Sorting through the rubble of unwritten blog posts . . .
If you see me on the street and my eyes look swollen, it's because I've spent a good part of the last three days watching the final season of Six Feet Under on DVD. Because we don't subscribe to HBO, I've lived "in the gap" (via Chuck) for the last few months, going out of my way to avoid spoilers, and eagerly -- I mean eagerly -- anticipating the DVD release. I cried throughout most of "All Alone" and rewatched the last five minutes of "Everyone's Waiting" three times before finally allowing the closing credits to run. Those last four episodes are so great that I'm now willing to overlook the dip in quality during seasons 3 and 4 and can, without reservation, call Six Feet Under my all-time favorite TV series. I never would have imagined it possible that I could be made to care so deeply for a cast of characters.
A week or two ago, I queued up the most highly acclaimed films of the last two years that I had missed in the theaters, and they've just begun to trickle in. First up was Last Days, the final film in Gus Van Sant's recent trilogy of formal experiments. I think I'm actually more interested in the idea of these films than in the films themselves. That an American director with a bankable name has chosen to spend five years making elliptical narratives about violence -- films packed with brilliant long takes and extended periods of contemplative silence -- gives me great hope. I'd like to watch Last Days again, along with Gerry and Elephant, and give them all the time and attention they deserve.
This weekend I also finally caught up with Jia's The World. After watching so many American filmmakers over the past few months (Stillman, Ferrara, Hartley), it felt good to sit down with a foreign film again. I'm ambivalent about the final moments of The World, but it's still among the very best films of the last five years. Jia's examination of an Epcot-like theme park as capitalist simulacra comes three or four decades after postmodern artists in the West wrestled with similar metaphors (Doctorow in The Book of Daniel, Robert Coover in The Public Burning, Max Apple in The Oranging of America, etc.), but, to his credit, Jia grounds his commentary in a human story, and, damn, it's beautiful to look at. It was nice to see Jonathan Rosenbaum promoting the film on Zeitgeist's DVD release. Doug and I were almost hit by a car when we chased him down in the middle of a busy Toronto street two years ago. Rosenbaum had just seen The World for the second time that week and was already raving about it.
As a great fan and supporter of Caveh Zahedi's films, I've been delighted to see his name and face appear all over the film blogosphere this week. My favorite piece so far is Susan Gerhard's interview with Caveh and his wife, Amanda Field. As I wrote in my response to I Am a Sex Addict, the dramatic pull of the film -- especially for those viewers familiar with In the Bathtub of the World -- is the very real relationship at stake. It's nice to hear Amanda's take on the film. Also, this is the first I've heard about reshoots that were necessary to eliminate actual footage of an ex-girlfriend. I'll be curious to see the new version.
Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, I'm embarrassed to admit, is the only novel I've finished in months. Like Jim, I worry that I'm losing the discipline or the energy or simply the attention span required of serious fiction. Not that Ford's novel is particularly "serious" or "difficult"; in fact, it's compulsively readable -- one of those three-days-in-the-life of a struggling character (struggling metaphysically, that is) novels in which the character's life finally, inevitably, recklessly spirals toward epiphany. I've already picked up a copy of its sequel, Independence Day, to keep me occupied during the long flight on Friday.
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