A double helping of Meat Loaf wraps up a Film Nerd birthday

How the hell did that happen?

Is it possible? Did they finally admit that reality is happening?

Trust me, I don’t want theaters to be closed, but I’m glad Warner Bros is doing the responsible thing and pulling Tenet from the release schedule indefinitely. When we can open theaters, then studios should start worrying about how to release things.

I’m already hearing grumbling from people in international markets, and I’ll be honest: I think studios should consider releasing things overseas if those markets are ready. Yes, piracy is an issue, but so is the complete and utter shutdown of the industry, and there are all sorts of costs involved with putting a movie on a shelf for an indeterminate amount of time. There are so many factors to consider, but I think a fundamental one is this: the United States blew it. We can’t open movie theaters right now or in the near future because we blew it. We did not respond correctly to a crisis, and we continue to pay the price, and we will continue to pay it for the foreseeable future. There are countries where they could definitely roll out films.

The UK has their theaters open? Great. Here’s James Bond as your reward. And if that hurts American film fans’ feelings, so be it. It stings. It hurts. It would suck knowing that something was opening somewhere else that we are still months and months from seeing, but I am willing to see that happen at this point to help the industry and also to reinforce to Americans that there are consequences for their actions. It’s clear that the thing that Americans hate, more than anything else, is being told no. We are the angry toddlers of the world, and the way you correct an angry toddler’s behavior is by simply moving forward with the consequences. You don’t argue about it. You don’t ask them if they like it. Right now, we don’t deserve movie theaters.

Unfortunately, by the time this is done, I’m hearing some wild things about what we can expect the moviegoing landscape to look like once we get a handle on this pandemic. This is, of course, dependent on the idea that we eventually will get a handle on it. According to NATO, there are just over 40,000 screens in the US right now. By the time we are actually able to open theaters safely, I’m hearing some estimates that could put us at about 1/4 of that number still standing. We could be looking at fewer screens than there were in the ‘80s. What we think of as theatrical exhibition is in the middle of a seismic generational shift, and that’s so much larger a story than just “Is Tenet finally coming out this week?”

I am sorry that Christopher Nolan’s film has become emblematic of the larger issue, but that’s the studio’s fault. I understand that they feel the brunt of many people’s frustration right now, but I also think they’ve invited that. I understand that they hoped things would change, and hope is fine. Hope is tricky, though. There’s hope and then there’s willful delusion. They should have taken the film off of the release schedule and worried about the date once they had information that supported it. Instead, they turned the entire summer into an ongoing news cycle of no news, constantly making their film the focus of the conversation instead of just getting out of the way. Everyone wants to be the hero of the summer at this point, but there is no hero this summer. Nothing’s going to swoop in and save the story. We did it wrong. Theaters are closed. They will stay closed. That’s the sad and brutal truth of it. Warner isn’t the only company that’s been playing this same game, of course.

Just yesterday, Sony Picture Classics sent me an email about their October theatrical release date for a comedy called The Climb. I’ve heard good things about the movie, but it flat-out annoyed me to get that e-mail. It seems willful and arrogant and frustrating because of the way it gums up the conversation. No, Sony, you’re not going to be in a theater in October. And you know that as well as I do.

Stop trying to make me feel guilty with the phrase “the way it was meant to be seen.” You made a theatrical motion picture to be seen in the theater. No shit. I get it. But let’s stop pretending that none of us will be able to adequately process the majesty and the awe of Christopher Nolan’s SF/action film just because we don’t see it on a giant screen first. It’s insulting, and I don’t need you to tell me what does or doesn’t make me a good film fan. It is unsafe to be in movie theaters in the U.S. Period. It is unpopular to state simple uncomfortable truth. Everything has to be dressed up and softened and delivered with optimism even if that optimism is, frankly, dangerous at this point. I think part of the reason we’ve been told that we’re six weeks away from re-opening since the beginning of this is that they knew telling us six months would have been too much for most people to take. They also would have had to answer hard economic questions that no one can answer, and no one wanted to do that. So instead, we’ve turned the entire year so far into one long game of “ARE WE THERE YET?!”, which every parent can tell you is the single worst game of all time.

No. We are not there yet. Not by a long shot.

A DOUBLE HELPING OF MEAT LOAF

You have to find ways to keep yourself sane right now, and if movies are deep down in your bones the way they are in mine, this has been a tough adjustment.

It’s been just as hard on my kids, who definitely love movie going. I feel for Toshi, whose 14th birthday last year included his first visit to the New Beverly and his first midnight movie. This year, I had some very fun plans for him, all involving theaters, and none of it was possible.

On Friday, I wrote about the first part of his birthday movie marathon. I’ll pick up with our prime time show, the main event. By this point, we’d already seen Trainspotting, Cigarette Burns, A Clockwork Orange, and Fast Times At Ridgemont High. We took a break for dinner, talking over everything we’d seen up to that point, and we talked again about the function of satire. I felt like I couldn’t underline the point strongly enough because there were plenty of adults, including people working at the studio releasing the film, who did not realize at the time of its release that Fight Club is a satire.

It’s safe to say the film was a hit with Toshi, and it’s equally safe to say he won’t be starting a real-life fight club any time soon. From the moment I put in the Blu-ray and the menu for Never Been Kissed came up, Toshi was laughing. The film is so dense, so packed with information, that he sat silent for most of it, just trying to track all of the visual information. One thing that impressed me is that he spotted every single close-to-subliminal flash of Tyler Durden that shows up before he makes his first real appearance. There were critics older than me who I talked to who couldn’t see the flashes of Durden even when it was pointed out to them, and I think it’s about how your eyes get trained when you’re young. My kids have grown up processing visual information that’s cut so much faster than what I grew up with, and the things I grew up with were cut so much faster than what my parents were used to. I love that Fight Club actually taxed older viewers; it seems appropriate.

The film is just as blisteringly angry as it was when it was released, but when you look at it from some distance, the satire seems far more obvious than it did in ’99. Toshi was fascinated by Tyler, but at no point did he find Tyler particularly persuasive or seductive. Instead, he was intrigued by the way Tyler would give voice to something that seemed reasonable right before saying something outrageous. There were little things that seemed to bug him or not add up as we were watching, and I let him sit there and simmer a bit. He was fascinated, but he wasn’t sure how any of it made sense or added up, and I could tell it was starting to bother him.

And then the other shoe dropped.

There are moments you will always forget from your history as a movie fan. You remember what you saw and where you saw it and how you saw it. I remember when Ben Gardner’s head popped out of the hole in the boat in Jaws and I did a back flip over a couch in my friend’s house. I remember the way my friends and I reacted when Jason Voorhees came popping out of the lake. I remember where I was sitting in the theater when Frank Booth invited Jeffrey to “take a ride” in Blue Velvet, and I remember how I couldn’t breathe.

For Toshi, I’m guessing that moment when he suddenly realized that Tyler Durden and the narrator are the same person is one of those moments. Watching his face as he made that connection is going to be one of those moments for me forever now. He turned to me, eyes wide, then turned back to the screen, then turned back to me. He looked delighted and outraged in equal measure. Suddenly, all those things that didn’t make sense or that were bothering him simply went out the window. Suddenly, it all added up. As the film shows you those same scenes from a different angle, and we start to see the reality versus what we’d been told, he was laughing, absolutely amazed at the game the film had played on him.

Like Clockwork, this is a film that pushes the limits of dark humor, wielding satire like a weapon, and Fincher seems gleeful about the way he gets to stick his thumb in the audience’s eye over and over. We talked through the film’s big ideas, and we talked about how each of the performances was its own special kind of marvel. He was fascinated by Edward Norton and the strange comic rhythms of his work. He was impressed by just how committed Brad Pitt was to the strange frequency where Tyler lives. He found Marla Singer compelling but until the film made Tyler’s role clear, he couldn’t figure out anything about her behavior.

One of the minor pleasures of the film for him was the sudden discovery of Meat Loaf. He saw his name in the credits and couldn’t get over it. Then once he saw Bob and his bitch-tits, he was absolutely captivated. It wasn’t until we finished Fight Club and I started to get our final movie ready that it occurred to me that I had programmed an accidental Meat Loaf double-feature. I did it because one of Toshi’s favorite films is The Perks of Being A Wallflower. In that film, the main characters bond over screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Toshi’s been curious about that film ever since. I wanted to take him to the Nuart for a real midnight screening of the film as one of the pieces of his birthday, and since it seems like it’s going to be a while before we have that opportunity, and a long while if ever before they have a live cast and it’s the full midnight experience, I decided that Rocky was the best way to wrap up his birthday.

We started it just after 11:00, and we had our dessert before it started. Toshi was already overstuffed with movies by that point, but when I told him what we were watching, he positively beamed. I was curious how the film would play for him as a movie removed from the experience of seeing it with a bunch of lunatics yelling along at it. So much of what I think about Rocky Horror is tied to the experiences I’ve had with it. The first person I knew who was into Rocky Horror was also the first person I knew who went to theater camp, and in both cases, those things were transformative moments. Suddenly, this shy withdrawn person I knew found a voice and a vocabulary for all these things they felt.

I feel like Rocky is a point in cultural coming of age that lots of people have in common. It attracts certain personalities, people who are looking for a way to express a voice and who are worried that they don’t know how to do that. It’s a film for people who feel like weirdos and outsiders, and it is a film that can be very important for people if they find it at the right age. I remember when I was ten and I saw Fame, and those kids all went to see the film together. It definitely put the film on my radar, as did Danny Peary’s piece about it in his Cult Movies books. It wasn’t until I started working at a theater that was I actually got to see it and got to experience the whole atmosphere for the first time, and I thought it was a hoot. We played the film at our theater every Friday and Saturday, and pretty soon, I was working every Friday and Saturday at midnight as well. It was fun. It was fun to see who showed up every week. Half of the regulars were also staff members at the theater, and I guess we figured that since we had to clean it up anyway, we might as well be part of the mayhem every week.

One thing’s for sure: I did not bring my Rocky Horror fandom into my home. My parents are fairly open-minded people, but I’m not sure any amount of conversation could have set the right context for “Sweet Transvestite” to play in my house. It is a film that still seems fairly wild today in terms of gender politics. The terminology may be a bit quaint, but the movie’s big horny heart still seems to be almost giddy about how out there it is.

Toshi’s response was pure joy. He laughed at it, he thought the music was great, and he was absolutely flattened by Tim Curry. I’ve made sure the boys had some exposure to Curry before this. They’ve seen him in Clue, where he’s flat-out amazing, and in Oscar, where he steals the movie, and in Hunt For Red October, where he’s very good among a whole slew of very good performances. Even so, nothing can really prepare you for the raw energy of Frank N. Furter, and Toshi thought the performance was incredible. He laughed at the way Frank seduced both Janet and Brad, he cackled at the way Curry turns the mere pronunciation of words into an event, and he stayed engaged the whole way through. One of his most complicated reactions was to Susan Sarandon, who he once met, making her smile when he excitedly recognized her as “Speed Racer’s mom.” All of a sudden, he’s seeing her performance as Janet, which is not just a canny comic performance and a memorably stylized vocal performance, but also a genuinely sexual performance, and it’s a lot to process.

It amazes me how my kids seem totally chill about the evolving nature of sexual identity in the 21st century. They don’t seem to have any hang-ups about anything. We talk about LGBTQ people, about trans people, and in conversation after conversation, they’re very matter-of-fact and accepting. It took me a lot of personal experience, especially after moving to LA, to really let go of the programming of the ‘80s and learn how to not only respect that community but also openly embrace them as my community as well. I fully cop to having all sorts of weird negative programming in place when I moved to LA, despite having a gay aunt who remains one of my favorite people in my family. I guess I thought because I loved her without reservation, that meant I was totally enlightened and informed, and the truth is that I had a lot of weird biases and prejudices that I didn’t even recognize. There’s none of that in my kids, though. Toshi didn’t seem even remotely confused or weirded out by any of what he saw in Rocky Horror, and he didn’t view it as “a weird joke,” either. Instead, he seemed to really like the movie’s broad world view and the way Frank’s private little world of oddballs and outsiders feels like there’s zero judgment involved.

I’ve been writing about the experience of showing films to Toshi for so long now that it’s easy to miss how significantly things have changed recently. We’re watching things and having adult conversations, and it’s clear that he’s becoming a thoughtful, curious, open-hearted young man. I think he is full of kindness and I think he’s going to get bruised a bit from people who take advantage of that, but I think he’s also going to meet people who will get just how wonderful that is, and he’s going to have lifelong friends as a result. As we spent the rest of the time he was here, which was most of the next day, talking about the films we watched and then using those conversations to talk about a hundred other things, I was so pleased because all of the films seemed to land in a different way for him.

And for anyone who has any questions about just how brutally honest he is about his reactions to the things I show him, let me share one final story. He told me just before he left that he’d had a chance to think about all of the films, and he had his list ready. He’s reached that stage of film fandom now where he makes lists because all film nerds end up making lists. It’s just one of the ways we digest movies.

“Number one is Fight Club,” he said. “I loved it. I love the story. I love the twist. It’s very cool and very funny. Number two? Clockwork. I love Kubrick so much. It was super heavy. I thought Alex was incredible. That’s a great performance. Number three was Rocky Horror. I had so much fun with that. It’s just wild and fun. I want to see it again with the midnight stuff turned on, and I still want to see it in a theater. Then I guess number four and five are interchangeable. I thought Trainspotting and Fast Times were both so good, and I liked characters in both of them, and I’m really glad I saw them.”

Then he took a beat and shrugged. “And your movie was fine, too,” he added.

Brutal. I have been murdered. That’s my boy. It’s going to be a great year of movies ahead, and I have a feeling he’s going to keep me on my toes for years to come.

AND FINALLY…

I am obsessed with a video game.

I blame a mysterious benefactor. I am genuinely hurting right now financially. I’m reading whatever I get sent. I’m watching whatever I am sent. I am not buying much of anything. This pandemic really did add the final straws to the camel’s back, and I’m afraid the camel is going to explode any moment now.

As a result, I wasn’t about to buy a $60 game right now. I just couldn’t. Even when everyone started talking about it on Twitter, I couldn’t justify it, and I made a crack on Twitter about how I guess I would accept a gift from someone if I absolutely HAD to. Because I know genuinely wonderful people, a friend ordered it and had it sent to me, and now I’ve got Ghost of Tsushima, which is basically Akira Kurosawa’s Red Dead Redemption. It’s a samurai game, set in an open world, and it is wall-to-wall delightful. I have just barely begun the game and I can already tell you I will play every single inch of the map. The combat is a delight, the visuals are lush and relaxing, and while it certainly doesn’t reinvent the open-world videogaming template, it follows it in a way that soothes my disordered brain.

Seriously. I could get lost in this thing. It’s amazing.

Anyone else playing something right now? Or this game in particular? If so, are you digging it as much as I am?

I’ve got more for you tomorrow or Thursday, and then we’ll be back with the Friday Spotlight.

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Image courtesy of Warner Bros
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Image courtesy of 20th Century Pictures
Image courtesy of Playstation/Sucker Punch