53: Taking Notes

New York City! I will be at the IFC Center on Wednesday, May 17 for a screening of Aliens, followed by a conversation between me and critic Matt Zoller Seitz and a signing for my book Becoming Alien. Tickets are available here. Hope to see you at the movies!

I am an obsessive note-taker. Doesn't matter if I'm in a meeting at my day job or in a screening for a movie I'm going to review–whatever the venue, if I think I'm going to need to remember something, I write it down. Most of the time I don't even refer back to the notes I've taken. It's the act of writing that forces me to remember.

Here's where the habit backfires: I get more invested in note-taking than I do in the thing I'm taking notes about. I want to remember everything I watch, and–if the movie's either very good or very bad–I keep trying to formulate how I'm going to write about it while I'm watching it. This leaves me at a remove from the movie, even as I'm actively engaging with it.

I've been thinking about this because I sat down to watch Aliens this week, for the express purpose of taking notes for next week's screening. It's a movie I'm already intimately familiar with, but it's been a couple of years. I shouldn't have worried: the movie's paced perfectly, and it's spare and mean and beautiful, the kind of movie that doesn't let you slide off it once it's grabbed you. I took careful notes at first, but put my pen down right around the drop-ship sequence about 45 minutes in. Any movie that can get me to sit down without anything in my hands to keep the wandering half of my brain occupied is a good one. I can't wait for Wednesday.

What I talked about:

For Seeing and Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. I paired it with Katsuhiro Otomo's anime film Akira, which has a surprising number of thematic resonances with the Guardians movie.

I lent my voice and my thoughts about There Will Be Blood to the limited podcast series Pod Thomas Anderson, which explores the filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson following a framework set out by my friend Ethan Warren in his new book about the director. The book is good! I was honored to be asked to be a part of the podcast! You can listen to the episode here!

What I'm watching:

My husband Josh and I have been making our way through Cowboy Bebop. It's 25 years old this year, and still great! I love how kinetic and lived-in the show's world is, and how uninterested the show is in exploring why the solar system turned out the way that it did. There's no dissection of social forces here, just a crew of misfit bounty hunters drifting from planet to planet, moon to moon, space station to space station, in a setting that looks very much of its late-90s time in terms of design sensibility, and that feels very much like the more dystopian parts of our own world. It's a Vibes show, and it's fun to just sit and marinate in it.