Scorsese Wins the Oscar - On Saturday night I went to the engagement party of my cousin, R, and we were sitting around the pool in her apartment complex celebrating that. A bunch of my other cousins, who I hadn't seen for fifteen years, were there, as a brief aside for those of you who keep up with that sort of thing. That's not really up for discussion here in public, however, but the guy who lived in the apartment block, and who with his girlfriend and friend, came down and sat in the spa, are, though. Because this guy was what many of you will be able to recognise as a Film Geek: he professed to own over a thousand DVDs, and have them catalogued on his computer, and organised into genre on his shelves. He was a good looking, rich film geek of a guy, with a good looking girlfriend, and I'm sure, somewhere in his apartment, were files for the scripts he wrote, and cameras for the short films he made.
At one stage my cousins and him were discussing Al Pacino and someone (I forget who now) wanted to know what films he was in. The Film Geek rattled off a few, and I added Dog Day Afternoon, which made him turn to me and say, 'You must be a bit of a film buff, huh?'
'I like films.'
'To reference Dog Day Afternoon, though, you gotta fancy films a bit.'
I just shrugged. It's an old film, made before Pacino started chewing on the scenery, and not a bad one at that, but it hardly rocks my world. If anything, I like the title more than I like the actual film, and if I could, I'd steal it.
'So what's your favourite film then?' he asks. 'I got a theory that everyone's favourite film says something about them.'
'I dunno, I like a lot of films--I don't really go for that favourite thing.'
'You must have one.'
I hate those kinds of questions--there's more to the world than one kind of film, and more than one kind of opinion, and I always struggle to find a way to explain without coming across like an arrogant shit. Eventually, I said, 'I like Jim Jarmusch films.'
'The black and white one with Johnny Depp?"
'Yeah, but Mystery Train and Ghost Dog are the ones I like the most.'
'That French speaking shit in Ghost Dog sucked--that film sucked.'
'So what's your favourite film?'
I figured he had an answer and he did, real quick: 'Fight Club.'
The first word in my head was 'dilettante', so I suppose he was right about his theory that favourite films say something about you.
At one stage my cousins and him were discussing Al Pacino and someone (I forget who now) wanted to know what films he was in. The Film Geek rattled off a few, and I added Dog Day Afternoon, which made him turn to me and say, 'You must be a bit of a film buff, huh?'
'I like films.'
'To reference Dog Day Afternoon, though, you gotta fancy films a bit.'
I just shrugged. It's an old film, made before Pacino started chewing on the scenery, and not a bad one at that, but it hardly rocks my world. If anything, I like the title more than I like the actual film, and if I could, I'd steal it.
'So what's your favourite film then?' he asks. 'I got a theory that everyone's favourite film says something about them.'
'I dunno, I like a lot of films--I don't really go for that favourite thing.'
'You must have one.'
I hate those kinds of questions--there's more to the world than one kind of film, and more than one kind of opinion, and I always struggle to find a way to explain without coming across like an arrogant shit. Eventually, I said, 'I like Jim Jarmusch films.'
'The black and white one with Johnny Depp?"
'Yeah, but Mystery Train and Ghost Dog are the ones I like the most.'
'That French speaking shit in Ghost Dog sucked--that film sucked.'
'So what's your favourite film?'
I figured he had an answer and he did, real quick: 'Fight Club.'
The first word in my head was 'dilettante', so I suppose he was right about his theory that favourite films say something about you.
- Notes:black mountain - no satisfaction
Comments
- smart (because they thought it was complex, or even, in the words of one guy about whom I had this theory, "the biggest mindfuck of a film ever made")
- coolly desensitised (becauses it pushes lots of the right buttons in terms of violence / transgression)
- knowledgeable (because by an entry-level standard it is even slightly offbeat/obscure
That is Fight Club, somewhat like, say, books by Ballard or Nabokov, or films by David Lynch, is art you can say you like of which the saying-so reflects well on your masculinity.But now, a bona fide hipster wannabe who has already had this insight tends to reject any of the potential positive connotations of such obvious material, so enthusiastically liking Fight Club was (for the nascent hipster wannabe inside me at the time) almost entirely a negative since in my view the film was not particularly complex, not particularly transgressive or violent, and not particularly offbeat. Another rung up on the hipster ladder going along almost exactly the same axis as Fight Club would be to say you were an enthusiastic fan of Oldboy ... but then the true hipster wannabe would probably also reject that as too obvious.
Likewise it's a hipster no-no to suggest that knowing about almost anything (and definitely a mid-level classic like Dog Day Afternoon that pretty much any film student would be familiar with) is surprising or a sign of buffdom.
This is the sort of dynamic that, taken to the extreme, rules those insane LJ ratings communities like
Surely the first rung of film fan "hipsterness" though is liking Tarantino - or is he too 1990s now?
When you're part of the inner circles of the wannabe hipster/collector/buff vortex, you naturally deride lower-level hipster plays (like praising Fight Club) as a way of asserting your own hipster-status.
Once you've moved to the post-hipster "enlightenment" circle of Heaven, in which you sit around claiming hipsters are lame and "music's good if and only if I think it's good" (a claim that, I would say from my own self-absorbed meta-meta-level, demonstrates a blatant lack of understanding of a huge part of the popular art experience), and you're aware of the transition of noob to hipster and all the attendant mindlessness, these low-level hipster plays seem even more lame.
Once you recognise that there is a vortex, perhaps you're prone to finding everything both lame and wonderful all at once, and your faculties of taste have become utterly useless. Anyway.
or you disappear up your own ass ;)
still, i love how everything you've said casts us all as jaded hipsters, with our own hispster standard. clearly, we all need a t-shirt.
Dead Man was pretty cool, though.
Granted the samurai / hiphop connection wasn't too much of a stretch after a decade of Wu-Tang material, but the dead seriousness of the protagonist as played by Forest Whitaker, alongside the Hagakure (which the film happily inspired me to read - it's both beautiful and hilarious itself, as a book, IMO) and set against the delightfully unmotivated comic incompetence of Whitaker's gangster employers ... well, it's just a great film. It's the best Jarmusch film I've seen, but I've only seen three.
-Paul
(decidely not a film or cinema buff; just someone who can remember farther back than 10 years)