Singles

I had a friend whose theory was that whatever you love in high school and early college is what you love for the rest of your life. He suggested that your favorite music, tv show, or movie when you were eighteen or nineteen is still probably your favorite today and the new things you encounter get measured against it. 

Now this theory doesn’t hold 100% true because I know for a fact my 90s love affair with the Dave Matthews Band is long since over. But there are a lot of things from that period that I still think are wonderful, and one of them just came out on Blu-Ray this month. The 1992 film Singles is kind of Cameron Crowe’s lost film. Right before it, he directed his first movie, the classic high school love story Say Anything, and after it he directed the unexpected Tom Cruise blockbuster Jerry Maguire. Right between those two notable movies came this small film about a group of six friends who all live in the same apartment building trying to navigate the single life in grunge-era Seattle. It’s like an extended episode of Friends set in the northwest and with a far better soundtrack.

 

Crowe is among America’s most writerly filmmakers. He loves character, idiosyncratic dialogue, and bumper-sticker worthy one liners. Let us not forget this is the guy who introduced “Show me the money” to the national lexicon. Singles is divided up into vignettes with short story-like titles such as “Have Fun, Stay Single” and “What Took You So Long?” Each one focuses on both the pathos and occasional absurdity of being single.

The relationship between Steve, the traffic engineer trying to solve Seattle’s gridlock problem, and Linda, the more-wholesome-than-the-granola-she-eats environmental activitist, is the heart of the film, but I love the subplots and side characters even more. Matt Dillon, for example, plays Cliff Poncier, the empty-headed puff-chested lead singer of the ridiculously named band Citizen Dick. He’s pursued by the sweet and naïve Janet played by Bridget Fonda. He neglects and ignores her until a very Cameron Crowe moment when Janet decides to test Cliff by pretending to sneeze around him. Her only standard left for a boyfriend is that he say “Bless you” when she sneezes. She tries it and he hands her a box of Kleenex saying, “Don’t get me sick, babe. I have to perform this weekend.” She breaks it off with him and he is left to suddenly realize that he lost a really good thing. 

 

My other favorite supporting character is Debbie Hunt played by Sheila Kelly. Debbie is a bit of a man-eater and at one point has a full-on auction-slash-negotiation with her roommate in the kitchen for the eligible bachelor sitting well within earshot in the living room. The bacherlor is disappointed when he hears that Debbie is willing to give him up to her roommate in return for doing the dishes for a month.

The film is thick with cameos including members of Pearl Jam as Cliff Poncier’s band and director Tim Burton as the guy who directs Debbie Hunt’s entry for a video dating service. Real-deal grunge era bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden play in clubs attended by the singles. Crowe himself makes an appearance as a rock reporter, which is a bit of an inside joke because he got his start as a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone.

 

Looking back now, almost 23 years later, the film doesn’t seem very grungy. Its version of the club scene in Seattle looks tame and quaint, and as Crowe’s camera pans across the singles various apartments, it’s kind of funny and dated to see what used to seem alternative and edgy. Still, outdated or not, Singles has been one of my favorite movies for a long time. Since late high school/early college to be exact. And I’m glad it’s being reintroduced to new viewers on Blu Ray.

Review: Poetry

National Poetry Month continues! And this week, I review a movie titled, appropriately enough, Poetry. It’s a South Korean film released in 2010 directed by the filmmaker and novelist Lee Chang Dong. The film centers on a grandmother, Mrs. Yang, living in a smallish Korean city where she raises her teenage grandson and works part-time as a maid and home health care aide. It’s a small, quiet life but things begin to change for her as three events converge. First, after noticing she’s regularly forgetting basic words, Mrs. Yang is diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Then on her way home from the doctor, she sees a poster advertising a poetry class at the local community center and decides to sign up. Finally, Mrs. Yang discovers that her seemingly typical, pimply, inarticulate teenage grandson is one of a gang of boys involved in regularly assaulting a girl at school. She discovers this only after the girl commits suicide by jumping off a bridge and the fathers of the other boys get together with Mrs. Yang to make a plan for how to protect their sons’ futures. 

The film follows her as she tries to continue on with regular life while simultaneously trying to write poetry for her class by dwelling on the beautiful things of the world and trying to understand and reconcile how her own grandson could be part of something so monstrous. Both efforts are confounded as her Alzheimer’s continues to creep up on her. 

 

One of the saddest scenes in the film takes place when Mrs. Yang travels to the country to find the dead girl’s mother and convince her not to go public with the reason for her daughter’s suicide. She walks out to the field where the mother is working and gets so distracted by the beauty of the scenery, that she forgets why she came in the first place. She has a pleasant chat with the mother and then leaves, only realizing as she’s walking away what she forgot to do. Too embarrassed to correct herself, she just keeps walking.

 

Mrs. Yang tries to write a single poem over the course of the entire film, and she pauses every time she sees something stereotypically poetic – birds in the trees near her apartment, flowers outside the restaurant where she plans with the other parents to pay off the mother of the dead girl, the rippling water of the river where the girl jumped in. But each time, she’s never able to get more than a line or two before realizing she isn’t really inspired by these things. 

Mrs. Yang wrestles with the morality of trying to pay off the mother of the dead girl rather than allowing her grandson to be accountable for his actions. As she is gently bullied by the other boys’ fathers, she then struggles with how to come up with her part of the payoff. Each parent is expected to chip in five million won or about 4500 hundred U.S. dollars. For a woman of her means, it might as well be five million U. S. dollars.

In the end, Mrs. Yang gets her share of the money, but it doesn’t save her grandson. She also finally writes a poem, but rather than giving her peace, it only seems to highlight the fact that her life is irrevocably different and that she can never go back to what it was.

The film is largely about waking up – to the world around you and to the people in your life. It is about understanding that real poetry is not in birds or flowers but in the discoveries we make about ourselves and others when we truly open our eyes. It is in the contradiction of finding that you can still love someone even when we hate what they’ve done.  

It is not a fast moving film. It lingers and takes its time in ways that most American movies never would. There are subtitles and cultural differences that will keep away casual viewers. But like poetry itself, the film Poetry is something that rewards the patient, open-minded viewer.

Before Night Falls

April is National Poetry Month. Now I know what you’re thinking. It seems like there’s a national month for just about everything – National Hug your Postal Worker Month, National Pocket Lint Awareness month. But April is different. Even though it’s wildly unpopular and seemingly archaic, good poetry can do more to encapsulate the beauty, tragedy, and mystery of everyday life than almost any other art form. As William Carlos Williams once wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

So it seems appropriate to begin April with a film about a poet. Directed by Julian Schnabel and released in 2000, Before Night Falls tells the life story of Cuban-born poet, novelist, and memoirist Reynaldo Arenas. Arenas was born into abject poverty in the jungles of Cuba in 1943, joined the revolution as a young man in 1959, but then came into conflict with the new government as his open homosexuality, candid writings, and increasingly disenchanted views of Fidel and company made him a political dissident. After years of persecution and spending time in and out of brutal Cuban prisons, Arenas eventually made it to New York City where he lived and wrote. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and in 1990 ended his own life with an intentional overdose of drugs and alcohol.

The film telling his story is itself poetic and almost dream-like at times. Told in beautifully photographed vignettes, the movie doesn’t try to tell every single aspect of Arenas’s brief life, but instead tries to make impressions using carefully shot and arranged images of the tropical landscape, a mobile, sometimes wandering camera, and occasional period footage of Cuba itself. The director, Julian Schnabel, was actually a prominent painter and visual artist before beginning his career in film. His visual sensibilities make Before Night Falls not just a moving story about art, censorship, intolerance, and survival, but a work of art itself, a kind of cinematic poem that is meant to send you away not necessarily comforted or uplifted, but provoked to thought and reflection. 

 

Arenas is played by Javier Bardem in his first major English speaking role, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor that year. His performance is complicated and believable. He doesn’t play Arenas as a persecuted saint, but rather as a human – filled with all the contradictions, anger, and hopes that most humans have.

Toward the end of the film, Bardem reads lines from Arenas’s poem “The Parade Ends.” The poem and its delivery are both beautiful and sad, angry and hopeful. Like any good poem and any good poet, the film is many things all at once, and it’s an excellent cinematic representation of an underappreciated art form.

Before Night Falls is part of Delta’s LGBTQ Film Festival and will screen Monday April 6 in room S-105. The screening is free to everyone and a special broadside of one of Arenas’s poems will be given out to the first fifty attendees.