Movie Night

Choosing our nightly 8 pm movie often devolves into a high stakes, union vs. management-type negotiation.  We bit our nails with Hitchcock last night; can’t we catch a Viking epic tonight?   Fortunately, tonight’s pick - Down By Law - was an easy one.  After all, if Winona Ryder (is there a more underrated actor?) says it’s one of her favs, we’re both in!

(BTW, are we the only ones who still marvel at the fact that with a few scrolls on our Apple remote we can retrieve any film, regardless of how old, forgotten or lousy it is?)

Down by Law delivered.  Set in 1980’s New Orleans, this b/w film noir unfurls like a meandering jazz score, unapologetically taking its cool-cat time.  It’s confident you won’t bail during some of its more slow-burning scenes - and doesn’t seem to care if you do.

Now, if you’re from the Hollywood school of silence (i.e. no one is allowed to utter a word until the final credits) you wouldn’t like watching a movie with us.  We yammer, offer hot takes and look up filming locations, even deep into the third act.  And, I must admit, during Down By Law we found ourselves occasionally whining about a scene we felt was unnecessarily drawn out or bemoaning the director’s decision to turn down a superfluous plot alley.  Perhaps one of us was even secretly monitoring a Yankee game on his phone.

Shame on us.

After the anti-hero Tom Waits smoked his last Lucky Strike enroute to an inexplicably happy ending, we were both gobsmacked with a horrifying realization.

We had ghosted one of our dearest friends!  Driven off and abandoned Her among the tumbleweeds at a desert Texaco at the edge of the Mojave.  Our rejection had been gradual, a creeping vine unnoticed until a forty five year-old film held up a mirror in front of us.

Patience, that most precious of virtues, had been squeezed from us, one Tik-Tok, one text chain, one Ipad at a time.  Turns out all those dopamine hits from the 50th phone check of the day have consequences.  

Think of the last exceptional feature film you enjoyed.  At some point, the art was so gripping, so enthralling, that you surrendered yourself to the story.  In your trance-like state, you were one with the hero as he got not what he wanted but what he needed ultimately.  Your heart broke with Rocky when he landed the fight with Apollo only to realize hours before the bell he had no chance to win.

In the case of Down by Law, our woeful absence of patience deprived us of fully absorbing this masterpiece of a film.

So … thank you Winona. Thank you Tom.  This cinephile’s car is hitting the brakes for a Steve McQueen-style u-turn.  Goodbye Ipad, so long Yankee games - movie night is for movies, nothing else.

Besides, baseball season is almost over anyway.