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February 14, 2006Happy Valentine's Day.
I can't think of a much more romantic place from which to write today than San Marten's French Quarter. I'm at a table just off the beach, my eyes filled with the three or four shades of blue in the sea, just 40 yards away.
And all of this has me considering the importance of beauty in our lives, in our film, in the core of our well being. There is, indeed, something enriching about something as perfectly, naturally beautiful as all of this.
We spend a lot of time in the Land o' Criticism ripping into those who would have the world be beautiful too much of the time. Far too often, we who claim to know better are seduced by the arrogance of the unpleasant... not our own unpleasantness or our arrogance about it, but rather the bodybuilder flexing of movies that tackle tough subjects. I think really hard, therefore I am.
The Academy, as every monkey with a typewriter seems destined to write this season (it's funny, kinda, how even as "one of those web people," the crowding of every outlet known to man obsessing on Oscar as though it was their salvation is making me chafe a bit), clearly values the message over the medium. This is not to say that I would be thrilled if Oscar more closely resembled the annual Top Ten Box Office chart rather than the MCN Critics' Top Ten Round-Up. But I would say that it might indicate a more emotionally healthy business if the Academy found it in "their" hearts to nominate a movie like The 40 Year Old Virgin or Wedding Crashers for Best Picture... or at least Best Screenplay.
But I digress...
How might simple images of beauty affect the daily experience of living in this crazy world of ours? How about joy?
Certainly it is more than a little important to be conscious of the world and our responsibility to at least consider the agonies in the lives of many millions who still suffer daily in this world. Perhaps Preston Sturges is still the keeper of film's most perfect representation of this with Sullivan's Travels. The film, while very funny and in certainly ways - still very Hollywood - also manages to appreciate that there is real pain in the world and that it deserves our consideration and respect. And there are few images more beautiful, in film or in life, than the men and women, destroyed and left homeless and hungry by the Depression, laughing with the abandon of a real gut laugh, at one of Sullivan's comedies that he thought had no place of value in the world.
And sitting here by the beach, I can only think that my spirit is being enriched, like my computer battery being plugged into a socket, by each image of beauty that passes into my head.
Of course, in the film world, it is harder to mark the territory of beauty and, more so, of the territory of honest beauty. Movies are myths... even docs to a certain extent. Talking about In Cold Blood this week during the Floating Film Festival, Scott Wilson talked about the famous scene of rain on the window reflecting into tears on Robert Blake's face in the film. It would certainly be the first shot in Conrad Hall's video obit. But the mythology that it was just a magical movie fluke was disabused... without intent, but in simply telling the truth. They set up the shot, Hall saw what was happening with the simulated rain on the stage, and he then rigged up the "magical" shot. (Another great Hall moment in the festival was seeing Scott Wilson's screen test, in which he did a scene from a play that wasn't part of the In Cold Blood script, but also in which the lighting of harsh blacks and cold whites, and distinct shadows in which to hide were already as apparent as they would be in the film.)
Some people don't like the sun... hate the beach. For some, the magnificence of Park City, where I was driving through a gloriously white and gray near-blizzard just two weeks ago, is the height of beauty. For others, the top of a mountain.
We really forget the beauty of the human form in our workaday lives. On this trip, the third-quarter bodies of aging have been on endless view. And I know I am still too steeped in something to appreciate that form of beauty fully. But even young bodies always seem to come with personal asterisks these days. So many work so hard to understand the beauty in Picasso or Klee or even purely commercial art, yet we rarely give that kind of room to the bodies around us. And passion suffers. The subjectivity of beauty is real, but it is layered so deeply in us all that we have narrowed our fields of beauty to smaller and smaller slices, often beyond obtaining.
When we talked about Memoirs of A Geisha this last season, the phrase "the cinematography was beautiful" was spat like a bullet directly into the heart of the film. And while in that case, I felt the film was worth killing, it was not because it was too beautiful for words, but because the aspiration of the film was far rangier than the cinematography and the beauty of the images is where the quality work in the film stopped dead. (Rob Marshall... coming to the helm of a hopefully - for him - career saving movie musical any minute now.) But there are many times when this standard of "too beautiful to be good" is a real shame. And certainly, anyone who walked around saying "it's only about the performance" regarding Capote or Walk The Line this season should be forced to consider where those performances came from and, if you like the movies, whether those performances could have existed in a vacuum.
Anyway... the scene here is too beautiful for words. The topless beach part has been the least interesting aspect of the experience. In fact, for the sake of the health of the skin and the well being of the other beachgoers, "Put it on!" But there is still a wealthy of beauty in the people, topless, bathing suited, or in parkas. And all the natural beauty around us seems to be a reminder to open our eyes and to see it just a little clearer for a change. Why do we crave beauty, love, even sex? Because that is, indeed, our nature.
There are so many ugly images to distract us from it. But when you allow yourself to focus on beauty, you may expose your heart, and you may be risking a lot... but what is life without it, in all its forms? Beauty is as simple as a speck of honey on your tongue or as complex as being the Dalai Lama. Soothe that savage breast. All of our lives depends on it.
Me... I'm going to go enjoy the sand, the sights, and perhaps the crisp salty assault of the ocean water. Good day.
January 3, 2006 - Reflections On A New Year
January 6, 2006 - Sundance Preview
January 5, 2006 - The Business Of 2005, Pt 1
January 9, 2006 - The Business Of 2005, Pt 2
January 11 - Munich In Sequence | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3
January 12 - V For Vendetta
