Sundance season

Noel has been in Park City, Utah since last Wednesday, attending the Sundance Film Festival. You can read his daily dispatches here at the A.V. Club.  By all accounts, he's had a good run in the screening rooms.  And clearly, he's worked very hard, as can be seen by how many films he's logged and how many thousands of words worth of capsules he's written in the wee hours of the morning.

Here at home, we have our own "Sundance Film Festival." It consists of trying to cobble together babysitters, grandparents, and my work schedule so that the kids are delivered to and from school on time, and receive regular meals.

That's been difficult in our 2012 outing.  A combination of regularly scheduled spring events -- a freshman book discussion, a sophomore orientation -- and two faculty candidate visits back to back, meant that this is the first weekday night since Noel left home that I have not had to head out in the evening darkness for some work-related event.

I couldn't have managed without my parents coming to handle kid transport and kitchen duties while I was otherwise occupied.  They left this morning for the grueling two-day drive back to their home on the Georgia coast.

Noel's last day at the festival is tomorrow; he flies home on Thursday, arriving around the time the kids are getting into their pajamas.  I have done a decent job keeping things together (knock on wood).  But I've done a poor job communicating with my absent spouse.  Normally I post status updates and blog entries regularly, supplementing the occasional phone conversation with public information about how we're getting along.  But the faculty candidate visits have thrown any concept of "regularly" out the window.  I've had neither the time nor the energy to write, even a hundred and forty characters.

When a big push like faculty hiring coincides with the stressful and difficult conditions of half parental strength, you put your head down and power through it.  But it always surprises me how much effort, mental and physical, that it takes.  Several nights in the past week, I've sat down in my recliner an hour or so away from bedtime, finally done with everything on my plate, and have felt the bone weariness seep through my shoulders.

Noel knows that feeling well, I'm aware. No one works harder, especially through the 20-hour days of film festival madness. My parents know it, as they bunk down in some motel midway through Alabama, still a day away from their home after driving all day.  We all look forward to getting back to the normal pile of deadlines and the usual routine of too much on our plates, rather than this crazy displaced double-time version of our lives.

Classic

Archer's never been a movie fan.  Long narratives that require an understanding about why people are acting as they are and what they are feeling -- not exactly his thing.  But we took him to see Cars 2 earlier this summer in the hopes that there would be enough racing to keep him from getting board while the rest of us enjoyed the story.  And based on his enjoyment of the trailer for Disney's new Winnie the Pooh traditional-animation feature (which had a meta-textual element using the book pages and words), as well as the movie's short running time (69 minutes), we decided to go see it as a family, too, and hope that Archer could find something to engage him.

Did he ever.  The animated book illustrations and playful interaction with the text tickled him pink.  And during the rapid-fire verbal farce about whether Piglet could tie knots (Piglet: "I cannot"; Owl: "So you can knot"), he was in hysterics, confiding to me afterwards, "I was laughing so hard I almost threw up."

Of course Cady Gray loved it all, as did her parents; the movie has a handmade feel that combines the gentleness of the books, the classic imaginative touches of the original Disney Pooh featurettes, and a dash of contemporary zip.  But every time some comic misunderstanding or bit of narration-related fourth-wall-breaking happened, I glanced at Archer and saw a huge grin on his face.  With the right sense of humor and self-awareness about its formal qualities -- whether cinematic or literary -- a story can hook him, and keep him enthralled.

Solo entertainment

When you're a couple with kids, seeing the latest movie or show takes on a whole new complexity. You have to find someone to stay with the kids to make your night out possible, adding planning and expense to the equation. This makes non-home-based entertainment a rarer proposition than for your single or childless friends.

Of course, you have another option -- you could choose to go out separately, making the childcare question moot. That's easy enough when only one member of the couple is interested in the show. When both are, though, there's a feeling that you ought to wait to see it together, both in terms of economy and solidarity.

We were hoping to get a sitter this weekend to go see Super 8, but haven't been able to find one. And Noel and the kids are going to be out of town next weekend. So he decided to go out on his own to see the movie tonight (and run a couple of other errands), since I would have plenty of time while he's gone to see it on my own.

That makes perfect sense, and while I wish we were going to be able to experience it together and discuss it afterwards -- it's one of our more anticipated films of the summer -- that means depriving him of the chance to see it for the next couple of weeks.

Noel deserves a night out; he's not only been working hard but also dealing with the sudden addition of two full-time summer-vacation kid charges to the household for the last two days. And I'll get the time back in spades when he takes them to Nashville next week -- not that an evening at home with them is hard work, since they are hard at play together in their rooms by 6:30 pm. Still, even though it's eminently reasonable to split up the moviegoing, it feels like a regression to a pre-married or pre-kids era, or a temporary pause in the agreed-upon arrangements. With such unspoken consensus about our mutual time, we have forged habits that are surprisingly rigid even when they do not serve any perceptible interest.

Connecting

I'm going to be in Boston for a conference in the fall of 2012.  Looking forward to the visit.  But I don't have to wait to connect with some folks in the city.  I'm going to do that tomorrow via Skype, thanks to an alert and nimble teacher who asked me to visit his class.

Steven Berbeco teaches history and Arabic at the Charlestown School (his Arabic classes were featured on NPR's Day to Day back in 2006).  When he decided to show his kids Walter Salles' film Central Station as part of a unit on Brazil, he went to the web to find some texts to supplement their viewing.  He found my 2001 article "Faith and the Absent Savior in Central Station," and thought it was accessible enough to give to his kids -- less as a way to enrich the information about Brazil than as an example of analytic academic writing.  In that vein he's asked me to Skype into two classes early Monday morning to chat with the students about how I approached the movie and generated an argument about its meaning.

I have to get up an hour earlier than usual to make the date -- Berbeco's first class meets at 7:30 am Eastern time, and I'm going to join them at 7:00 am my time, thirty minutes later.  But it's a happy obligation.  I'm impressed with their teacher's initiative and energy, and excited that I can be present in their class across the miles.

Weepies

Noel and I are going out for a rare dinner-and-a-movie tonight, which will be followed when we get home by late Survivor finale and school lunch packing.  So I'll very quickly note that both of us spent part of the day wiping tears from our eyes -- me because of this story about an unlikely long-distance connection forged by a tornado disaster, from the Washington Post (reprinted in our local paper), and Noel because of the documentary Louder Than A Bomb, which caught him off guard with its portrait of a high school experience rarely caught on film these days, but whose kids in solidarity through a shared activity and talent was quite familiar to him.  What have you read or seen recently that has similarly moved you?

The secret of my success

I often tell students that the secret to life is finding away to get assigned to do things you want to do anyway.

That seems like a simple matter, like telling people to do what they love.  But what you love and what you'll make time to do are not always the same thing.  Take movies.  There are a ton of movies I want to see.  But how often can I make those the highest priority in my leisure time?  It's actually hard for us to devote a whole evening to a movie we don't have to see, when there are so many things we need to see to keep up with the media that's part of our jobs.

So as a way to see some movies I want to see, I created a no-credit course that screens them.  Students sign up to attend, and every other week I watch with them.  I don't always want to be there doing exactly that at precisely that moment, particularly when I'm really busy.  But I want to see these movies at some point.  And now is the moment when I can assign myself that job in order to have those pleasure.

A desire made into an assignment can become a chore, it's true.  But at the end of the day, would you rather not have read the books on your life list, because it wasn't quite as spontaneous as you might ideally have wished?  If you can find a way to work your bucket list into your everyday to-do list, it's possible to make some progress before you retire.  Good thing, too, since the list of movies I want to see isn't getting any shorter.

Second time around

We finally got to see Inception tonight. And while I thought it was awe-inspiring and endlessly stimulating, that thought is inevitably already a response to other thoughts about the movie that have been debated in the media, in critical circles and in the chatter of social networking. The lash, the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash were all underway before the movie even opened, and it's impossible to experience it without all those layers. Appropriate, in a way, for a movie that is constantly asking you to figure out how many looking glasses you have gone through.

I've been mildly tormented recently by acquaintances mentioning on Facebook and Twitter that they saw some fantastic movie or other and were underwhelmed (or worse, are on a mission to expose its fantasticness as a massive fraud perpetrated on them by the cultural establishment). Sometimes I wish I could just fast-forward people into the future so they could see these great movies for the second time. The first time, we're too burdened by the reason we're watching them in the first place -- because everybody says they're great. We may have some idea what quality of greatness we expect to say, or we may have a vague impression of the genre or type of movie our taste buds were set for. And what people often mean by greatness is that it can't be contained in the usual boxes we have prepared for the experience. It's not until the second time, when the artifact can emerge from the background of all that surrounds it in the ordinary course of moving through popular culture, that we are startled by how far it stands above or how much it stands alone.

Movie night

Every other Thursday this semester, I've been spending the evening with my students, watching movies. Tonight was our last movie night. The students will spend the next four weeks working in groups on shooting, editing, and finalizing short films.

I'm going to miss movie nights. It's a large class, by my department's standards; two sections meeting together with two instructors. That means almost thirty people in the room, watching the movie projected on a big screen. The students bring their dinners and snacks -- class starts at 6 pm -- and they feel at home. At first I was bothered by the number of murmured comments and side conversations going on during the movies. But in discussion, it was clear that they had watched carefully and picked up on all kinds of interesting nuances. I concluded that the commentary was their way of processing what they were seeing. They weren't watching the movie in isolation; they were using each other as a means to pay attention.

We had terrific discussions after each of the movies, and I have been gratified to read in their blogs about the depth those discussions added to their experience with the movies. Before class today, a student told me, "Now I'm even doing it to music videos. I was watching Lady Gaga ...?" I told her that she wasn't overdoing it, that there were all kinds of things going on in those videos intimately related to what we'd been doing in class.

Sometimes I hear complaints -- or at least concerns -- from those students who feel like this academic approach to film is condemning them to a lifetime of analysis rather than enjoyment. I'm glad that my students this semester seem to be more interested in the enhancement of simple entertainment experiences than worried about losing their naivete. And in four weeks, I hope to see a few incredible moments -- maybe not a lot, but a few -- that they've created because of what they've seen and thought about.

Friday night at the Bijou

Our little town isn't so little anymore. When the 2010 census figures are released, I fully expect that Conway will have more than 75,000 residents. And the college population is more than 15,000.

But for as long as we've lived here, we've had two movie houses, both the kind of strip-mall multiplexes that were long since run out of business in major cities. The Carmike 6 switched to digital projection a couple of years ago, and leapfrogged from worst to first in moviegoing quality. The Cinemark 6 has bigger houses, but in the last few years has lagged behind in technology.

As of January, though, we're down to one cinema option. The Cinemark closed for eight months, with the aim of gutting the place and rebuilding as a state-of-the-art multiplex. The idea is to make it an anchor for an edge-of-town shopping center that has steadily emptied over the past decade and is barely hanging on with temporary outlet sales that swoop in and out.

What I'm wondering is what took developers so long? There are thousands of college students here. A good movie house is a can't-miss proposition in this town. Being able to see 3-D movies without driving an hour round-trip into Little Rock? I'm there. Despite the fact that we're movie people, we see very few movies in the theater -- maybe one or two a month. Put a real theater in this town, and you double that from my family, or more. You'd let me see what right now I can't see -- the 3-D, the stuff that doesn't open here currently because of limited screen space.

It's going to be fall or winter before we get the grand reopening. That's a long summer with only six tiny screens in town. But I hope it will all be worth it when we enter the new Cinemark, and maybe even more so when pressure is put on the Carmike to upgrade as well.

And I keeent steeend 'em

I showed Singin' In The Rain to my film class tonight, and even though I had work to do while they watched, I couldn't help but get caught up in one of my favorite movies of all time. Here are the moments that made me giggle or sigh and kept me from checking off items on my to-do list.

1. Studio head R.F. after the eighteen-minute eye-popping Technicolor "Broadway Melody" sequence: "I can't quite visualize it."
2. Don standing by the cake Kathy popped out of: "Now that I know where you live, I can see you home."
3. The director trying to keep the microphone in place on Lena Lamont: "Oh, and try not to make any sudden movements; you might disconnect it."
4. Don's "Broadway Melody" character working his way up the Broadway ladder from vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies, with each iteration involving less and less dancing, until at the end he's barely moving and smoking a cigarette.
5. "Dignity -- always dignity."
6. "This line 'Imperious princess of the night" -- I don't like that. Can't I say what I always do: 'I love you, I love you, I love you'?"
7. "Gotta be a rose 'cause it rhymes with Mose."
8. And of course that crane move at the climax of "Singin' In The Rain" -- maybe the single most joyous shot in the cinema.

Looking for Miss Golden Globes

I'll be trading quips and snark (with a smattering of real entertainment enthusiasm) at the AV Club's TV Club, as we liveblog the Golden Globe awards. It's an awards show that has very little prestige or cachet -- but it does have the advantage of coming first in the crowded awards season. And I actually enjoy the mix of movie and television stars it attracts, giving us for one night the illusion that all our moving-picture entertainment favorites live in one big happy family.

Too much typing is scheduled for tonight for me to provide a real essay of any kind here. But I'll leave you with one observation: When an actor who has no trouble getting work in the movies appears on television in a regular role, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I think it's because the stepchild medium of the industry is acquiring the respect of those who in previous generations would have considered themselves too good for it. My love of television is validated by their gracious and wholehearted participation. And that means there's all the more love to spread around to everyone working long hours to entertain me. See you on the red carpet!

A whole new world

Avatar has divided my critic friends. We saw it tonight -- in 2D, unfortunately. But for the moment, if you release a film in 2D and 3D, it had better work in both. It's not like talkies were simultaneously released in a silent version. So I have to believe I saw the film, even though I wasn't wearing special glasses.

And I was pretty darn impressed. Yes, it culminates in some serious mystical hokum; yes, the story beats are predictable and the showdown with the unkillable villain preprogrammed. But there are more moments of spontaneity and humor than a big effects-laden blockbuster like this usually deserves. The facial motion-capture effects are obviously way better than anything we've seen, especially with eye movements, and that makes a huge difference in the parts of the film that have to be carried by the aliens.

But it was the scope, imagination, and detail of the environment, as well as the camera's swift and joyous movement through it, that really make this a movie to be reckoned with. Some people are saying that it is the Jazz Singer of computer-generated films. I don't think it's that big a game-changer. But I do think it's the Jurassic Park of the genre. Remember the sense of awe that was provoked when those dinosaurs ran right by Sam Neill and Laura Dern? That's exactly what this movie provides for some very long stretches. It's clearly a huge leap forward for the technology.

And thanks to the distinctive voice and eye -- for good and ill -- of James Cameron, it's a real movie as well. It has all the flaws and strengths of its creator. It's not a corporate creation. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars and the thousands of people involved in it, there's a singular point of view to be found there. You may not like it (I've certainly got my problems with it), and it's certainly not subtle, but I think it's rather amazing that such a huge enterprise and such a technical achievement turns out to have a soul, even if partially worm-eaten.

At the movies

Noel let me horn in on his daddy-daughter time this afternoon. Usually he takes Cady Gray to the movies and I spend time with Archer. But because I was excited about seeing The Princess And The Frog, he let me switch places with him.

It was a thrill. When you're young and just starting to imagine having a family, you think about taking your imaginary kids to the kinds of movies you saw as a kid. And for me, of course, that's traditional Disney animation. The return of cel animation is like the ability to step back in time and give your children an experience that you had, that for a scary moment you thought never would return.

And I think those who are critiquing the movie for not being an instant classic are missing the forest for the trees. Quite aside from the cultural significance of a Disney heroine and setting in the African-American community -- a belated rectifying of the Uncle Remus legacy -- this is a tremendously enjoyable and often technically astounding piece of work. I think some of the broad, slapstick humor is off-putting, but that's maybe two sequences out of the whole. Some of the most remarkable effects animation in history more than compensates -- the brief song of the fireflies is glorious, and nearly all the musical sequences have animation that pops right out of the frame. I don't know what people who complain about the music are talking about -- it's fantastic; loving, complex, but infectious invocations of distinctly American genres, with some inspired lyrics. Not the most hummable tunes, but really wonderful in context.

The story might be among the weaker of the fairy-tale adaptations, but the writers make something out of almost nothing by giving the hero and heroine a classic ant and grasshopper dynamic. It turns out to be a meditation on what it means to achieve your dreams -- what success consists of -- a theme I frequently bring up with students.

I hope I get to take Cady Gray to many more hand-drawn animated films in the future. Perhaps Noel will let me have that segment of the kid-movie market to experience with my daughter. We both enjoyed our first outing in the series, and hereby petition John Lasseter for a long and fruitful run of the new golden age of the cel.

From all our labors

This long weekend is a chance for us to catch a deep breath before the busiest two weeks of the semester.

On Wednesday, Noel leaves on his annual trip to the Toronto International Film Festival. My parents will fly in that night. Friday I'm driving up to Petitjean Mountain with a hundred and twenty freshmen, faculty, and assorted student helpers for our annual fall retreat. Saturday morning I'll be one of the leaders of a writing workshop up on the mountain. Then as soon as we break for lunch I'll be sprinting down the mountain and back into town to lead half a day's worth of class on Reformation theology for part-time Methodist pastors (I have a former student covering the morning session, when I'll be tied up with the writing workshop.) As soon as that's over I reverse course back up the mountain to participate in the retreat's evening academic session. Sunday at noon I'll be back home to relieve my parents of kid duty before the school week starts Monday morning. Noel will be back on Thursday.

That's a couple more activities than we usually try to cram into the week of Noel's Toronto excursion. Usually he's back the same day I head up the mountain. And usually I'm not teaching a Saturday class that same week. And usually I'm not supposed to be in Santa Barbara at the same time for an executive committee meeting (that's the one thing that had to give way in this triple-booked weekend).

At a certain point you just set your jaw and figure that no matter what goes wrong, time will pass and it will all be over eventually. Then today Archer started showing signs of getting the flu -- lethargy, aches, fever. If we all come down with H1N1 this week, all bets will be off. But I've already let go. Whatever will be, will be. Bring it on, September 9-17.

Fishy in the sea

We just returned from seeing Ponyo, after it unexpectedly opened in town. And I can't wipe the smile off my face.

Thanks to Disney, John Lasseter and other champions, Hayao Miyazaki has received plenty of exposure in the United States. Yet it's still difficult to describe what makes his films so special.

For me it's the combination of precisely observed behavior -- especially child behavior -- with an unhurried pace, a total lack of concern for cinematic economy that leads to a richness of detail, and the impression that the filmmakers somehow translated images that bubbled up in imagination or dreams directly onto the screen with no intervening technical steps. The idle thought that a goldfish looks something like a little girl in a red dress becomes an exuberant sequence of transformation. Yet just as much delight comes from watching the fleeting yet all-consuming emotions passing across a child's face as he waits for his noodles to cook.

Miyazaki wears his heart on his sleeve, and the mythological and ecological fantasy of Ponyo might be too big a leap for some viewers. But its utter sincerity and wild invention is of a piece with the empathy the film shows for a little boy who walks barefoot over the crest of a hill wiping tears from his eyes and looking for his mother. I watched every moment of the movie with delight, as much in the evidence of freedom found in the drawing style and pacing from moment to moment, as in the overwhelming joy expressed by the children's wide, simple smiles.

Celebration weekened

There's something really special about this weekend. It seems the stars have aligned to produce a near-perfect confluence of enjoyment. Let's count the factors:

1. Birthday party! The kids will have their shared birthday party tomorrow morning. Subfactors: (a) It's a slacker party at a local public park with a game exchange instead of present-giving. (b) Tomorrow is going to be the nicest day of summer in weeks, with temperatures in the low eighties and plenty of sunshine.


2. Tarantino! His new film has generated plenty of heated disagreement, which makes me eager to see it for myself.


3. No class! Since classes have started, I feel a great sense of freedom on the weekend when school is not in session. Yet since classes have just started, I don't have any work to do to prepare for next week. Win-win!
   

Immersive

NPR did a story this morning about a new serial killer novel that comes with a packet of items -- driver's license, death certificates, etc. -- along with phone numbers and websites where you can interact with the characters.

It reminded me of one of the first places I spent a lot of time on the web -- The Spot. It was purported to be a kind of reality show on the web, with a bunch of beautiful people living in a house and posting journal entries and photos with all kinds of relationship gossip. I couldn't browse graphical sites from my Charlottesville apartment, but I had access to Netscape on my workplace computer. Several times a day I'd check in, looking for new content in the characters' diaries.

Even though the faux-real touches of projects like this are gimmicky, they have the potential to draw you in. One reason I'm so looking forward to seeing District 9 tonight is that it's framed in that documentary style. I find that approach makes me more alert, scanning for information and feeling like whatever I've caught is something I really possess, not something that was fed to me. It's a structure that involves me, exactly as it's designed to do.

No time to write

Noel and I are going out to dinner and a double feature tonight. That would have been nothing to our twenty-years-ago selves, but for oldsters like we are now, it's a marathon that requires use to psych ourselves up and carbo-load for days. Add to that the rather intense Super Mario Galaxy session that Archer roped me into this afternoon, and I'm not sure I'm capable of rational writing.

So I'll just leave you with the hope that you're having as relaxing as evening as I am. Enjoy!

Edited to add: OK, we didn't make it through two movies. We are so old. And Julie & Julia was somewhat ... awkward in structure and halting in execution. Yet my love for Meryl Streep knows no bounds. I need to revise my answer to this AVQ&A, Tasha, please.

Upcoming

Amazingly, there are only three weeks left in the summer. After that, school starts up for three of us, and Noel gets his home office back full time. Here's what I'm looking forward to in the meantime:

• Funny People. I know that early reviews indicate this Judd Apatow film might lose its way in the third act, but I've been looking forward to it ever since the first trailer. Practically all my favorite people in comedy right now on screen at the same time, and the return of dramatic Adam Sandler, who was so wonderful in Punch-Drunk Love.


• Finalizing just one syllabus. I only teach two classes, but for the past eight years I've been coordinating the team-taught freshman course, which means putting together a complicated syllabus for 120 students and eight instructors. This semester that duty has been passed to another, which means I'm only responsible for myself and my one seminar. Really takes the pressure off.
  


• Shopping for school supplies. Oh, how I love the boxes of pencils, markers, composition pads, folders, and the specialized holders to contain it all. I wanted to get started this weekend, but Noel informed me that school-supply season doesn't begin until August 1.


• The kids' birthday party. Well, technically this isn't until August 22, and technically I'm not looking forward to it, since I'm already feeling guilt about the slacker route we're taking. But if I can get a second to think about Mario-themed activities, I'm sure I'll start getting excited.
  

Life tracking

One of the aspects of social networking that tends to befuddle non-adopters is the sharing of personal life lists. Since I started blogging several years ago, I've kept lists of movies seen and books read in a given year. At a certain point I moved those lists to listography.com, where I also keep private lists of work-related data that I know I'll need for year-end reviews (as well as packing lists, top ten drafts, etc.).

But since I joined Goodreads.com, I've stopped keeping up with the "books read" list on listography. (And the "movies seen" list is languishing, too, as you may have noticed if you clicked the link above.) Because the queueing system in Goodreads is so useful (you can keep track of books you want or plan to read, as well as those currently in progress and those completed), but most importantly because the social aspect encourages me to keep my profile current, I find it much easier to keep track of my reading there. It's kind of effortless, actually; when a book review of mine goes up, I'm usually reminded to hop over to Goodreads and link to it in the "my review" box, simultaneously marking it completed, and that's when I update my shelves to include the next book or two in my pile.

Because I'm not keeping a list of what I have read as much as making available to friends a view of my bedside table -- what I'm reading now -- I don't think of Goodreads in the same way as the "books read" post I used to keep on my blog. Yet behind the scenes, while I'm doing the social networking thing, the site is compiling that very same list for me. When I need it, voila -- there it is.

So now it bugs me that I'm still trying to keep my master list of "films seen in 2009" on listography. Why isn't there a social networking tool that would make compiling that list as effortless as it is on Goodreads? Why can't I invite my friends to see what I'm planning to watch, and what I've seen recently (or back in the mists of time)? Being in the pop culture media means being asked these exact questions all the time.

My former student Holly recommended the site livingsocial.com; it's where she keeps her books-read list, but you can also collect films, iPhone apps, ski slopes, albums, TV shows, and beers there. I'm leery of the kitchen-sink approach, and of course I'm not interested in abandoning Goodreads. Is this the best place to stash my film updates? Or are there any more film-centric sites out there that will aggregate my viewing, motivate me to update, and allow me to share?