60: Taking the Time

One of the tricky parts about being a self-taught part-time critic with a day job is the feeling that I'll never catch up. I've never taken a film class; I don't live in New York or Los Angeles. I'm fortunate to be a part of a critic circle that grants me access to advance screenings and awards-season screeners, but strangely, all that access makes me feel like I'm falling further behind, because I'm never the first to publish a review. I don't shape the conversation. On my worst days, I wonder why I even try.

This sounds a little self-pitying, and it is; part of it stems from ambition, and part of it stems from comparison against other people. I keep having to remind myself that I'm young, and I'm still figuring it out, and that God willing I'll keep learning until the day I die.

Maybe that's why Wes Anderson's Asteroid City touched me so deeply. I'd been feeling the catch-up crunch with that movie, too–I wasn't able to see it until it had been released wide in theaters, and my husband and I had to fight traffic to get to the sold-out theater on time. But the lights went down and the movie started and I knew within five minutes that this was a story I wanted to sink into, with all its layered characters and intricate pieces. It's not a puzzle, but it is a puzzling movie, in the sense that I wasn't fully certain where Anderson was going, and in that I wasn't able to articulate how or why it worked for me. I certainly can't do it in a short review, even a week later. Anderson is grappling with themes of loneliness and alienation here; the film's primarily in sunny pastels, but it's emotionally quite dark.

I want to see this movie again. I want to talk about it with everyone else who's seen it. It's lovely and sharp, a wounded movie about wounded characters, and I don't know that I've read or listened to any reviews that fully do the film justice. The people who got to it first all feel like they're grappling with the movie just as much as I am, and suddenly I'm reminded that we're all just catching up; some people just happen to be better at hiding it than others. I can keep trying (and failing) to be the smartest person in the room, or I can come along for the ride. I think the best conversations happen when I slow down and listen. It's why I do this in the first place: either I love a piece of art and I want to articulate why, or I don't understand it and I want to figure it out. Both approaches benefit from time and a cooperative spirit. The cultural/critical conversation is more fun when it's a real conversation anyway.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Asteroid City. He introduced me to Steven Spielberg's 2005 version of War of the Worlds. The conversation here was a really good one–we're both still thinking through Asteroid City, and we both have mixed feelings about War of the Worlds, and I found our reviews of each rewarding.

What I watched:

Yesterday evening I watched Nimona, an adaptation ND Stevenson's two-page comic that became his senior thesis that became a webcomic that became a graphic novel. It's a pretty solid adaptation! Colorful, funny, and true to the characters while making all the necessary adjustments to make the story work in a completely different medium.