“Yo, Steve, you got any movies, my dude?”
One of the youngbloods, a relatively new arrival here at the halfway house, is standing by my bunk with a look of desperation. It’s Sunday afternoon and he’s too broke to do anything but languish in here with us old timers. I slide my pile of Brooklyn Public Library DVD’s over for his perusal. After scanning the titles for a moment, he grimaces sadly and says, “I meant good movies.”
“There’s some good movies in there.”
He squinted at one box: “McCabe and Mister Miller? 1971? Man, I was born in 1983. Why would I wanna watch some wild west crazy shit made when I wasn’t even around?”
“Movies ain’t newspapers, youngblood. You’re missing out.”
“The old black and white Casablanca stuff y’all watch… nah, man, thanks, I’ll pass.”
I returned to the portable DVD player on my lap, to Carnival of Souls. I didn’t mean to lie to the young man– movies are newspapers, produced in a frenetic daily grind, stuffed with advertising, distributed in a blitz as far and wide as fiscally possible, then cast aside, forgotten the next day. But I figure asserting the notion of movies as something other than disposable infotainment would give him food for thought.
Late one night, Big Biswas, who is actually a medium height, slightly chubby man around my age with an endearing bulldog face, visits my bunk. I don’t even pull off my headphones, just direct him to the DVD stack. Peripherally noticing him still standing there after while, I look up from Boccaccio ‘70 to find the bulldog looking hangdog. “Nothing?” I ask. “Come on, man. Just try one. I know they look sorta weird and old, but what’s to lose by trying?” “Na,” he says. Then his eyes go wide. He is looking at my LCD screen. Sophia Loren is bouncing around silently in a tight red dress, in front of several grubby, horny rural yokels.
“What you watching?”
“Boccaccio ‘70.”
“Oh, one a those old school pornos.”
“No. Well, sorta. Look at this.”
I rewind to a scene where Sophia, as a carnival worker offered as the prize in a lottery, causes a frenzy by bending over to pick something up in from of the nasty men. A moment later, a bull breaks loose and starts to charge at her crimson dress until she strips down to her lingerie and tosses the dress aside. “See?” I said. “She’s built like Buffie the Body, right?”
“Like Melyssa Ford.”
“Gloria Velez.”
“Esther Baxter.”
“Like Ice-T’s wife.”
“Which one?”
“All of ‘em.”
Big Biswas is grinning harder than the yokels as Sophia teases and pouts and struts across my ten inch screen. I got him. “You wanna borrow this one, don’t you, man?” He takes a moment, freeing his eyes from the screen only when Vittorio De Sica cuts away from Sophia. “Nah, that’s okay,” he says. “I like the new pornos better.”
To each his own. I never push too hard, not wanting to become as obnoxious as the nostalgic village squire in Powell and Pressvurger’s A Canterbury Tale–another library disc treated like a leper round here.
“You sound mighty condescending,” says a critic colleague of mine when I complain that, as starved as my floormates at the house are for cine-nutrition, the mainstream films they digest provide little more than carbs and sodium. The critic protests, “Let folks see what they wanna see. These are the movies they chose to watch.”
“Well, I feel it’s more like the movies are choosing them.”
“Not everybody needs to watch Renoir, Welles and Mizoguchi.”
“Now who’s condescending? Why should Renoir, Welles and Mizoguchi be VIP-only? Those are some of the most accessible movies ever made. Why don’t we have Renoir, Welles and Mizoguchi type filmmakers turning out Dark Knights and Tropic Thunders?”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
I’m holding my breath, but not my tongue: These movies are killing us in the stealthy manner of mercury-laden toothpaste, hypothermia and deep fried sugar wings. Taste buds massaged, body benumbed, poisons working silently into the bloodstream until death starts to feel like sweet slumber.
The politics of it all: When the town well is poisoned, the poorest and weakest drop first. The ones who can afford expensive treatments manage to live through the ailment, scarred but not destroyed.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog