Rediscovering the Dance in the Dark

For someone who’s always enjoyed movies, from the earliest memories as a kid with 20-something parents, who loaded us into the station wagon and went to the drive-in theater (in Southern California and then Arizona, and in the heyday of those venues). Saw some great stuff, a bit over my head but I remembered.

And the I entered the 70s with some movie autonomy, a pretty spectacular decade for innovative filmmaking, and I dipped in and out. I have a couple of friends who are serious cinephiles, and they’ve opened my horizons a bit. But, you know. I love movies. Not passionate about digging into some of more trying (or violent, or frightening images because in those case, maybe the written word is better?) Anyway, squeamishness trumps quality and I skip.

The pandemic decimated by attention span, so movies were mostly out. I could watch hours of TV series, back to back, but those come with manufactured breaks. I can step in and out, and even skip a week or so, sometimes longer.

The past couple of weeks, though, I’ve been exploring in really a technologically convenient way. I watched a film with Seth Roger (50/50; he plays a supporting part and a supporting friend to a buddy suffering from cancer and treatment). He was excellent but also very funny.

So I went on a Seth marathon, and I was pleased. Some bursts of long laughter, a rarity for me. Some more dramatic roles that were fine but less polished. But his output is stunning, directing, producing, writer, and he managed that on 7-8 joints a day. People are complicated.

And then I saw “The Guilt Trip,” a mother-and-son road trip with Rogen and Barbra Streisand from 2012, and I was immensely intertained. A simple family bonding experience with little trauma and a nice resolution, and no one, particularly Streisand, was the slight best bit off. It was a real, fun, and occasionally hurt performance. Roger could have been any actor, although I enjoyed him a lot.

Point is here – No matter how much we moan and gripe about the spectaculars we see in the theaters, now that they’re back in business, there’s a backlog of fun, small films just waiting to be discovered on Netflix or Amazon or Disney+. I had a great time. Maybe time for another taste of Superbad. Movie cracked me up.