1. I experienced a low key turning point today in my post-transplant life. I finally plugged the Vizio back in. My Criterion Channel subscription had lapsed and I rejoined. I also moved our Netflix subscription level up a notch.
Yes, my mind remained focused on meeting the daily regimen of my post-transplant life -- mostly focused on taking the right medicine at the right time -- but it was a pleasure to engage my mind in the world of movies again.
When my Criterion Channel subscription kicked in, I immediately tuned in to the latest installment of Adventures in Moviegoing and watched and listened to Aliza Ma interview Paul Schrader about his fascinating personal history with movies. Schrader was raised in a strict Protestant church that forbade movie viewing. It wasn't until he was in his late teens that he saw his first movie and, once he did, he dove into movies with a voracious appetite, started a film club at Calvin College, had the good fortune to meet Pauline Kael, and she helped him hone his skills as a movie critic.
Eventually, Schrader began to also write screenplays and, before long, directed movies, too.
After listening to the interview, I watched him talk about individual movies from the Criterion Collection, one at a time, that are especially important to him. I love this feature of Adventures in Moviegoing. No matter what person is being interviewed, his or her movie choices and comments on these favorite movies are fascinating and, inevitably, my own limited world of knowledge about movies gets widened and deepened.
Paul Schrader was especially fascinating to me because, while he left the Christian practice he was raised in, his spiritual hunger, curiosity, and keenness grew as did his unending explorations of the bridges between the sacred and the profane.
His movie choices reflected this, well, I guess you could say obsession, with the spiritual in movies (not necessarily religious) and the profane world we live in. He focused on European and Asian movies, none of which I have ever seen, but will now consider.
2. I then turned to the movie choices Barbie director Greta Gerwig made in her contribution to Adventures in Moviegoing. I haven't seen Barbie, but I've been aware of Greta Gerwig's work over the years. I'll go back soon and listen to her talk about her personal history with movies, but I was very interested in what movies she chose from the Criterion Collection.
I'd seen three of the movies Gerwig focused on: Federico Fellini's Amarcord, David Lean's Brief Encounter, and Abbas Kiarostami's Where is My Friend's House? She also focused on movies by Akira Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, and co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I've seen movies by these three, but not the ones Gerwig discussed.
In one of these individual movie discussions, Peter Becker asked Greta Gerwig about how she watches movies as a director of movies.
I loved her answer and it summed up how I, too, watch movies.
Gerwig replied that she watches movies with her heart. She explained that how the movies she watches were made doesn't register with her, especially in her initial viewings of the movie. She feels movies. It's not until the movie has stopped working on her -- maybe after the tenth viewing -- that she can begin to consider its technical aspects, the aspects that will help her in her work as a director.
I think it was a couple of years ago that I wrote in this blog about marticulating in an imaginary school called Vizio University. My plan was to watch tons of movies, especially ones made before 1960, and try to teach myself more about the technical dimensions of moviemaking.
But, because, like Greta Gerwig, I get absorbed in how movies make me feel, because I have a long history of watching movies with my heart, I never made much progress in the university of my own creation! Now, granted, I didn't watch any of these movies ten times, so I don't know if I, like Gerwig, would begin to be able to tune into the technical aspects on the tenth or eleventh viewing.
I used to marvel at my colleagues Dan and Kate and Susan. They taught film studies at Lane Community College and they had that ability to analyze a movie's camera angles, the movie's editing, mise en scene, and all of the other technical properties that make movies work.
And, I must add, they also viewed movies with their hearts.
I'm not there with the technical details. I don't know if I ever will be. I can say, though, that I loved hearing Greta Gerwig talk about herself as a feeling movie viewer more than an analytical one.
She uplifted me.
3. I returned this afternoon and evening to my favorite Netflix offering: Midnight Diner and its sequel, Midnight Diner, Tokyo Stories. Each barely twenty-five minute episode mostly takes place in a Tokyo diner that operates from midnight until 7 a.m. and is run by a superb chef whose name is simply Master. The diner has a small set menu, but Master will cook anything a customer requests if he has the ingredients on hand.
Each episode features one of Master's dishes. Each episode tells a story about one or two of the diner's customers, ordinary people, who deal with life's universal experiences such as love, jealousy, death, careers, identification, and other big questions within the context of their modest lives.
I've observed this before, but it bears repeating: these episodes are like visual haiku. Short. Focused on a conflict. Often surprising. Economic. And, above all, emotionally moving and richly satisfying.
I hadn't watched a Midnight Diner episode for a couple of years.
I loved returning to this program today.
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