Back from Hiatus

Hey! I took a vacation, too! (No. No, I did not.)

It is increasingly difficult to write about entertainment these days, but I think it’s important to. It’s not a matter of distraction with bread and circuses (we have state-sanctioned media for that); the arts are what can sustain us at the highest and best levels, spiritually. At the very least, a movie, a play, a concert, a TV show can give us a break from the madness of our current 

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been laid up (and recovered, thank you) and preoccupied with what precisely I do want to write about (other than politics over at the other place). It’s not as though I haven’t watched anything over the past three weeks. Quite the contrary, I’ve watched a shit-ton of stuff. There’s been an embarrassment of riches; repertory cinema over at the River Oaks and (surprise!) my local Regal theater. The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and more. In the wake of Robert Redford’s passing, The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Heck, I even rewatched the complete Mr. Moto series with Peter Lorre because I couldn’t think of anything else to do while I was in and out of various fever dreams.

But what I really want to do is hit this year’s ’tis the Season series where I want to cover the complete Universal Frankenstein series from the 1930s and ‘40s, ahead of Guillermo del Toro’s vision due out this month. I also really want to get back to 30s Hitch and the films of Anna May Wong. I also want to sing the praises of actually going to the theater. It’s crazy that a night with a family of three can break the bank, but that’s also why I’m a big believer in subscription programs like Regal Unlimited or the River Oaks Theater’s Cinema Savant program. If you’ve got a family that likes going out to see movies, you could do worse than get memberships for the whole family and shave off a considerable chunk of change. Regal’s program pays for itself with two flicks (actually more like one and a half) and the most you’ll pay is a .54 service charge.

In any case, cinema remains my topic to write about, largely because it is communal and it brings me happiness to share these droppings with you. When we go to the theater and the lights go down, we all entire a collective dream. Even if I’m reviewing a streaming movie or something i own, just knowing that others can see and experience it lends a kind of special aura to watching it. In some ways, it’s as if we are all sharing some shamanic adventure where we enter other states, other narratives, and we can come back and compare notes. 

For sure, not everything is going to merit a report or a response. I don’t have any great thoughts to share about Peter Lorre’s Moto, except to say that if ever there were an example of a pro giving B-movies his all, it’s that series, yellow-face and all. Actually, in some ways, given Lorre’s “otherness” as a foreigner (and a pain-addled drug addict, and a formerly renowned European stage actor, and the lingering, looming shadow of M over his Hollywood work, perhaps his assumption of an Asian role gave him a kind of buffer or distance from his impending sense of having fallen from Brechtian grace. Yes, the appropriation of Asian identities by Warner Oland, Boris Karloff, and Lorre rubs us very much the wrong way, but it’s hard to be too condemnatory since that appropriation was part and parcel of good ol’ white America’s racism and xenophobia. 

So no, not gonna write anymore about Moto. As much as I’d love to blabber about the Bergmans, Scorseses, Coppolas, and others I really loved seeing again on the big screen, these have been covered by others and much better than I could. Which isn’t to say that I might be inspired to look at them from another, more personal point of views as I think about it…hm.

The most difficult part of all this is actually carving out the time. I’m retired, but I have a couple of projects I’m working on that take up a certain bandwidth and somewhere between those and living life, the couple of hours it takes to poop out a review or the six to eight hours for a - more or less - more involved analysis of a film is sometimes more difficult to finagle than not.

I’m not whining! Really! It would be swell if I was getting paid for this because it would automatically put the onus on me to prioritize writing about movies, but hey! I’m not getting paid for it! I’ve got a rinky-dink Patreon account that I still don’t know what I’m going to do with. Every time I look at it and think about revamping it, I feel like I need to burn it down and start over from scratch.

Anyway, all of this said, I’ll get back in the saddle - maybe even tomorrow! I can’t promise I’ll be more prolific and less profligate, but it’s highly likely that I’ll get more reviews and essays up this month than last (not saying a whole hell of a lot, but here we are).

Thanks for sticking with me, and I’ll try not to be a stranger. Or any stranger than usual.