My Kingdom

*Ahem*

(They all turn around in their chairs and look at him.)

"What kind of bird are you?"

(Pause.)

"I'm a sparrow.  She's a dove--"

"No-- what kind of bird (beat) are you?"

----------------------------

I've seen the trailer maybe twenty or so times.  Maybe I have Aspergers-- maybe I'm just in love.  I don't know.  In any case, I've been waiting for a long, long time.  I had plans to drive up to New York City to see it two weeks ago, but it just didn't happen.  I'm not as impetuous, or as quixotic, or as liberated as I used to be.

Twins'll do that to a guy, you know.

Because I wasn't alive in the late 19th century, I'll never know the thrill of hearing that "a new operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan" is premiering at the Savoy, or is coming to New York.  I'll never get to hear the scuttlebutt or the gossip about the costumes or the sets, and I'll never get to see the sheet music for "The Law is the True Embodiment" when it was brand new.  That would have been it for me.

So, because I live in this place and this time and in this century, the release of a new Wes Anderson movie is, I suppose, as close as I'll ever get to that feeling.  And now, at long last, "Moonrise Kingdom" is rising at a theatre near me.

Which is good, because I'm damn tired of waiting.

When I read a little review of "Rushmore" all those years ago, one reviewer called it "A love letter to the misfits of the world."  I didn't need to read any more of that review to know that I needed to see this film.  I couldn't have known that, as Max Fisher danced with Miss Cross to the clanking chords of The Faces' "Ooh La La" that I'd be in tears. I couldn't have known that I would have a fight with my allergist about the ending of that movie, that he argued that the film shouldn't have ended happily for Max-- that, because the movie ended how he wanted, he never learned anything, he never grew as a character.  I argued that Max did learn and Max did grow, but that the film ended how he would have ended it if he'd written it.

What kind of bird is he?

It's funny, being drawn to films about people whose family dynamics are completely fucked up.  You'd think it's how I must have grown up-- surrounded by eccentric people who possessed an uncanny inability to communicate anything resembling affection-- but I didn't.  My upbringing was mundane and regular and safe and surrounded by love.  We were not without our problems, but we weren't Tenenbaums, and we never wanted to be.

Wes Anderson films are more than the sum of the camera angles, the flat presentation of the characters, the shirt and tie combos (in "Rushmore", Herman Blume wore monochromatic shirt-and-tie combinations-- all yellow, all blue, etc, and in "Royal Tenenbaums", Royal favored hues of purples and green stripes-- effeminate choices for such a, well, bastard) or the chic, carefully selected eyeglasses or the indie-cool, carefully selected soundtracks.  It's not the charming, pizzicato tinklings of Mark Mothersbaugh or, now, Alexander Desplat.  It's not the many, many details.

I think it's the sad sincerity of even the most insincere characters.  It's their unabashed presentation, it's the way in which they plod through life, saying awful things with a great innocence.  They're telling the truth even when they're lying through their teeth.

And I guess I like that.  I guess I'm like that, too.  Even though I wish I wasn't.

I suppose I keep coming back to these films because they're some kind of mirror, albeit a distorted one, with cooler clothes, of who I am and I think that, if I watch enough times, if I step aboard the Darjeeling, Ltd one more time, if I close my eyes and listen to the words and the music and the pauses, maybe one day I'll figure out what kind of bird am I.

What a Trip (A Review: Sort Of)

Film classifications/genres kind of get on my nerves.

(If you just asked yourself the question, "But, what doesn't?" then I love you.)

Oftentimes, I'll see a comedy and come away sad, and will know for sure that I just watched a great comedy. It's kind of just how I roll. If a comedy made me laugh and nothing else, I'm pretty sure it can be stated that it was basically a mediocre event-- like "Hear No Evil, See No Evil" or "Fletch". Not that those movies are really designed to get you to do anything other than laugh and possibly pee on yourself (it's been a while for me) but I tend to think the measure of a particularly great comedy is whether or not it makes me sad.

Michael Winterbottom's "The Trip", starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, was a film that made me sad, but I'm not sure that it was a particularly great comedy. The synopses that I read of the film piqued my interest: two eccentric English comedians tooling around in a Range Rover doing impressions and eating expensive food seemed right up my alley, but you can never really go by those synopses. Almost without exception, they refer to Brydon's character as "annoying" or "irritating" or, to really throw it out there, "the source of eternal aggravation". After seeing the film, that seems funny to me, because Coogan's character, at least to me, was just as annoying and obnoxious, if not more so, because he was all of that combined with an acidic narcissim, lack of charity, and a voracious, predatory lust for anything with a pair of tits.

The film struck a chord with me because it reminded me of a friendship that I have which seems to hang by a tenuous thread-- it's an old friendship, formed when I was ten and when my friend was thirteen. Fortunately, I was precocious enough back then to pass for appropriate company for him and the age gap closed somewhat as we both entered college and stayed in touch. Instead of both being English, as are Brydon and Coogan, we were (and still are) Jewish and American but desperately wanted to be (and still want to be) English, and we gave lusty voice to this fetish by collaborating on Monty Python-style sketches in our teenage years and cajoling my father into filming them.

He became a professional actor, an extraordinarily talented musician, and has enjoyed the company of many an attractive, lithe and sensual young female, and I didn't.

I got married and bought a house and have stable employment and am starting a family. And he didn't.

And to say that there isn't any jealousy that exists on both sides of our relationship would be patently unfair. A few years ago, in a spurt of creativity and confidence, I helped him develop a one-man show that has now been produced in several different venues in New York City, and I have had the privilege of watching my friend perform the piece excellently at two different theatres. And I'm proud of the work I put into the piece as far as editing and suggesting material, but mostly in providing emotional support during the creative process. Do I sometimes wish it was me up there, embodying characters and receiving adulation?

Yes. I do.

Back in 2003, he asked me to run away with him. He tried to seduce me, you see. He asked me to take his hand and run away with him to New York City. At this time in my life, we were spending more time together, huddled in his tiny $400-a-month South Philly apartment, replete with the requisite pizza boxes strewn around on the floor, doing together what we did best: writing. He asked me to come to New York City with him and develop a stage show-- a comedy act-- a sketch show. A who-knows-what. But, at this time, a girl was working on seducing me, too-- and we all know how that goes. She became Mrs. Apron, and my friend went to New York by himself, and he flowered. And maybe I say it to make myself feel better about the choice I made, but part of me thinks that, were I shackled to his shin, the poor bastard might have wilted.

And I might have, too.

Watching the interplay between Coogan and Brydon, watching the tension simmering underneath as they try to out-do each other's Michael Caine impression was very hard to watch for me. Because it made me think about my friend, and my relationship with him, and how it's changed and stopped and started over the years-- over twenty-one years... Jesus Christ-- that is hard to write out like that.

I love him. I do. And love is not easy to bear, just like a good film is not easy to watch. See, it was a good film-- but I'm not sure if it was a great film. It did make me sad, though-- but I think that had more to do with my own baggage than with the film's technical and artistic aspects. We all lug tons of baggage into a movie theatre with us. There really should be overhead compartments for all that stuff.

I'll Probably Never See "Citizen Kane"

My wife is currently struggling with the concept of being human, and forgiving herself for being so.

Oftentimes, I'm pretty reasonably comfortable with my humanity, my flaws and my foibles, my acne and my wrinkles, my blunders and my anxieties. Sometimes, though, I just can't seem to shake the fact that, when it all boils down to gravy, I just don't measure up.

Measure up to what, of course, the question becomes. To whose standards? To what level? To whose ideal?

Probably my own, though I think society bears some of the blame here. I love blaming society. It makes me sound so, I don't know, Proustian.

???

I'm deeply flawed. I say racist and offensive things. I'm often insensitive and pernicious, I'm all over four-letter words like they're my best friends or chicks I want to fuck.

(See?)

I'm a hypocrite and a charlatan and a faker and a dirty old man and a complainer and a dreamer and an insipid coward and a concealer and a crybaby.

And I've never seen "Citizen Kane." And I probably never will.

Why?

I don't know. I'm just not that into black-and-white films. The only black-and-white stuff on film that I really love are "3 Stooges" shorts, and I only really like the ones with Curly. Shemp I never really got into very much, Joe Besser is just a wimpy, gay stereotype, and Curly Joe DeRita was, well, a fourth-rate Curly impersonator, and not a very good one at that.

Oh, and I love "Dr. Strangelove," of course. I think it's illegal to call yourself a Peter Sellers Freak without loving that movie. Plus, it was James Earl Jones's first on-screen role. I mean, it's a piece of history in so many ways.

But "Citizen Kane"? I don't know-- just doesn't interest me. Sure, I've seen clips. And I've heard about sticking the fucking camera in a hole in the ground a hundred times. And I know it's, like, #1 on the AFI Most Important Contributions to Cinematic Whatever of All Times.

I know.

But, it's just something about it. "Rosebud." Whatever. That style of acting, it's just so... representational. So affected. So... uninteresting. And Orson Welles is probably going to come back from the grave and give me a nipple-twist for saying this but, like, in the grand scheme of things, who gives a shit if I've never seen "Citizen Kane"? It makes me an imperfect connoisseur of the film medium, for sure.

I'll admit that. It does. So does never seeing, "Gone with the Wind." Or "Inherit the Wind." Or "A Mighty Wind." Basically, all those windy movies I've kind of just skipped over for whatever reason. I don't know, I'm sure a cunning psychologist could come up with something pretty enticing about that.

Can I really say, "I love movies" without ever having seen "Citizen Kane," arguably one of the most influential movies ever made? I don't know. I get away with saying "I love Mark Twain" without ever having read much of his novel writing.

Does that make me something of a cheat? Does it make my enthusiasm for a subject matter somewhat hollow?

Or, does it make me human?

I don't know. But, either way, I'll probably never see "Citizen Kane." Why? Because, truth be told, I'd rather pop in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" and laugh my ass off as Peter Sellers destroys his own apartment trying to engage Burt Kwouk in yet another Cato/Clouseau battle royale any day.

And that, if anything, makes me about as human as I can be.

God Save the Queen

I felt like a real baby yesterday.

Not in the burbling up mashed peas all over my onesie kind of baby, but in the not getting my way and not being particularly diplomatic about it kind of baby.

I had my heart set on seeing "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," Terry Gilliam's latest romp. Those of you who've been around for a while remember the blog post I wrote about the film, relating to the imagination of children several weeks ago, and will understand why I wanted so badly to see the film.

Because I work all day and teach and rehearse at night, my opportunities for seeing films are very limited, but Saturday night appeared to be all-systems-go, and so I asked my wife if she'd go with me.

"Sure," she said, "but, what the fuck is 'The Conundrum of Mrs. Parabolas?'"

"Don't worry about it," I said, dialing the number for my forty-two-year-old sister, our perennial third-wheel. She was, of course, being fed and babied at my parent's house, a mere 0.04 miles away.

"Pick us up now," I said into the phone, "we're going to the movies."

"Okay!" she said. I never have to worry about her having plans, because she never has plans.

The time was 6:51. The film started at 7:00. The movie theatre was probably ten minutes away for most drivers, seven if you drive like you really mean it.

Now, I would have driven, but my sister is allergic to dogs, and feels that, because our dog has traveled in our car many times that she cannot do likewise. Therefore, whenever the three of us go anywhere, she has to drive. In her pristine, 2009, gold ("Not trashy gold," according to my father), blonde-wood enrobed BMW where dust mites fear to tread.

As my wife and I stood outside on our street corner, waiting for a glimpse of my sister's xenon headlamps cutting through the evening air, I shook my head in despair after consulting my watch.

"We'll never make it."

I don't exactly know what happened to my sister but, somewhere along the line, she went straight from infant to senior citizen. In her apartment, there are heating pads and huge containers of vitamins and tubes of theraputic gels everywhere. Her condominium looks exactly like my great grandmother's apartment used to look like, only without the chifferobe-sized console television, the avacado-colored rotary telephones and blackened liverwurst hamburgers.

My sister has even started driving like an elderly person. Fortunately, only as concerns speed. She doesn't weave into the opposite lane of traffic, nor does she drive through people's lawns and hedges, the way my step-grandmother has, but she adheres to the posted speed limit signs with an almost religious fervor. This is a woman who used to rack up speeding tickets with all the enthusiasm of a chubby 7-year-old kid vying for skiball prizes. I rolled my eyes as she slowed to a cringeworthy 15mph and rode her brakes down what can be a very fun, winding road on the way to the movie theatre and I resigned myself to the fact that "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" would fly the coop before I got to see it in the theatre.

I wondered briefly if my sister preferred Polident or Sea Bond.

When we got out of the car at the movie theatre, it was 7:12 and there were approximately 30 people in line for tickets.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," I moaned, "fuck this, let's just forget it."

"Buddy," my wife said in her best impersonation of an optimist, "don't forget about previews-- they're usually at least fifteen minutes long."

We stood in line behind the yacking and irritating wealthy people of this neighborhood and, as we got closer to the ticket window I saw a sign that read something like,

"Dear Movie Patrons:

Due to a malfunction in our heating system, there is NO HEAT in movie theatre #2, which is currently showing "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." Please be aware that the temperature inside this movie theatre is approximately 55 degrees. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

I walked up to the ticket window when it was my turn and said, undaunted,

"Three for 'Imaginarium,' please," sticking my debit card in her face.

"Sir, you do realize that it is approximately 55 degrees in there, right?"

"Buddy," my wife said behind me, "I think I'll be cold in there." And she would have been. And if my young, sprightly, pixie-like wife would be cold in there, my woefully underweight, brittle-boned, geriatric sister would probably become an ice-pop before the first plot-twist.

I sighed and turned my gaze up to the other offerings or, in the case of this small theatre, offering. One other film, beginning at 7:15.

"Three for 'The Young Victoria,' please."

It wasn't terrible, but it was no Terry Gilliam film. If it were, a gigantic, slimey, cyclops dragon would have devoured Queen Victoria within the first ten minutes and its head would have popped open and a dozen tuxedo-wearing goldfish would have swam out singing German oom-pah songs.

But that didn't happen, and I was okay with that. I wasn't okay, though, with the filmmakers completely fabricating Victoria's husband, Albert, getting shot while shielding her from an assassination attempt.

There was an assassination attempt on Victoria, many, many assassination attempts, actually-- but in none of them were Albert shot. In the movie, he acts like a Secret Service agent, pushing Victoria back in her carriage while simultaneously leaping in front of her to gracefully accept the bullet into his powerful, manly shoulder.

But it was nothing but pure, Hollywood horseshit, and it made me furious.

What is the purpose of historical films if they are going to radically manipulate and outright lie about what happened? I know why they did it-- because, in the scene before, Albert & Victoria had just had a huge blowout and then they needed to have them make up. Well, couldn't they have done that without making shit up? It was ridiculous and unnecessary and all it does is make people who are too lazy to research things or are too trusting to think they don't have to believe things that aren't true.

I just think it's funny how films like these obsess over the historical correctness of period dresses and hairstyles and mutton chops, and uniform colors and the accuracy of medals and table linens, and casting just the right actress who looks just enough like the Baroness Lehzen, and then they just go and fantasize about rather significant happenings, or non-happenings and are content to rewrite history, because what really happened just isn't interesting enough. Am I a fuddy-duddy who only wants the history represented as it truly was-- or is that even possible?

Or maybe I'm still just in a funk because my sister drives like an octogenarian and I didn't get to see my movie.