1. I went to the market with my camera and continued to try to break out of my picture taking slump. I had better success buying cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, cilantro, and sweet onions than I did taking pictures. Tomorrow I'll go back out with my camera and, to put it in baseball terms, see if I can go from shooting underneath the Mendoza line (.200 or below) to maybe reaching at least Gene Alley levels (career .254 hitter with the Pittsburgh Pirates).
2. I have a very emotional history with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It's hard to say when it began. I know that I could not stop going to the Branagh/Thompson movie version in 1993. I saw it five times in the first week it was in Eugene and later that summer drove to Portland just to see it again. In 1994, the Tygres Heart Shakespeare Co. in Portland put on a thrilling, out of the heart of darkness into the heart of light, production set in the aftermath of WWI, with Hero played beautifully as deaf by a deaf actor. I got to be in the cast of Much Ado About Nothing in 2006 at LCC and played the very grounded, loyal, unswayed, truth speaking, Antonio, a role I loved and relished. I have probably seen Much Ado About Nothing twice, if not three times, maybe four, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
I went to see the current movie version of Much Ado About Nothing blissfully ignorant. I'd see a few still photos from the production, but I'd seen no trailers, read no reviews, neither read nor heard any friends' comments on the movie; moreover, despite having several friends and scores of students press me to see Joss Whedon's television shows and movies, I never did. This was my first Joss Whedon experience. The movie's actors were all new to me.
The thrill began when I heard Leonato spoke his opening line, a mundane line, but a line that thrills me with hope and anticipation for what I'm about to experience: "I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina."
Suddenly, I am emotionally tied to my long love with this play, and at the same time, it's as if I've never seen it performed before and what starts to unfold on the screen is the only production of Much Ado About Nothing that has ever been produced.
I ached with pleasure throughout the entire movie, smiling broadly, tears running down my face at several points. It was as if I were hearing a song I'd heard a million times before for the first time, played by musicians I'd never heard before who made it so fresh, so new, so alive it really was as if I'd never heard it before.
The black and white pictures, one delicious shot after another, thrilled me.
I even let myself forget that Antonio was in the play. This production cut him (cut the character I played!) from the story. I noted it, but it didn't bother me.
I didn't want to leave the little screening room at the Bijou Metro. I wanted to stay in this dimly lit room of magic and not have to face the bright July sun. I gathered myself and went home, laughing inside, joyful, moved, with the words of Benedick repeating themselves: "...for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion."
Yes, Christy and Carol and Lura and Dawn and all other family and friends who have told me I need to be more this way: when I left the theater, I was giddy. This is my conclusion.
3. You'd think I'd be drained of all movie love after Much Ado About Nothing, but I wasn't. When Quartet played at the Bijou, I missed it and decided that while I was thinking of it, I'd better go right now to the David Minor and see it before it left there, too.
Am I ever glad I did.
I love going to movies and plays and reading books without a critical framework, without set standards as to what makes a movie or a play or a book good.
I try to let the movie or play or book set the standard and I give myself over to the story and the world it happens in and the characters. (I do the same thing when I read student papers. Gasp.)
I have one word of advice for anyone who wants to enjoy movies, plays, and books: "Believe."
That's all. Don't suspend disbelief. Don't get hung up on whether the movie is realistic, whether it could ever really happen.
Just believe.
It's why I never recommend movies. I assume, from what I read and hear when friends and others comment on movies, that most people have a critical framework and have certain standards they want a movie to meet: was the story believable? could that have really happened? are things consistent? were the characters developed/realized? did it end well (not necessarily happy, but well)? was the movie too long? And so on.
I can't recommend movies based on these criteria.
My experience with movies is private. It might be eccentric. I seek pleasure, in countless ways.
Movies are my private eccentric pleasure.
Quartet filled me with pleasure. I've enjoyed learning on my Facebook page that it filled others with pleasure, too.
One pleasure, in particular, moved me (this might be eccentric): it was seeing Tom Courtenay. He was in the neighborhood of seventy-five years old in the making of this movie, and there, in the proud, at times tortured, but eventually transformed face of his character, Reggie, I could see Norman, the title character in the The Dresser, a movie I love as fully as any I've ever seen, and I could even see the much younger Colin Smith, the character Tom Courtenay played in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
I realized that Tom Courtenay has been a long time resident in my memory and imagination. He might be sharing a suite with John Hurt. Hurt affects me in similar ways.
I loved the whole movie and enjoyed everything as it all unfolded and loved seeing a world populated by elderly characters, each with a story revolving around the way the fires of love, whether love of music or love another, do not diminish as people age.
No comments:
Post a Comment