On the Beauty of Art Weekends

During a dark week at The Daily Show last month, I had the rare opportunity to spend a whole week charting out a new screenplay with my dear friend, Lucas Loredo, back in Austin (Lucas is currently in the MFA program at UT's Michener Center for Writers). We relived past glory years in the service of creating something new, spent time with our beloved theatre directors Annie and Billy Dragoo (who changed the course of our lives) and reminisced on the formative years that made us who we are. We had an excellent time looking back, and more importantly, ahead.

The screenplay, which recounts our wonderful experiences performing in Austin High School's renowned theatre department, is something Lucas and I have been talking about writing for a long time. We finally decided we weren't going to make any headway unless we took a full week and bunkered down to structure the piece. During that time, we charted out the events and character arcs in the film, and mapped out the entire movie and its events on foam boards attached to the wall. In the evenings, we cooked dinner and watched coming-of-age films which have inspired us over the years, including Almost Famous (2000), Lady Bird (2017), Dazed and Confused (1993) and The Spectacular Now (2013), taking notes for our script along the way.

Leading up to our self-imposed writing "residency," I spent the last several months working on a quite long document in which I recall every single thing that happened to me in high school. Even though I've only made it about halfway into my junior year, the document is already over 150 pages long. It's a bit overwhelming, but the document has provided a wonderful well of memories from which to cherry-pick for our film. Lucas is particularly talented at story structure and the hero's journey, and I think his discipline, combined with many of the specific memories and ideas I've written down over the last few months, make us a great writing team (we've already made one short film together, Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding, in 2014).

A final script is a long way away, but we're finally on the beginning path to a dream project that means a great deal to me. On its tenth anniversary, here’s Lucas and me in action back in high school, in the Red Dragon Players' seminal 2008 production of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, directed by Billy Dragoo and filmed here by Paul Schattenberg. One day I'll put up the whole show in its entirety.


Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Scene Seven from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.


Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Scene Eight from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

Speaking of Jack and Lucas Go To A Wedding - this is a bit belated, but the film had its festival debut at the 2016 Black Cat Picture Show, followed by a screening at the Hudson Valley International Film Festival! I was thrilled to screen the film at the Black Cat Picture Show, only one year after my film You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory won their Best Student Film prize. You can see a clip from our film in the trailer for the festival.

In a bit of related news, I applied last fall to the University of Texas at Austin's MFA Film and Media Production program, which was a great experience in and of itself, as I was able to obtain letters of recommendation from my advisors and mentors and write about my interests and aspirations as an artist in detail. I had been considering applying to UT's MFA program for some time (it was the only graduate program to which I applied), but I certainly didn't expect to get into the school (they accept twelve students every year). In February, however, I was delighted to learn that I was offered admission, and for a time, I did not know what the immediate future held in store for me. When I was in Austin for my writing retreat, I also had my official UT campus visit, and I was astonished by the school's facilities, professors and classes - it had everything I could possibly want in a graduate school program. It was a very difficult decision. Ultimately, I decided that I was enjoying my current job too much and should stay in New York for the immediate future - but I was beyond honored to have been accepted to the program, and it was a wonderful experience touring the campus and imagining what my life would be like as a University of Texas graduate student.

Still, just being in Austin for a short period time makes me long for the opportunity to make movies there - specifically, one about growing up with my mother and father in the 1990s, and then the aforementioned film about the Red Dragon Players I'm currently writing with Lucas. They're both dream projects of mine, and ones I intend to make in the coming years.

I’ve been revisiting all kinds of wonderful memories from those glorious high school years lately. Nearly ten years after it first premiered, I re-watched the Red Dragon Players’ production of Jim Merillat's original musical Radio Eyes, in which I played the wildly erratic Inspector Riley. I received a copy of the musical from Jim (my DVD copy of the play was scratched), and it was a tremendous joy viewing the show with fresh eyes (it was one of my favorite musicals we performed at Austin High). I’ve also been looking at our productions of Round and Round the Garden (UIL), Over the River and Through the Woods (UIL), the aforementioned Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Willy Wonka, Seussical: The Musical, Into the Woods, Urinetown: The Musical, High School Musical and others. There’s an overwhelming amount of material from which to pull for our film, and I’m thrilled to have recordings of many of our productions (although I wish we had recorded our productions of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, Carson Kreitzer’s The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jason Milligan's …And the Rain Came to Mayfield).

The memorable writing retreat in Austin has been surrounded by a welcome succession of what I'll call art weekends in New York, mainly spent with my wonderful girlfriend Sophia. After the production of our short play White Castle Valentine’s Day 2018 in February, she and I have embarked upon a series of escapades on the weekends, hoping to take advantage of what New York City has to offer.

On March 16th, we saw Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero on Broadway, which was, honest to God, one of the best plays I’ve ever seen. Then again, it was written by Lonergan, so what did I expect? Michael Cera, Bel Powley, Chris Evans and Brian Tyree Henry were all exceptional – I’ve since bought a copy of the play, and I’m in the midst of learning one of the many outstanding monologues from the show. The next night, on St. Patrick’s Day, we screened one of my favorite films of all time, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), at my apartment – I mean, how else was I supposed to spend St. Patrick’s Day? Scorsese’s film has lost none of its immediacy and power in the now twelve(!) years since its release, and the picture still stands as the defining cinema release of my lifetime (seriously). On Sunday, I treated myself to a double-feature of Francis Lawrence’s riveting Red Sparrow, which way exceeded my expectations, and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, one of the first Marvel movies actually about something. The immensely talented Coogler also gives us the best and most complex superhero villain in some time, with Michael B. Jordan excelling as Eric Killmonger.

This is a bit of a brief tangent, but in the fall of 2016, I had the pleasure of seeing Kenneth Lonergan in person three times within a two-week period. The first time was at the Museum of the Moving Image, where Lonergan spoke after an early screening of his new film Manchester by the Sea, which was the second-best film of 2016 (after Martin Scorsese’s Silence). I saw him again shortly thereafter at the opening night screening of Nancy Buirski’s By Sidney Lumet, on which I was an associate producer and assistant editor.

By Sidney Lumet opened on October 28th at Lincoln Plaza Cinema (which has sadly now closed after thirty-five years of business) and received rave reviews. On opening night, there was a Q&A after the film with Nancy and Christine Lahti (who starred in Lumet’s Running on Empty), followed by a great after-party at the Tisch WNET Studio in Lincoln Center. Lonergan joined us for the after-party, as well (our editor, Anthony Ripoli, edited the Director’s Cut of Lonergan’s masterpiece Margaret), but I didn’t actually get to meet him until after a screening of Margaret the next weekend (also at the Museum of the Moving Image). MOMI screened the Director’s Cut of the film (they were doing a retrospective of all of his films), and Lonergan held yet another fantastic Q&A. After the screening, I shared with him my adoration for both Margaret and Manchester by the Sea (not to mention his first film, You Can Count on Me). It’s always an honor to get to meet your heroes, and I’ve truly enjoyed familiarizing myself with his work as a playwright this year.

But back to the present! The next weekend, Sophia and I went to the David Bowie Is exhibit at Brooklyn Museum, which was astonishing – an aural and visual experience like no other. On Saturday, I saw The Panic in Needle Park (1971) at the Quad Cinema as part of the Pacino’s Way retrospective. I could have lived at the Quad during this run of films, screened mostly on 35mm. At this particular screening of The Panic in Needle Park, director Jerry Schatzberg introduced his film, and discussed working with Pacino in depth. He also directed the masterful Scarecrow (1973), with Pacino and Gene Hackman, which has long been one of the unheralded highlights of 1970s cinema. I was sad to be working during Pacino’s visits to the Quad, where he screened his passion projects Salome and Wilde Salome – but I cherish my memories of seeing him onstage in The Merchant of Venice (2010) and Glengarry Glen Ross (2012). Pacino recently turned seventy-eight, and he continues to inspire and amaze – most recently in his magnificent performance in Barry Levinson’s Paterno on HBO (less than a year after Levinson’s great The Wizard of Lies with Robert De Niro, also on HBO).

And then, on Sunday, Sophia and I saw Wes Anderson’s new film Isle of Dogs, which filled me with joy. It’s an emotional, beautiful movie – I was smiling the entire time. You can read my full review of Isle of Dogs for Austin Family Magazine here.

In Austin, in addition to my residency with Lucas and my UT campus visit, my mom and I saw Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, which was a total blast (and just flat-out mind-boggling that Spielberg released the film within the same three-month period as The Post). We also saw John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, which I wish I could say I viewed in a very quiet place. I loved the movie (between this and 2016’s The Hollars, Krasinski is one talented director), and I think filmmakers should slowly start conditioning audiences to this level of silence in more movies. It is a truly effective dramatic tool – and it requires audiences to shut the hell up.

When I returned from Austin, the art weekends continued. Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here was a strange, beautiful and mesmerizing movie with one of the world’s greatest and most interesting actors, Joaquin Phoenix, at its center. Ramsay strikes gold once again, after her masterful We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - there was no scene in this film that unfolded how I expected. And this picture could have been so violent, reveling in the brutality of our protagonist's methods - but Ramsay isn't interested in close-ups of hammers bludgeoning heads. She's interested in more specific details, and the effects trauma has on the human body.

Seeing the film a second time, I was struck even more by the connection between Joe (Phoenix) and Nina, the young girl he rescues from a New York City brothel. Subtly over the course of the movie, they recognize each other as having both experienced abuse and trauma in their lives. Both characters use counting mechanisms to cope with their suffering – as a child, Joe held a cellophane bag over his head and counted down in order to repress the brutality exacted upon him (and his mother) by his father. Likewise, Nina counts down in her head when she is preyed upon by men inside the brothel. These elements are beautifully woven together in an underwater sequence in which Joe attempts suicide, and as he counts down, he begins hearing Nina’s voice counting instead of his own, leading him to abandon his suicide attempt and attempt to rescue her. When I was in Austin, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar had a You Were Never Really Here promotional photo booth, and you can bet I spent some time in there. Very well done, Amazon Studios.

The next weekend, I travelled down to Charlottesville with Sophia, where we stayed with her family and had a truly great time, as always. We even held a photo shoot with her friends Ivy and Clara, in which Sophia’s mom Maiya took some fine and truly strange portraits of us – you can see some of them throughout this post (I’m smoking a fake cigarette, by the way). While we were there, we spent time at a nearby reservoir, held a lavish banquet with friends, ate outside near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and, on our final night, watched Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) with Sophia’s dad Walter (I first saw this film when doing research for Blood and Thunder, and it remains one of the best and most original westerns I’ve ever seen).

Once back in New York, Sophia and I ventured to the Tribeca Film Festival the next weekend. On Friday, April 27th, I had my first virtual reality experience at Tribeca’s Horizons program. I was mainly attending because the program featured a short VR film by Terrence Malick, and it was beautiful (it’s telling that I finally tried out VR only because of Malick’s involvement). The next day, Alexander Payne spoke at Tribeca, with fellow Nebraskan Dick Cavett moderating the Q&A. What an amazing filmmaker and human – I sat in the front row and took notes, as every piece of filmmaking wisdom Payne offered was so valuable. Afterward, he told attendees he’d be around to talk in the lobby, and so I got to speak with him and share my adoration of Downsizing (2017). I could tell I was among devoted Payne loyalists, as much of the audience was quick to share that they loved Downsizing, too (which I maintain will be considered an ambitious modern classic in due time). I wish there were more like Payne – humble, Midwestern, authentic voices who make soulful movies about real people.

That evening, Sophia and I watched the recently released Criterion Blu-Ray of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), which is just as astonishing and powerful as ever. I saw a restoration of this film at the 2013 New York Film Festival with Scorsese in attendance, and it’s taken this long for that stunning transfer to make its way to DVD and Blu-Ray. Thankfully, the Criterion Collection has given the movie a welcome home.

Sunday, April 29th was the sixteenth anniversary of my dad's passing. I know I share a lot of the same videos of him, but here's something he shot on our family's 1996 trip to New York. He was a wonderful soul, and over the years I've been overjoyed to transfer more and more of his home video recordings as a way of remembering him.


The Kyser Family in New York - 1996 from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

In the midst of all of this, I caught a screening of Avengers: Infinity War before going to my evening shift one day, and I was surprised by the film’s effectiveness – particularly Josh Brolin’s performance as villain Thanos. You can read my full review for Austin Family Magazine here.

The next weekend, we saw Jason Reitman’s Tully, which was a delight, reuniting the dream team behind Young Adult (2011) – Reitman, writer Diablo Cody and star Charlize Theron. It’s exactly the kind of interesting film that rarely gets made anymore. Reitman never ceases to surprise and engage me – he never makes the same film twice (I remain a fan of his slightly un-loved Labor Day and Men, Women and Children). Tully is also a movie that I heard people dismissing before it was even released. I’m irked every time I hear people talking about a film they haven’t seen, prejudging it and having no real interest in what the picture might have to say – instead reducing the movie to its most basic elements. This happens with older films, too, as social mores change and folks want to reevaluate certain films based on a new set of criteria and whether it aligns perfectly with today’s ideas. What they don’t seem to understand is that the capturing of a certain time and place is precisely what makes a film interesting, and in time, today’s seemingly evolved values and ideas are going to seem outdated, too.

On Friday, May 11th, we saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's astounding film Ordet at the Quad Cinema, followed by a Q&A with one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Paul Schrader. He gave great insight into Ordet and its influence on his new film First Reformed. The impact Dreyer's film had on our audience was palpable - it's a thoughtful examination of the role religion plays in our lives, and it takes on a kind of meditative quality as it goes on. There's something nearly God-like in its slow pans and long takes, creating a truly spiritual feeling I haven't experienced since Martin Scorsese's Silence.

There is a shot near the end of the film in which the camera does a slow, nearly-360° rotation around Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) and his niece (as her mother lays dying) that simply took my breath away. It was one of the most profound and haunting marriages of dialogue and camera movement I have seen in some time, and it will not leave my mind any time soon.

On Saturday night, Sophia and I saw one of my all-time favorites, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) in 35MM at IFC, as part of their Waverly Midnights: Scorsese program. It’s as much of a delightful and exhilarating ride as it was when I first watched it on VHS as a kid – frenetic, thrilling and truly bizarre. Over the past year, there have been a lot of terrific opportunities to see Scorsese’s work on the big screen – I saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975) and The Last Waltz (1978) at the Museum of the Moving Image last year during their amazing Scorsese exhibit, and IFC has been screening much of his filmography over the last few weeks (I’m going back in June to catch another favorite, Bringing out the Dead, in 35mm). Soon enough, I’ll have seen most of Scorsese’s films in cinemas (so far, I’ve seen nineteen, including the ones that were released in my lifetime).

When back in Austin more recently, I watched Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) for the first time. This is perhaps the most formally fascinating film of Allen's career, and yet beyond all of the breathtaking handheld one-takes and jarring jump cuts, there's something truly unsettling here, both thematically and in the masterful performances. Husbands and Wives also has some very memorable set pieces - Sydney Pollack's drunken, rage-fueled visit to Judy Davis's house in the middle of the night is downright haunting (and, as more and more characters enter, it becomes one of Allen's best-directed group scenes ever). Meanwhile, two sequences with Allen and Juliette Lewis (when they retrieve his manuscript from a taxi driver, and then later share a kiss at her birthday party) will both linger in my memory for some time to come. This film is a scorcher.

My job at Comedy Central is going well – it’s always a joy to work on an interview clip with a guest I truly respect and admire. Here’s Sean Penn on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah this past March – with a (hopefully good) still I picked out for him. I’m currently reading his first novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, and it is a wild ride – a truly original and fascinating peek inside Penn’s mind. I miss seeing him onscreen these days, but Bob Honey is holding me over until his next film.

I also got to work on a great interview clip with Matt Damon and Gary White of water.org, which you can find here.

The film I directed last October, Four Play, is officially finished, and the film’s writer and producer, Ben Krevalin, is busy submitting the movie to film festivals. I think we made a pretty strong movie, with four really charming lead performances and some creative blocking in there. I suspect it will be some time before it’s available online, but if you’re interesting in seeing it, please let me know. And, yes, I’m still editing Harvey’s Last Night on the Avenue. I’m getting closer and closer, and more and more excited with each passing day as it comes together. I’ve never taken this long editing a film (in fact, I used to pride myself on making and releasing new films with great regularity), but this one feels like it needs my full attention and focus. It’s already been in the works for two-and-a-half years – what are a few more months? Anyway, by the next time I post here, I’ll have a trailer ready – and a full film (and web series) shortly to follow.

A few extremely talented artists have passed away since I last wrote. Milos Forman was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time – and, in his incredible career, directed two films pretty much everyone can agree are among the finest ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). Actor R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket, Seven) was such a presence onscreen – he will be missed. I had the opportunity of meeting him when I was a volunteer at Dennis Quaid Charity Classic Golf Tournament in high school, and he was extremely kind.

I don’t think I’ve written anything about this year’s Academy Awards. There’s really not much to say – they got nearly everything right except the biggest prize of them all. I suppose it doesn’t matter ­in the end – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was always a little dangerous, and the film (thankfully) didn’t play by the rules of what’s expected in cinema nowadays. But I can’t imagine anyone in his or her right mind looking back years from now and thinking The Shape of Water was a superior film. But the fact that Sam Rockwell, Roger Deakins, Gary Oldman and Allison Janney are now Oscar winners is heartening (not to mention Frances McDormand receiving her extremely well-deserved second Oscar). It’s not every year that your favorite film has a shot at the big prize (see Silence last year), so I was certainly rooting for Three Billboards in a big way. But now the noise of awards season is gone, and the greatness of McDonagh’s film remains.

Lastly, I never thought it’d happen, but I’m going to Springsteen on Broadway with Sophia in July! I haven’t been this happy since the last time I saw Bruce Springsteen during The River tour and made something of a tribute video here.

Film Reviews - Blue Jasmine and The Spectacular Now

Spoiler warning for both films reviewed below.

Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine is writer/director Woody Allen’s best film since his incredible Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Like Crimes and Misdemeanors, this new film is closer to tragedy than comedy. Allen has made some extraordinary films in the past few years, including Midnight in Paris (for which he won an Academy Award), Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Blue Jasmine is the crowning achievement of his recent work.

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, in one of the finest performances of the year) has lost everything – her husband (Alec Baldwin), an investment banker arrested for fraud; her wealth, including her Park Avenue mansion, taken by the government in the aftermath of the scandal; and her sanity. She arrives in San Francisco to stay with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins, also amazing), telling a million lies to everyone in sight. The film hauntingly intercuts Jasmine in present-day San Francisco attempting to rebuild her life with scenes from her life as a wealthy New Yorker, almost as if we’re reliving her past with her.

Blue Jasmine has one of the most inspired ensemble casts of any recent movie. Some of the most underrated actors currently working are used here to perfection, including Peter Sarsgaard as an aspiring politician who genuinely loves Jasmine, Bobby Cannavale as Ginger’s passionate boyfriend Chili (how our ideas about Chili shift throughout the movie is a testament to the genius of Allen’s writing), and Andrew Dice Clay, who gives the film an unexpected heart as Ginger’s ex-husband.

Jasmine may make mistakes and lie about her past, but the film isn’t afraid to acknowledge when she’s right, which makes her downfall even more tragic. What’s remarkable about Allen’s film is how it neither condemns nor endorses the moral failings of these complex characters. Blue Jasmine defies expectations at every turn, and my evaluation of every character was challenged with each new scene.

At the same time, Jasmine is responsible for nearly everything that ends up destroying her, and watching her lose her mind, muttering to herself and reenacting moments from her past, is pretty devastating – especially since Allen gives us such a vivid sense of the darkness that consumed her perfect life in Manhattan. In a film full of characters who delude themselves into happiness, Jasmine is the least successful of them all.

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now features two of the most complex teenage characters I've ever seen in a film, played by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in two of the year's best and most natural performances. Filmed largely in unbroken two-shots, which allow for performances built by posture and body language as much as they are by close-ups, this is a film full of scene after scene that does everything right – there isn’t a moment in the film that rings false.

Sutter (Miles Teller) is a semi-alcoholic underachiever who is the life of every high school party. His longtime girlfriend, the beautiful and popular Cassidy (Brie Larson), breaks up with him near the beginning of the film, and, drinking his sorrows away, Sutter wakes up one morning on the front lawn of wallflower Aimee (Shailene Woodley). The two start spending time together, despite not being part of the same crowd.

There’s a scene early on in the film in which Sutter takes Aimee to an outdoor party, attended by what you might call the more popular crowd (when offered a beer, Aimee says she doesn’t drink, and it’s clear that she doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with this crowd at first).

As soon as they arrive at the party, Sutter looks across the crowd and sees Cassidy talking to her friends. As he instigates a conversation between Aimee and a few other people, his attention is focused squarely on Cassidy, who he still hopes to win back. Once Aimee is comfortably engaged in a conversation with the others, Sutter has done his job, so to speak, and he heads over to Cassidy, knowing from their online chat the previous evening that she’s still interested in him. Sutter and Cassidy talk and flirt a little bit, as Sutter seems certain that he is the master of his domain – he has not one but two potential romantic conquests at the party, and, for the time being, he can leave Aimee aside and focus on Cassidy.

Suddenly, Cassidy’s new boyfriend walks up to them, and asks her to leave the party. As Cassidy leaves with this new guy, Sutter is devastated. But he thinks, okay, no worries – I’ll just go to my back-up girl. But when he finds Aimee, she’s hitting it off with another young man! Sutter interrupts their conversation and asks Aimee to walk away with him.

His assumption – that Aimee is a fish out-of-water and will be lost at this party without him as her guide – backfires quickly. There is such an amazing power shift that occurs so naturally in this scene. Sutter feels that he has the power to pick and choose between his multiple romantic conquests, only to realize that he was deluding himself with his first option. So, he scrambles to the “back-up” girl – only to see that she has become engaged with someone else in the interim. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen scenes that understand the whims and anxieties of young people in ordinary but often overwhelmingly painful social settings so well.

There are many scenes in The Spectacular Now that similarly moved me. At their high-school graduation, Sutter and Cassidy have a conversation in the bleachers that evokes an indescribable kind of sadness. She’s not mad at him after their break-up and subsequent almost-getting-back-together – in fact, she jokes that he will always be her favorite ex-boyfriend. For Sutter, though, you almost get the sense that it would be less painful and easier for him to move on from Cassidy if she simply never wanted to speak to him again, and that would be it. But instead, it’s something a little more melancholy. She’ll remember him as kind of a joke – Oh, Sutter, that guy I once dated, he’s funny ­– and move forward with her life. As she leaves him standing alone in the bleachers, his graduation robe open, I felt an immense amount of sadness for these characters.

The film defies every expectation, never once following the expected path. In a lesser film, for instance, Aimee would try to get Sutter to stop drinking and perfect his behavior, but here, she actually starts drinking, too. She develops a dependency on alcohol and gets “worse,” in a sense (and, ultimately, Sutter realizes this and wants her to stay away from him, knowing that he’s bad news for her). 

There’s also the expectation that Sutter and Aimee’s relationship will be tested by Sutter cheating on Aimee with Cassidy. Wrong again. The film instead presents a real impulse – at first, maybe Sutter does want to get back together with Cassidy, and Aimee is simply a temporary rebound relationship. We aren’t meant to judge Sutter because of that – the film presents this in an honest and understanding way. If he had his way in the beginning of the movie, he probably would forget about Aimee entirely and get back together with Cassidy. But the fact of the matter is, he can’t win her back. And, once he accepts that, he ends up falling in love with Aimee. You can think what you want about him, but, like an actual human being, Sutter is complex and has contradictory feelings about multiple people (The Spectacular Now allows every one of its characters to exist with these kinds of contradictions, just like this year’s Frances Ha and Before Midnight).

In perhaps the most powerful scene of the film, Sutter’s boss – who loves him as dearly as anyone else and turns a blind eye to his drinking habit – meets with Sutter in his office. The boss says he can only keep one employee at his store, and he wants Sutter to be his main employee. However, he asks Sutter to promise that he will not come to work under the influence of alcohol ever again. Sutter honestly tells him that he cannot make that promise, and you watch as the boss, who cares and loves Sutter deeply, wants to tell him to get it together, but he can’t – he’s not the young man’s father, and ultimately, he almost admires Sutter for his honesty. This is a tough scene. My heart breaks for both of these characters.

What works so well about all of these scenes is that we’re able to read the intentions and desires of each of these young people so clearly, as they try so hard to appear cool and act natural. The not-always-obvious social violence and exclusion that happens right before our eyes is articulated with such grace and complexity, and the oversimplification of social ostracization that occurs in even the best recent coming-of-age films (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) is completely absent from this film.

I’m not mentioning the wonderful passages of the film that involve Sutter visiting his father (the great Kyle Chandler), but suffice to say that The Spectacular Now never missteps. The director is James Ponsoldt, and I'll be first in line for his next film. 

Film Review - Midnight in Paris

Thank God for Woody Allen. In the midst of an almost unbearable summer full of 3D superhero garbage and brainless sequels, he has given us his latest film Midnight in Paris only seven months after the release of his last film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The middling critical reception to You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger bewildered me – of that film, I wrote: “Allen’s characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side.” Powerful stuff, but for some reason, American critics weren’t impressed. Perhaps it’s because Allen offers us, on average, one movie per year, and aside from Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), most of them aren’t nearly as good as his masterworks from the 1970s and 1980s.

Well, so what? A middling Woody Allen film is better than ninety-nine percent of everything else out in current release. Not that I would consider You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger a middling film in the least, mind you.

Fortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that Midnight in Paris is the funniest and most endearing movie you’ll see this year – critics and audiences alike are recognizing the film as Woody Allen’s finest work in years. Owen Wilson gives one of his best performances as Gil (the ‘Woody’ character), an American writer visiting Paris with his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her unbearably uppity parents (Allen’s depiction of McAdams’ conservative family would seem harsh if it wasn’t so, I don’t know, spot-on).

Gil, bored with his status as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, yearns for the Paris of the 1920s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso walked the streets and tossed ideas around in cafes. And so it happens that, while Gil is walking alone through the city after midnight, Paris magically morphs into that era, and Gil quite literally hangs out with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the rest of the gang. Along the way, he falls in love with Picasso’s mistress Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, who perfectly embodies all of the beauty of Paris in any era.

The joy of this film is discovering all of this for yourself, and so I’ll refrain from saying anything else, except that Allen’s work with the Surrealists (including Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali) is brilliantly absurd. With the playful and fantastical premise, Allen is free to wrestle with large ideas in a very funny manner (not dissimilar to his work in 1985’s wonderful The Purple Rose of Cairo).

Along the way, Allen takes playful jabs at the current state of Hollywood screenwriting, Tea Party dimwits, and pseudo-intellectuals alike (Michael Sheen is perfect as that guy – you’ll know the character once you see him). This is a film that assumes you’ll catch the joke about Luis Bunuel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), or the jokes about Hemingway’s speech pattern (he talks the way he writes). Allen doesn’t bother explaining them to you because he’s not interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator, and in today’s cinema of digestible fluff for the masses, that’s quite an achievement.

More importantly, it’s a wonderful movie about nostalgia, a force so strong and bittersweet that Allen has devoted an entire film to the subject. Gradually, our protagonist learns that all people feel disillusioned with their own time and place, and secretly yearn to live in the idealized past, no matter the current era. It’s Gil’s (and Allen’s) own discovery of this truth that lends Midnight in Paris its poignant insight.

For this particular Woody Allen fan who holds Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) close to my heart, I mean it when I say that Midnight in Paris is as wonderfully poetic, sad, touching and funny as anything Woody Allen has ever made.

Wild Strawberries and Woody Allen

"You know so much, and you don't know anything."

In a haunting dream, seventy-eight year-old Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) is confronted with this piece of wisdom by a lost love, as his daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), drives him to a ceremony where he is being presented with an honorary award in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), one of the most moving films I have ever seen.

How fitting that I first took in a viewing of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Bunuel), a social satire which engaged me on a purely intellectual level, only to follow it with Wild Strawberries, a film that caught me off-guard, and floored me completely - my emotional response to the movie was something I surely hadn't suspected.

Bergman's film takes a close look at Borg, a proudly intellectual professor of science who is described by everyone, including his son and daughter-in-law, as cold and void of any emotional attachment. He decides to take a reflective drive from Stockholm, Sweden to Lund University, where he will be receiving his honorary award. Accompanied by Marianne and a trio of happy-go-lucky youngsters headed to Italy, his journey becomes a painful examination of his past, and in his reflective dreams we see how his intellectual superiority spared him from real, meaningful relationships with other human beings.

"He's on such a terribly high level, and I feel so worthless," says Sara, a cousin who Borg almost marries before she opts to marry his brother, Sigfrid, instead. Borg has no interest in taking joy out of the small things in life, such as eating from a patch of wild strawberries near the backwoods of his childhood home, and Sigfrid is the perfect alternative - a lewd man's man.

Borg's punishment - for knowing all of the answers, for understanding other human beings more than they understand themselves, for constantly engaging in intellectual activities and tossing aside simple pleasures - is loneliness. His wife is dead, his son despises him, and his very elderly mother seems even colder than Borg himself. As the professor arrives at the end of his life, he is disillusioned and haunted by his empty past. Yes, he is being awarded for his intellectual achievements, but where is the love? His son, Evald, has grown into an even colder version of his father, and the happy-go-lucky trio, who at first appear mildly annoying, ultimately represent the sort of joyous carelessness that Borg secretly envies.

In short, Wild Strawberries is an examination of that special breed of men who are so obsessed with their own intellectual abilities that they often defer from social situations, preferring to be alone with themselves and bask in their own brilliance. And, eventually, that is exactly where they are at the end of their lives - alone, with themselves.

Borg finds redemption in the finale of Wild Strawberries. "If I have been feeling worried or sad during the day, I have a habit of recalling scenes from childhood to calm me. So it was this evening," says Borg as he shuts his weary eyes. We are treated to his own portion of nostalgia, a topic I explored in some detail in last evening's post.

The film left such an impression on me because the internal struggle between the intellectual self and the emotional self is a topic that I have been writing about for a long time - in fact, due to my incredible reaction to Wild Strawberries, I will soon post a series of articles I have written in recent years about loneliness, alienation, and the struggle mentioned above. How does one resist conformation and promote individuality and yet keep away from total alienation and loneliness? Borg only began asking this question in the final chapters of his long, cold life; hopefully, by exploring the issue now, I can spare myself a cold future.

By the way, it's no wonder Woody Allen gets his inspiration from Ingmar Bergman. His films are, more or less, comedic explorations of Bergman's fascinating thematic ideas. Tomorrow night I am going to see Allen's Annie Hall (1977), one of my all-time favorite films, at the legendary Paramount Theatre downtown, as part of their 2009 Summer Film Series.

I've seen many classic movies at the Paramount, including incredible 70 MM prints of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean), as well as The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola), The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut), Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, Martin Scorsese) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961, Blake Edwards). Needless to say, it is one of the finest theaters in Central Texas, and offers rich cinematic experiences of classic films during the summer.