66: Glad to Be Here

I've been catching up on Eye of the Duck, a podcast hosted by my friends Adam and Dom. Every week they go through a movie's themes and plot and try to find a single scene that manages to capture the essence of the movie in question. This summer they're going through a miniseries of '80s dark fantasy films, a genre that I like very much from an aesthetic standpoint, but that I haven't watched all that much of. I caught up with the Dark Crystal episode this week (a movie that I have seen before, and admire very much). Early in the episode, Adam mentioned that watching movies like The Dark Crystal (and I'm paraphrasing here) make him glad that people make art.

It's a sentiment I can get behind, and a feeling that I like to chase. Whenever I remember that we're all alive, and we have the ability to create things, and wevmanage to find a group of people to create and appreciate those things with, I get bowled over. It's a feeling primarily of gratitude and wonder, not even about the art itself, but about the fact that, somehow, art was made, and I get to see it.

I get this feeling most reliably when I'm going to a show, whether it's live theater or watching a band play music. Watching movies with an appreciative crowd works, too, but it's a more rare feeling, I suspect because movies by their very nature tend to hide the artifice a little. You can draw attention to the fact that the lead actor performs all their own stunts, and you can tell the audience bits of trivia about how a certain effect was achieved, but the end result is preserved, more or less unchangeably, and the only thing that alters the experience of watching the movie is the context in which it's presented, and the viewer's own attitude toward the film. With art that's performed in front of an audience, you really never quite know what's going to happen, and it's never going to be exactly the same each time.

What really gets me is the realization that someone–or a group of people–had a creative vision, and that they were able to coordinate a large number of people in service of that vision. (Bad art requires coordination of some sort too–The Room wasn't made only by Tommy Wiseau, after all–but that only makes me even more verklempt when a large group of creative people manage to pull something off, and make it look good and easy.) I'm bowled over by the idea that someone else had an idea, and they were able to communicate what they wanted to create to however many other people, who then agreed to help them do it, whether for love or money or both, and then they were able to pull that artistic vision together into something that could be shared with others, and those others wanted to come and watch for themselves. And then some of those people, by nature of being in the room, find something meaningful in the art they saw, and it inspires them to go and talk about it with others. I guess my little linguist self is always going to marvel about the fact that people can communicate with each other, however imperfectly. Introduce a way to express that communication to a crowd, in a way that might change some of the audience's lives? I'm never going to get over it.

What I wrote:

I wrote about Michael Mann's 1981 feature film debut Thief for Bright Wall/Dark Room this week.

What I talked about:

On Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I mixed it up over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (I dug the art style; he wasn't a fan). We also talked about Hayao Miyazaki's "lesser" film Howl's Moving Castle.

What I watched:

I caught up with Ridley Scott's 1985 movie Legend this past week. It's being covered on the Eye of the Duck podcast soon, and I've always been curious about dark fantasy-flavor Tom Cruise. Unfortunately the script's terrible, but I really dug the set design, costumes, and cinematography; there's a gorgeous dream-ballet sequence in which the love interest dances with a shadow and comes away transformed by the experience. As a mood piece, the movie really moves. It's at its best when it's showcasing the human body in motion.