day when you split in to gender groups and learn about Each Other’s Bodies. First it is all menstruation and growing leg hair, and then you switch tapes and learn about the boys’ testes and why their voices are changing, and the kids are ten and this is mainly the first they’ve heard of all this, so absolute hell is on the verge of breaking loose with every nuance of the voice-over and tick in the animated shot of the vas deferens.

I only remembered that day from the girl’s side of it. A flickery screening of some kind of Reader’s Digest, “I am Mary’s Fallopian Tubes,” type-film, a stumbling conversation about how periods don’t hurt and it’s really no big deal, the assurance that boys are changing too, nobody breathes a word this first time through that all this body stuff is in preparation for SEX, like it is totally absent from the conversation, and at the end everyone gets a single pad. THAT DAY.

I was in charge of That Day!

It was a session every bit as nerve-wracking and filled with giggles and shaky, mumbly questions as you might imagine and at the end I felt like I’d been hit by a truck and I wasn’t really sure if any of the things I’d said in my answers to their questions had laid their nervous minds to rest, but at least I knew I tried, even on pretty much zero preparation.

Keep it under your hat but I actually love my job. (“I am Joe’s Soaring Job Satisfaction.”)