Boyhood. Though the movie is pretty mesmerizing in a slice-of-life-y way, I think I’m more in awe of the work involved than the end product.

Unforgiven. My second viewing. This time around I got to see it on the big screen and it’s glorious. Previously.

Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.

Filed under: Clint Eastwood.

I read some Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson, which is a good way to fill little pockets of time here and there. Some of my favorites:

• “Hope” is the thing with feathers
• I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
• I’m Nobody! Who are you?
• I know some lonely Houses off the Road
• Death sets a Thing significant
• It’s coming – the postponeless Creature –
• It might be lonelier
• We grow accustomed to the Dark –
• A Charm invests a Face
• The going from a world we know
• Fame is a bee

If you’re hankerin’ for some Emily Dickinson set to music, check out John Adams’ orchestral piece Harmonium, which uses Donne’s Negative Love in addition to Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death and Wild Nights - Wild Nights!. It’s a phenomenal piece of music.

I read the Strugatsky Brothers’ book Definitely Maybe, and enjoyed its kooky Russian brand of paranoia. I love how transitions between scenes and chapters just drop off and pick up mid-sentence. I heard about this one from my buddy Will, book-devourer and publisher, who also tipped me off to that Solaris translation I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Collateral. My third viewing. (Ignore my comments after the second.) It feels like every time I watch a Michael Mann movie it becomes my new favorite of his. This movie is seriously in love with LA, too. You almost never get this much richness in setting. The surfaces, the light, daytime and night. Passing scenes and shots of a Hispanic gas station, a Korean (?) newspaper, murals, traffic, strip malls, modest neighborhoods, airport boulevards. Crucial scenes in Latino and (mostly Asian) nightclubs. This sense of place fits with one of the movie’s themes – presence. Our protagonists are Vincent (Cruise’s cool, decisive, efficient professional) and Max (Foxx’s daydreaming perfectionist). Max is dreaming miles into the future, but too hesitant or cautious (“It’s gotta be perfect.”) to do anything to get there. Vincent is skimming along the moment, zipping through assignments. (“We gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.”) Two early soundtrack moments underscore the contrast, too. Early on, Max enjoys the nostalgic, old-school vibes of Groove Armada’s Hands of Time as he cruises through the city. Soon after, we see some of Vincent’s subway/disconnection speech (foreshadowing!) backgrounded with a cool blues-y rendition of Bach’s Air on the G String. Pure sophistication. It’s not until (after the missed-opportunity soliloquy in the jazz club scene) Max is forced into impersonating Vincent that he starts to show some real agency. On this viewing the humor came through much more for me, thanks to Cruise. Lines like “Promise not to tell anybody, right?” and “Don’t let me cornered. You don’t have the trunk space.” and “What? I should only kill people after I get to know them?”. I could go on. What a damn great movie.

American Gigolo. Fantastic movie. One current is an electric crime drama (and the challenge of justice for outsider groups). Another is the steady melancholy, loneliness, and emptiness of the protagonist’s life. Awesome clothes. And OMG Lauren Hutton. Another good movie that explores the tensions between a criminal profession and desire for a normal life: Thief, of course.