1. Today, I originally thought I'd stay home and watch a couple of Hal Hartley movies. Early in the afternoon, I changed my mind. I felt like going on a short road trip, so I leapt into the Sube and barreled over Lookout Pass and eased into the small parking lot in front of The Old Montana Bar in Saltese.
I enjoy The Old Montana Bar, especially in the afternoon, because the bar serves really cold mass produced beer in an iced glass, their small casino is the only place locally that I know of that has one of my favorite games, Wolf Moon, they serve reliably delicious food, and, at least in the afternoons, it's what I think of as a Social Security bar. Usually, almost everyone who's in the place is around my age. Today, a crew of, well, I'll say retirees, were in, having been out on ATVs enjoying, I presume, the Montana landscapes.
So I won a little money playing video poker, won a bit more playing Miss Kitty, and then the guy who'd been playing the machine that has Wolf Moon on it as an option changed machines, and I jumped on the machine in his place. I won a little money there.
I like to limit myself to two bottles of Budweiser at The Old Montana Bar. I also quit playing machines after two beers. Finishing my second beer coincided with being a little bit ahead in the casino. I cashed out. I used some of my winnings to treat myself to a Mushroom Swiss Cheese Burger and fries with a Pepsi and a tall glass of ice water.
I returned to Kellogg in a relaxed frame of mind. I had a very modest amount of extra cash in my wallet, and and was really happy that I made the 40 minute drive to Saltese to enjoy the ambience and solid food at The Old Montana Bar and to spin reels for as long as it took me to slowly drink a couple of long neck Budweiser beers.
2. I didn't head straight home. I dropped in at The Lounge. Charlie was in the house, doing what Charlie always does, playing superb blues music, using an app on his cell phone, on The Lounge's digital jukebox. It wasn't very busy when I arrived at The Lounge and so I got to yak quite a bit with Cas and had fun yakking with Ginger, Harley, and Riles. Harley told me that he hadn't cracked open any of the Heidelbergs I gave him a while back -- and for good reason! He and Candy are going to Montana later on to see Kim and Marty and Harley will take the Heidelbergs over as part of a birthday celebration. It was fun reminiscing with Harley about the days when Heidelberg was sold in keg bottles, when it was one of the Silver Valley's most popular beers, and the great enjoyment that beer gave so many people.
3. Back home, I turned my attention to Hal Hartley, but not by watching another of his movies.
Instead, I went in search of videos of him talking about his filmmaking style and of other people talking about his movies.
I had the good fortune of stumbling upon a YouTube channel hosted by a film scholar, Aaron Hunter. Hunter is a teaching fellow at Trinity College in Dublin and he posts lectures on his What Makes This Film Great YouTube channel.
To my delight, he has lectures on some of Hal Hartley's movies and tonight I listened to his analysis of the movie I watched on Friday night, The Unbelievable Truth.
His lecture helped me understand Hartley's unconventional filmmaking much better. I'm not quite at a point where I can write about Hartley's style of making movies in my own words. I can say, however, that the same sorts of things that appeal to me about David Mamet's style -- the pauses, the repetitions -- are at work in Hal Hartley's writing and I can say that the same sort of non-realistic (or non-naturalistic) elements of the theater of the absurd that I enjoy so much are also at work in how Hartley writes and films movies.
To my further delight tonight, I also stumbled on Aaron Hunter's lecture explaining what makes one of my favorite of all movies, Between the Lines, great. I thought Hunter's insights were right on the mark as he discussed how Between the Lines captures the uncertainty the idealistic characters in this movie face as the independent weekly newspaper they work for is going under and as they wonder where their lives are headed as they approach their early thirties and realize that the dreams they had about their lives when they were younger are not coming true.
I've watched Between the Lines at least a dozen times. I loved it when I was in my late twenties and felt so much of the ambivalence about life, love, sex, work, and the future as these characters experience. Watching the movie now, in my late sixties, it continues to work for me, not only as a superb period piece, released in 1977, anticipating the changes that were on their way in the 1980s, but also as a movie that I feel deeply, one that rekindles idealism I once felt and takes me back to disillusion I experienced as the life I dreamed of when I was in my twenties disintegrated as I moved into my thirties.
Some of these characters are difficult to like because in their confusion they behave badly, say mean and self-centered things, hurt each other.
I, too, was very confused as I moved into my thirties and, I, too behaved badly, said mean, self-centered things, and hurt other people. I don't like that that's true, but it is and Between the Lines helps me understand my younger self and helps me, in my best moments, be somewhat forgiving of myself.
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