1. Ah! Great! What a relief! Debbie's flights to Detroit departed and arrived on time. Debbie and Adrienne met up at the Detroit airport, rented a car, and drove to Debbie's step-sister's house where she and Adrienne will stay. Debbie is in the Lansing area to participate in a ceremony that will commit her father's and her step-mother's ashes to their resting place. Debbie's father died about thirty years ago and his wife, Phyllis, died three years ago. This weekend's gathering will be huge for Debbie. She'll be with Adrienne, see her brother, Brian, and Brian's wife, Diane, and spend time with as many of Phyllis's seven children and other members of the family tree who can make it. It promises to be a spirited and emotional weekend.
2. Ed and I headed up to Andrews Gymnasium around 6:30 to watch Kellogg Wildcat volleyball. The Grangeville Bulldogs were visiting Kellogg. We arrived during the junior varsity match, which went five sets with the Wildcats prevailing. Ed wanted to watch two players in particular on the Kellogg varsity team. Ed has gotten to know Madison Cheney because she works at Garrenteed BBQ, Ed's son-in-law's food truck. He also wanted to see Alan and Peggy Derbyshire's granddaughter, Paige Yrjana play.
Kellogg also won the varsity match in four sets. The action was fun to watch. Madison Cheney was a powerful player for Kellogg, both as a spiker and a defender at the net. Paige Yrjana is a quick, active player, very impressive.
I thought the Kellogg team was as fun-loving and joyous a team of athletes as I'd ever seen. They were all smiles while in action and seemed to love supporting one another's efforts. I couldn't help but think of how, when I played high school basketball, I was so afraid of failing that I played with more anxiety than enjoyment. I wished I could have been as relaxed and loose as a player as these fun loving Wildcats were tonight. No matter the situation, they seemed closely bonded to one another and to be having a great time volleying the ball to each other and over the net.
3. I don't know why back in the 1990s and the early 2000s when Hal Hartley was making quite a few independent movies, I didn't see any of them. They had to be playing at the Bijou in Eugene, but not only did I not see his movies, I have no memory of deciding not to go to them.
Well, starting this month, the Criterion Channel is featuring a bunch of his movies (maybe all of them) in a collection. I'd listened to the channel's interview with Hal Hartley before I went to Kellogg High School and when I returned home, I watched his first movie, The Unbelievable Truth.
The movie zeroes in on a small town on Long Island. Two things are happening at the same time: first, a man from the town has been released from prison and returns to his hometown and, second, a teenage woman is in a state of malaise as she nears the end of high school and is certain that the world could come to an end any day, any hour, any minute.
The movie glides along, almost like a dream, and through ingeniously crafted dialogue and a series of set. scenes, tableaux really, the movie takes us into the perceptions, assumptions, rumor mongering, frustrations, complications, and contradictions of the characters who populate this small town.
Critic Vikram Murthy summed up Hal Hartley's work this way:
Hartley remains one of American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of wayward malaise; his existential portraits foreground their artifice while plumbing genuine emotional depths. His indelible characters are embittered romantics who encompass a bevy of contradictions: they’re sincere and ironic, passionate but apathetic, principled yet inevitably compromised. In other words, they’re true human beings.
It's just this malaise and this movement between romantic longings and bitterness that propels The Unbelievable Truth, making it just what I want from independent movies: a film that bears little resemblance to higher budget studio projects, that tells its story by moving outward from the troubled interiors of its characters, and that progresses not so much by developing a plot, but by developing mood through conversations and farcical coincidences and accidental discoveries.
My plan is to watch as many of these Hal Hartley movies as I can. Watching this movie, listening to Hartley being interviewed, and reading interviews he's given has me intrigued and I'm convinced that watching his movies and learning more about them will help me in my endless effort simply to understand movie making better.
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