Pre-Thanksgiving

Pre-Thanksgiving. Tomorrow we head up to Commerce Township for the big meal with Suzanne's family and then on Friday we load onto a plane and head for (hopefully) sunny Florida. Actually, the weather forecast says it will be overcast but in the high 70s. Seeing as how it's in the 40s and raining like crazy outside here, almost anything is an improvement.


Last night in film class, we were subjected to Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel. The professor prefaced our viewing by saying, "I've never heard of anyone besides myself liking this movie -- but I do think it's kind of wonderful." When the teacher made that comment, I wanted to share his vision, you know? I wanted to be one of the few, brilliant students who could appreciate this hidden gem, right? Well, unfortunately, I hated that movie -- hated it the way I hate Zach Braff. It was all ambition and no talent, all directorial back-patting and self-congratulation for being so clever and complicated. It was ugly to look at, boring to follow, and a failure at being any kind of science fiction (which is supposedly was). Once it was over and we took a mid-class break, one of my classmates asked me what I thought. I told him I'd had more pleasant experiences at the urologist's office.

But it did get me thinking about my teacher's taste in movies. I think academia sort of fetishizes complication and makes it a virtue unto itself. That was certainly true in the Boise State MFA program. The more difficult something was, generally the more praised it was, at least on the poetry side of things. Inscrutability was this high art. If someone had to scratch their head over your work, that meant they were paying attention. Though it was never articulated in this way, getting a reader to Pay Close Attention was regarded as the Holy Grail of writing. That's what you want. Basic pleasure was always viewed as a lowly, less brainy, and therefore less admirable second-stringer reaction to writing.

Pleasure in reading wasn't outright denied but it was always spoken of in connection with difficulty and complexity. The idea was that being required to think really, really hard and being made to look at a poem or story (or film or book) as some sort of puzzle to be solved or some sort of inexplicable experience that can't ever really be captured or articulated is what gives a reader pleasure. There's certainly something to that and I'm not opposed to complicated ideas or works of art. But ultimately, pleasure for me comes from feeling something more than thinking something. Most complicated, academic writing just doesn't make me feel anything.

Anyway, back to my teacher's taste in movies: as I sat there resenting him for making us watch this terrible piece of junk, I wondered what his favorites movies are. Asking a person what their one favorite movie is isn't that useful. I never have an answer for it. There are too many choices, too many different films for different moods. Even when you ask people what their favorite food is, they usually answer with "Mexican" or "Italian" or something like that. It's a whole genre of food rather than one specific dish.

So, rather than trying to narrow it down to one favorite movie, I wondered the old desert island question: if you were stranded on a desert island but got to bring ten movies to watch (presumably on a coconut and bamboo tv and dvd player invented by the Professor), what would you choose? I didn't ask Dr. Shaviro but, being the narcissist that I am, I asked myself.

In no particular order, my essential ten are:

Always (Spielberg, 1989)

Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)

Liar, Liar (Shadyac, 1997)

The Mormon Trilogy (Dutcher, 2000, 2001, 2005)

The original Star Wars Trilogy (Lucas, Kershner, Marquand, 1977, 1980, 1983)

The Incredibles (Bird, 2004)

A River Runs Through It (Redford, 1992)

Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989)

Grosse Point Blank (Armitage, 1997)

Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)

I can elaborate on these choices another day but for now, I tag Suzanne, Darlene, Tony, Tracy, Dan, Ellen, and Tawnya. What are your ten desert island movies?