Friday night I left the office about 4:45, ran home (literally), jumped in my car, raced to the community college and filled in, last minute, on KSFR's Cinema Talk. I've filled in on the Friday evening (from 5:25-6 pm) show a few times, but normally with a little more notice and time to prepare. I'd only happened to catch For the Bible Tells Me So, which meant I mostly listened and asked questions about the other two movies Chris Quinn (one of the show's hosts) had seen. Both Gone Baby Gone and Michael Clayton sounded interesting after the show, though neither were films I'd wanted to see before hand.
After the radio I headed down to the Mine Shaft to check out my big brother's band. In order to avoid any kind of conflict of interest we only put the show in the listings and the rest was a grassroots effort to get people out to dance. I was happy that the Pasatiempo writer Rob DeWalt gave the band some ink and hopefully it helped the turnout. The crowd for US Pipe and the Balls Johnson Dance Machine didn't seem to know what to expect at first. An 11 person funk band isn't exactly a normal New Mexico night. But eventually people started to groove. At one point two women and one man had the best dance-off I've seen in years. One of the bandmembers told me later that she was trying to watch from the stage because it was so good it was distracting. Because it was the big bro I was there for the entire show, leaving me filled up on music for the weekend.
Instead of going to the Hat Show at High Mayhem, which I really wanted to attend and throw my name in, I went to the movies on Saturday and spent the rest of the night at home. SFR's Emiliano Garcia-Sarnoff and Cinena Talk's other host, John Dupuy, hit the movies at about 10 am for a preview of Fido and I joined up with them later for Gone Baby Gone and Rendition. Neither movie really got me excited, the way I'd hoped they would, but both were good in their own way. Gone was well acted, with a moral dilemma not easily solved, which left the three of us in very different places. Two of us agreed with the characters choice, the other was disgusted with first him and then us. Somehow the guys decided they hadn't had enough cinema for the day and we went to Rendition next. When I left I'd enjoyed the movie, the more it sits with me though the more I don't feel anything. Again, it was well acted, but the pregnant wife bothers me because it seemed so melodramatic and unnecessary (and maybe a little too Marianne Pearl). But if actors are going to push politics I'd rather they do it in the form of a movie, even a mediocre one, than by politicking and destroying the barrier of fantasy that I like to surround a movie star. In fact, David Denby, whose reviews I tend not to like, discusses the difference between modern and classic movie stars in a great New Yorker article, "Fallen Idols." He discusses the lack of drawing power stars now have and the line studios used to have the ability to draw between the stars and their personal lives, lives which we now are all to familiar with.
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