I am in love with movies. I won’t try to write the definitive “Why I Love Movies” entry because I can’t do justice to that. I’ll just jot down random bits about it right now... I have two foundational movie moments that stand out—no, three. Well no, probably more but I want to mention these. It’s very hard for me to pick things, list things, rank things. Especially when it comes to stuff I love as much as movies and music.
ONE--Watching E.T. when it came out in the 80s, with my grandfather. My grandfather is a very dignified macho man, a man’s man, when I was little I thought of him as a living legend really. My grandfather was a bit Steve McQueen, a bit Gene Kelley, a bit Humphrey Bogart—he was Clark Gable saying “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”. He smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks scotch and his favorite food is steak. We’ll go out to a Thai restaurant and he will inquire about the steak frittes. We’ll go out to a Martini bar and he’ll order the scotch. Ice and Perrier water. Well, one day, in 1982 (83?), I was there to watch him lose his shit as they say, just weep like a child, when E.T. had to go home. And then he whispered Don’t tell anybody to me further emblazing this moment in my memory as a Foundational Moment. And the magic of the movies was thus manifest to me. To this day when some movie snob wants to go on and on about what a lesser being I am for loving Spielberg, I think back to that day and tell them “you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Growing up, I was obsessed with movies. I would collect these movie cards that came with each issue of “Premiere” magazine, when I was 7 or 8. And I would basically learn the basic facts about each movie (director, writer, main actors, synopsis), so that though I was not old enough to see most of them, I would still know what they were about. This was especially handy come awards season. The Cesars were bigger to me than the Oscars then because I was in Belgium. At the time and in my early years there was not a real understanding of what a director did, or what it meant to edit. I just knew those things were part of the movie “thing”, and typical for a smart kid, I could declare what the job entailed (a director directs the movie) without real comprehension of it. That changed with movie moment 2.
TWO--Watching Do The Right Thing many years later, when I first moved to the States. Spike is my first. The first director that made directing something I could understand. When I watched that movie I had this weird feeling all along of a third presence, something extra from what I was used to engage with: beyond the actors’s performances and the plot and whatever emotional trip the story was putting me on. There was the filmmaker: an intelligence and sensibility was directing this thing, the way it moved, the way the thing was shot, the way it was lit, there was a commander of the vibe. And just like that, it was like a whole language I loved to hear my whole life but could never understand was suddenly decoded for me--translated. It was my first “film is art” moment. It sent me back to voraciously go back and watch all my favorites, all my classics, with this “new” code that I had broken—that would make me (could this be possible?) love them even more.
Another set of foundational moments involves the trauma of watching things that rocked my world. Third grade was the year of watching grown-up movies. I wanted to talk about them in class. Gandhi. And then A Passage to India. My teacher was profoundly concerned about my well being at that point. I didn’t care, I wanted to talk about Gandhi and the scene where Gandhi leads the protest where they burn their ID cards in South Africa. However number of minutes it was it was a complete political education, skipped the mind, went into the heart. And I was not traumatized by watching these things that I was supposedly too young to see. As a parent now I don’t think it was a good idea, but then I saw it the way you see the truth: eyes open and knowingly. My best friend Hatem’s father worked in the movie theater and he helped us sneak in. His initial intention was to help us sneak into cartoons and age-appropriate fair without paying. I took it a step further and through some circumstances I can’t explain right now, would use his methods to sneak into age-inappropriate movies. This is how I saw Gandhi and A Passage To India. I had a similar method for doing this at home, which involved hanging upside down so that my eyes could glimpse at the TV in the living room through the spaces between the steps of the spiral staircase. It’s hard to put in words and I don’t have any memory of why I went to such great lengths. This is how I saw that horrific russian roulette scene in Deer Hunter at the wrong age. This is also how I became obsessed with Jesus watching the Franco Zefirelli mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. If a better Jesus flick has been made since that one (Jesus Christ Superstar notwithstanding, of course--different genre!), I do not know of it.
Netlfix is thus heaven for me. I’ve been doing my own personal film festivals. I’ve had a really good run of Scorsese films and then right after I went into my Spike Lee festival which is still underway. To spend a couple of days watching the work of the same person, in whatever arrangement you wantis amazingly rewarding. It gives you a sense of things. I whole heartedly wrote Spike Lee a sincere, effusive “Dear Mr. Lee” fan letter on the night I saw Crooklyn followed by 25th Hour, and cried so much. I just think he is so profoundly true and emotionally intelligent in his films, and so tough too, Spike has such balls; when all the credits stop rolling and the 40 Acres and a Mule stamp shows up on the screen you stand up and cheer like your team won. And I really don’t mean that because I’m black: I mean the team of those who are alive in a complicated world that starves us of meaning (and meaning-seeking and revelation), that team. And you know of course there would be no Spike without Scorsese--if you watch Raging Bull and Mean Streets, it’s all there. Evoked. Connected. Code is revealed.
I’m sure I don’t speak as intelligently about movies as true aficionados, but it’s not about that for me, in a way. Well it is: I tried to be cool in film class, to no avail (as is now fully apparent from this treatise I’m writing right now, I didn’t let that stop me). But most important it’s about the love. I’m talking about a love and love is really full of trap doors into cliché and idiocy… My son really fell in love with Singin’ In The Rain, which to me felt as if I was Michael Jordan and my young son turned out to be a basketball phenom. I have these movies I show him and they are my own way of checking how much made of my flesh and blood he is—not that he’s not, but you know what I mean? It’s also a very special, personal gift I give him. I watch him watch these movies and hold my breath and when he loves them I feel like I did a good thing for him, forever. Recently that gift was a Star Wars Film Festival, Episodes One Through Six. Back to Singin in the Rain: we now have our own inside singin in the rain jokes we make. We're building a repertoire together. This is important: the memories that I cherish most are the ones someone took time to make with me. This film now makes him a kind of happy that I know so well, a kind of happy that will blow up the corners of his life all the time, time and time again.
I wish I felt as closely connected to other art too and though I love it, it’s not the same. I know I’m not a film expert but I “get” film for my own purposes; it resonates. I don’t get opera the same way or certain kinds of music or some plastic arts, but I'm working on it because I know why I should. I know from loving my movies. It’s taken me a long time to stop feeling a bit stupid for being a popular art person in a way, because you’re taught to think it’s a handicap. In fact, it’s not—the media or the content changes but the point is not media or content. The essence of it is the place you are vis a vis the art in your life, whatever it is: if it’s central, if you dialogue with it, if it gets under your skin and tears it up for good or for bad, and mostly if it stretches what your life is at a particular moment, that’s the essence. And whether it’s ballet or Madonna’s latest video (don’t get me started!!!), you are your most alive in that moment.
<< Home