This year, your provincial pal the cinetrix celebrated Thanksgiving--her second ever outside of the northeast--with the Fesser's extended family in Michigan. [Come to think of it, the first time I skipped the family turkey fest I was also in the midwest--I ate steak and watched Trust with my pal the Adjustable Boy as snow fell outside his Chicago apartment. But I digress.]
The virtues of spending holidays with someone else's family are many. Traditional embarrassing stories are still trotted out, but they're rarely about your childhood. Also, you come off as a hero merely for helping with the dishes.
You also watch different movies. Cousin Dan and I had some free time last Wednesday, so we went to the university library's media collection. Tough to browse on a browser--so we spent a lot of time wracking suddenly empty craniums for names of films or directors we thought would play well to a diverse audience. We came up with Richard Linklater.
School of Rock was a surprising crowd-pleaser with the older folks on Wednesday night. Now that I am myself something of an educator, I was astonished how closely Summer the grade-grubber resembled some of my more tightly wound honors students. Oy. But I am not Jack Black, nor was meant to be. And, let's face it, even with Linklater at the helm, without Black you've got a Mr. Holland's Opus retread.
Unfortunately, after such a promising start, on Thursday the post-football stupor was accompanied by the braying caricatures of Meet the Fockers, a cringe-worthy entertainment courtesy of cable. Damn you, cable! What a cynical piece of shit that "movie" is. After two hours of idiocy, I had a larger sign language vocabulary and a renewed appreciation for Dustin Hoffman's ability to twinkle at will. That man is a machine.
Friday brought with it a trip to the Heidelberg Project, followed by sofa snoozing in front of the oh-so soothing story of Werner Herzog's quixotic quest to haul a ship through a South American jungle in the Les Blank doc Burden of Dreams, now available from Criterion. If you don't know the backstory of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, pull up a chair, because he encounters impossible to summarize difficulties while shooting the story of a man who wanted to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and basically makes Terry Gilliam [in Lost in La Mancha] look like a piker and Francis Ford Coppola [in Hearts of Darkness] come off as a whinging sissy boy. Herzog takes fiasco into a new dimension of mud and squalor.
Why put oneself through such misery?
Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.
It's fucking awesome, in the true sense of the word. [Pssst, Sac: Kinski!]
As a nice lagniappe, we also watched Blank's short doc Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. I can think of few better ways to recover from the excesses of our most American of holidays than to sit back as a German auteur cooks up his shoes at Alice Waters' chi-chi Chez Panisse circa 1980 and then eats them in front of a rapt Berkeley crowd, all because he bet Errol Morris he'd never make a film. I may make screening this a new holiday tradition.
So, what did you watch?
