A Week at the Knees (part one)

I am on the far end of recovering from knee surgery and am planning a return to work tomorrow morning.  I’ve had a lot of down time this week – with my knee up and iced, and my mind on various forms of media.  It may not have been the kind of fun vacation from school most of us think about when we think about February break, but it was certainly restful for me.  I had no choice but to stay still and let others help.

And boy, that was hard – letting others help.  I’m not good at asking for help, first of all, and so when people offer, my initial impulse is to wave them off, to say I am fine and have no needs.  This week, I learned to say thank you with grace, if not complete comfort.  I am grateful for the company, for the food, for the phone calls, for the offered support.  Friends both local and distant rallied to offer me comfort and friendship; I am truly fortunate.

And I am grateful that in our modern times, there are so many ways to divert me from boredom.  I would have gone stir crazy without movies and TV shows and books and iPad games and magazines and email and Facebook at my fingertips.  Shall we see how I amused myself?

Movies
Is it terribly embarrassing to say that I started my recovery by watching the second half of Breaking Dawn Part One?  I needed something simple, something that could pass the time without requiring a great deal of brain energy.  This certainly did fill the need.  I had seen it before in the theater – on Thanksgiving night while I was on the run from a behavioral episode that had taken place earlier in the evening, and hadn’t really paid a whole lot of attention to it then.  I have developed more of a distaste for the Twilight series as the books and movies have progressed – certainly the first book, while not wonderfully written, told an engaging story and held my attention, and the subsequent books deteriorated as they progressed.  Anyone familiar enough with me to discuss the Twilight books has already heard my rant about Stephenie Meyers and her eye rolling so I won’t explore that here – but I do note that the characters in the movies don’t do a whole lot of eye rolling so perhaps someone, somewhere, got the message.  I think at this point, I watch the movies for the same reason I continued to read the books – an impulse to just finish the damn things.

What a difference to move on to the next movie:  The Ides of March.  I like George Clooney, I like Ryan Gosling, what’s not to like in a movie starring both Clooney and Gosling?  Not a whole lot – I thought it was an excellent movie, a wonderful character study of a man (Gosling) at a distinct point in his career when he had to make a choice about where his life was going to go, knowing that the choice was being made and what its repercussions would be.  Many of us make these choices not knowing they will be critical and life-changing until we look back upon them, but this movie dealt with the conscious, intentional choice one man had to make at a specific time, with specific circumstances, and no backpedalling permitted.  I found the story engaging, though surely they could have thrown a few more important and intelligent women into the story.  I do believe women participate in politics these days, don’t they?

I watched Let It Be, not always able to follow the dialogue (heavy accents, no subtitles) but certainly able to recognize the music.  I had seen only small snippets of the concert on the roof and I was pleased to see more of it here.  This was a very Paul-centric exploration of the Beatles, but there was one particular moment – a George moment – that I adored:  Paul and George are discussing how George should play his part in a song, and George says, “Look, tell me what to play, and I’ll play it.  If you don’t want me to play anything, I won’t.  Just tell me and I’ll do what you want.”  One can see the struggle involved with keeping that kind of conversation civil – there’s a lot behind those words that we did not get to see.

Fish Tank was a splendid movie, a Bildungsroman about a young English girl in a poor section of town, trying to find out who she is in the midst of circumstances that don’t make it easy.  She has a relationship of sorts with an older man, her mother’s boyfriend, and though their relationship does culminate in a physical coupling, it’s the development of his influence over her, and hers over him, that informs the bulk of the movie.

I had heard Super 8 was a fun movie, and indeed it was – clearly involving Steven Spielberg (many echoes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind here).  The story traced the stereotypical hero path of its protagonist, a 12-year-old boy, through his quest – featuring such elements as uncommon family situation (his mother has died), traumatic experience that begins the quest (a train wreck), magical weapon (the camera, the unusual Rubik’s Cube-like pieces spilled at the train wreck), older sage-like guidance (the science teacher), descent into hell (going underground to locate his friend and the monster who took her), and ultimately, reconciliation with father figure (he and his dad ultimately bond and Get Through This Thing Together).  It’s rather fun to see literary constructs in action in popular culture.  Joseph Campbell would be proud.

I’ve been a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s for more than 20 years – going back to his Henry V days – and so when he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar, I wanted him to win it.  Then I started hearing about this wonderful performance Christopher Plummer gave in Beginners, and I had to see it.  I hate to admit it, but Plummer deserved the award, which he won last night, over Branagh.  Well, Plummer’s 82, and now the oldest winner of an Academy Award ever, and Branagh is a little older than me and still has time, so fair’s fair.  Beginners is the story of a man and his father – Ewan McGregor and Plummer – told in three timelines:  when McGregor’s character was a boy, as he dealt with his father’s illness and death, and months later as he tried to find love with a woman as commitment-phobic as he was.  The complication of this movie lies in Plummer’s character’s decision to come out as a gay man at the age of 75 – knowing he was gay all his life and remaining married and faithful to his wife, it was only when she died that he was able to turn to the lifestyle he’d dreamed of all his life.  There is no judgment involved in this decision – it is supported and welcomed by all characters – it’s not an issue whether or not he was right to stay married as a gay man, or how wholeheartedly to turn to a gay lifestyle once freed to do so.  The issue here is:  what do we owe ourselves in our search for identity and connection?  That’s a tough question we ask ourselves as we come to terms with our limited lifespans when we age away from the delusional immortality of our adolescent and young adult beliefs.

What an abrupt shift, then, from Beginners to Fight Club.  I had read Chuck Palahniuk’s book ages ago, probably when it was first published, and was not terribly impressed with the violence, or even the writing style.  But the movie has attained cultural touchstone status, and I had been meaning to see it for some time.  Here was my chance.  And, bearing in mind I’m not a fan of Brad Pitt’s in most of his movies, I tried to go into the movie as fairly as I could.  I still didn’t like it.  Dark and violent, sometimes confusing – even knowing the “secret” I found it baffling at times – I wasn’t pleased by the way it glorified terrorism.  Check that goal off my to-see list, thank goodness.

That’s it for the movies.  I believe I’ll save the TV series for part two.