1. Being back home means taking care of business. Laundry. Appointment for a vaccination. Costco transaction. My new passport arrived in the mail. Figure out sprinkler head repair (not quite there yet). Compose a grocery list. Get back in the swing of being home where things need to get done.
2. If it weren't for things to take care of and get togethers to happily attend, I could hole up for days at a time, taking breaks to eat and sleep, and just watch movies and other programming on the Criterion Channel. I especially enjoy their feature called Adventures in Moviegoing. Each episode features an interview with an actor or director who talks about his/her personal history with cinema and then the interviewee selects a handful of individual movies from the Criterion Channel Collection and explains why s/he loved them.
I discovered today that a new episode just appeared featuring Ethan Hawke. His good friend and graphic novel collaborator, Greg Ruth, conducts the interview. I enjoy Ethan Hawke's work in movies a lot and I must have heard him interviewed before because I immediately recognized how intelligent, generous, and genuine he is as an interview subject.
Among the movies Hawke chose to discuss were two movies intent on unraveling the traditional western: The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. Both movies feature Paul Newman. Both are directed by legends, John Houston and Robert Altman. I saw Judge Roy Bean -- I'm pretty sure I went to a screening of it in the SUB at North Idaho College, but I might have seen it with Ed Bailey at a drive-in. Either way, I think its purposes, its satire, its irreverence for the traditional western went right by me and I'm eager to give it another viewing -- nearly fifty years later.
More than once, I've held personal, private Robert Altman film festivals -- I love his approach to movie making -- but I've never watched Buffalo Bill.
So, I've got a double feature somewhere in my future and I'll add to these two movies two others that Ethan Hawke talks about. He enthused intelligently about John Cassavetes' movie, Faces and Hawke introduced me to a 1983 independent film out of Houston directed by Eagle Pennell entitled Last Night at the Alamo. I spent hours in the 1980s, especially 1981-87, going to independent films in Eugene and Portland movie houses and renting them for viewing at home. I don't remember ever hearing of or knowing about Last Night at the Alamo, but Hawke's love for this movie and his description of it made me think it's exactly the kind of low budget, black and white, possibly downbeat, off the beaten path movie I have loved to watch over the past forty years.
3. I didn't watch all of Ethan Hawke's discussions of selected movies, but I will. Nor did I watch any of the movies I just mentioned.
Instead, I watched Joel and Ethan Coen's movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, a story about a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village in 1961, living from couch to couch, trying to get a foothold in the emerging world of folk music. At times, I experienced this movie as a parody of folk music and thought I was watching something like A Mighty Wind. Other passages of the movie reminded me of the Coen brothers' earlier movie, O, Brother, Where Art Thou? Llewyn Davis goes on an Odysseyian journey from New York to Chicago and returns home again. The Coens patterned O, Brother after Homer's The Odyssey. Llewyn Davis's journey, however, is not heroic. In fact, it is a continuation of Davis' many failures. This is not a story of heroic triumph, but of a musician who always falls short, is always either doing stupid things or making poor personal and "professional" decisions. In this way, I came away from the movie thinking that if this movie was Homeric, it portrayed Llewyn Davis' journey into Hades, into a wintry world of exhaustion and cycles of failure.
I've read reviews that refer to Inside Llewyn Davis as a black comedy. My guess is that these reviewers experienced comedy in the passages of folk music parody, its poking fun at middle/upper middle class fans of folk music, and in the exaggerated performance John Goodman gives of a heroin addicted, barely mobile, crass and insulting jazz musician whom Davis joins on a miserable car ride to Chicago with a character parodying a taciturn and mediocre Beat poet.
In an odd way, cats that are featured in this movie are like Jeff Lebowski's rug. The rug ties Jeff Lebowski's room together. The cats tie together the parts of this movie. If you watch this movie or have watched it, I hope you will or do see what I mean about the cats.
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