So We Beat On, Boats Against The Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past...

It's a tough thing attempting to explain the unbearably painful and heartbreaking past two weeks, during which I haven't written a single entry. My heart goes out to the Goode family, in memory of their loving and wonderful son and brother, James Lawrence Goode, 1995-2009.

He was my little film friend. I say that because, as an only child, I have for years imposed my taste for great and obscure cinema on friends and family who really could not have cared less. I first met Jamie Goode nearly two and a half years ago, but I don’t believe I really knew him until the beginning of this past summer, when I was able to spend nearly every day with him and his wonderful sister, Anne. I noticed we had something unusual in common when one day Anne and I picked him up from a friend’s house, and he displayed to us his list of the one hundred finest movies ever made.

This occurrence made me very excited. I studied his list endlessly, compared it to my own, and wrote him a list of film recommendations that I believed to be ‘essential viewing.’ Jamie and I, it seems, both shared the obsession of making lists – top ten movies of the year, top ten favorite actors, twenty-five worst movies of the past five years, you name it.

I remember when Jamie, Anne and I stayed up late one night at her house and watched the great movie Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese). Did I ever believe in my mind that it might not be a wise idea for a thirteen year-old boy to watch such a brutal movie? Jamie answered that question for me almost immediately. He would not watch films such as Raging Bull or Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese) and comment on the awesomeness of the violence and rough language; instead, he would talk about the movie in the way a seasoned film critic might talk about the movie – elegantly, with careful attention to everything that made it great and enjoyable.

His comments were not the words of a typical adolescent craving to see an R-rated movie. These were the words of an incredibly mature young man who understood film as literary geniuses might understand literature and poetry.

I cannot emphasize enough Jamie’s ability to unassumingly enter a room of young adults six and seven years his senior, and carry on an intelligent, informed conversation on topics as varied as politics, film and religion for hours. Never once did anyone find it odd that a fourteen year-old boy just out of junior high was hanging in the company of college students.

How do you surmise the entire life of such a human being in a mere obituary? How can the impact and beauty of the life of Jamie Goode be trimmed down to a small article? The truth of the matter is, you could write five hundred textbooks on Jamie Goode, and it still wouldn’t be enough. There could be five hundred textbooks written on my late father, John Kyser, too, and it still wouldn’t even begin to hint at what it was like to know him, to love him.

I wish there had been some sort of foreshadowing that would have prevented Jamie’s death from happening. I went to sleep peacefully last Sunday night, and I remember saying to my roommate in the dark that I was going to sleep very well that night. The next time I opened my eyes, it was to see that I had missed eleven calls on my cell phone. Sometimes death waves a warning flag before he strikes. Not this time.

If I ever have a son, I hope he is one-fourth of the man Jamie Goode was. Is. It is a testament to his indescribable character that I only knew him for such a brief period of time, and yet he feels like the younger brother I never had.

No, we can never resurrect Jamie by writing endlessly about him, because it will never be enough, it will never fully measure the weight of his impact. But Jamie Goode will be remembered. Sixty years from now, his friends will meet at a restaurant and laugh about Jamie’s sense of humor, his indelible intellect, and his endless love and kindness toward his friends and his family. It’s never been the same ever since we lost Jamie Goode, they’ll say, and indeed, it will never be the same. But make no mistake, Jamie will influence the future just as much as he has influenced the past. Nobody will ever forget.

Why did Jamie Goode have to be taken from us? Nobody will ever know. In the words of The Band, “I swear by the mud below my feet, you can’t raise a Cain back up when he’s in defeat.”

I Think This Just Might Be My Masterpiece

Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is quite possibly the best film Tarantino has ever directed, even when considering his masterpiece Pulp Fiction (1994), which is one of my favorite films of all time, and the absolutely brilliant Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Volume One and Two (2003, 2004). After catching the 11:30 AM screening with my girlfriend Anne and her brother Jamie, I tried to pinpoint the last time I felt such unadulterated joy and cinematic delight while watching a movie.

The excitement of watching The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) for the first time comes to mind, but I don't think I've really seen something with the same raw energy and gleeful excitement found in Inglorious Basterds since Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006). I saw The Departed five times in theaters alone; something tells me I'll be going back to see Inglorious Basterds again.

Christoph Waltz, who plays the despicable yet oddly fascinating Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, has his name written on this year's Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (after winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his incredible performance). Tarantino's labyrinth screenplay, which introduces and employs dozens of memorable characters, is only partially devoted to the tale of the Basterds, the Jewish-American rogue soldiers on a mission to kill and scalp every Nazi they can find in France. Instead of filming a traditional revenge movie, Tarantino has made a distinctly European picture full of fascinating, three-dimensional characters who are the unsuspecting stars of a spaghetti-western-turned-war picture.

Tarantino holds back on the relentless violence his younger audiences will certainly crave, in favor of a terrificly-written series of events in which characters meet each other, discuss film and play games, and are eventually subject to very brief outbreaks of violence. It's not that different from the structure of Pulp Fiction (although Inglorious Basterds is told in chronological order).

Brad Pitt has impressed me once again as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the head of the Jewish Basterds, with a thick Southern accent and a serious problem with the Nazi Party. Pitt's performance is both wildly comical and seriously frightening; it's worth noting that Pitt has given brilliant performances in uniformly superb movies for the past few years, including Babel (2006, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik), Burn After Reading (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, David Fincher). Bravo to actors like Pitt and George Clooney who use their star power to make bold and daring films.

Costars Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Til Schweiger and even Mike Myers deliver excellent performances in the scenes which ultimately lead to the inevitably blood-soaked finale, in which the Jewish people get their revenge against the Nazi Party at the film premiere of a German propaganda movie.

Aside from writing and directing one of the most entertaining and joyous odes to cinema ever put onscreen, Tarantino has also crafted a film that is a rumination on the wonderful power of cinema to destroy evil forces and change the course of history. If there's a better message to be found in a motion picture this year, I'd like to hear about it.

With apologies to Public Enemies (Michael Mann) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), Inglorious Basterds is the best film I've seen this year. To hell with the fact that Tarantino has rewritten history - I think this just might be his masterpiece.

Tomorrow I will write about my extreme disgust regarding Paramount Pictures' decision to move the release date of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island from October 2nd to next February. Martin Scorsese is my man, and I don't appreciate this release date change (unless, of course, Scorsese himself requested the change). The absence of Shutter Island in this year's fall movie calendar leaves me without much investment in any of the other new releases this fall (other than Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, and Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man). Perhaps Inglorious Basterds will remain as my #1 film of the year, after all.