1. Today I watched my first movie using our new Blu Ray player and new television. Mostly I experienced discomfort as I watched Birdman. The movie took place in the world of a Broadway theater and was populated by characters whose cynicism, self-centeredness, insecurity, narcissism, crudeness, instability, and physical temper tantrums made me squirm. I might have been fidgety, also, because the movie struck close to home. Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, who made a name for himself playing a movie superhero named Birdman. He hasn't played that role for twenty years and has decided to infuse new life in his career by mounting his own adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. Self-doubt, fear that his life has added up to very little, insecurity about his abilities as an actor, especially when he's not Birdman, and guilt about his failures as a father torture Riggan Thomson throughout the movie, often via the voice of his old character Birdman that lives inside him and mocks him from within his subconscious mind, undermining his best efforts to reform himself and make art on stage rather than be a comic book character in the movies.
So, during the movie, my own self-doubts, my own fears that my life has amounted to very little, my memories of my own overreaching, and stores of guilt I've carried for years inevitably sprung to life and so the movie's script and my life's script intersected. I squirmed. I nearly turned off the movie. But I couldn't, largely because even though I wanted these unappealing characters out of my life, they were played so brilliantly by Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Amy Ryan, Lindsay Duncan, Andrea Riseborough, Zach Galifianakis, and, to me, especially Emma Stone that their performances thrilled me even as I strongly disliked the characters they played. The last time a movie's characters made me feel this uncomfortable was when I saw Sideways nearly fifteen years ago. Both movies are, in their own ways, dark comedies. Both are satirical movies, and movies of this sort work best when they make viewers cringe.
I cringed and squirmed frequently watching Birdman, making me think the movie succeeded.
2. I let Birdman sink in for a while and then I decided to watch something wholly different and clicked on the first episode of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's documentary series The Vietnam War. I appreciated how deeply this first episode explored the history of France's colonial ambitions in Vietnam. France's exploitation of Vietnam's resources and human labor and their repression of dissidents triggered resistance. This first episode also explores that automatic opposition to Communism crippled our country's ability to see that the resistance in Vietnam was grounded in the drive for national independence and self-determination. The aspirations of the resistance were similar to our country's aspirations when revolting against British colonial occupation. It's painful to watch as USA involvement in Vietnam escalates and the quagmire of the war thickens.
3. The Deke was out in the living room watching a French crime show and so I decided I'd treat myself to a British crime show/mystery and watched about half of an episode of Inspector Lewis I had never seen. I used to access streaming episodes of this series through my library membership in Prince George's County when we lived in Greenbelt. I remembered fondly cold winter nights slowly drinking brandy and hot water sweetened with cinnamon sticks and watching Lewis and Hathaway dig into crime after crime and I enjoyed reliving those memories and, even more, enjoyed being back with these investigators as they try to suss out who murdered an alcoholic professor recently released from prison for having killed a child while driving drunk. I'll find time Sunday to finish this episode as my viewing this evening was interrupted by a dinner of salad, salami, and Huntsman cheese and relaxing time yakkin' with Cas at the Lounge.
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