by the way

I am not free

I picked up a day planner from the bookstore today because I have a sense that I will have things to do soon. Currently, nothing is written in my day planner, but that doesn't mean I am free.

I am definitely not free on Saturday, February 11th because, in my planner, there is no Saturday, February 11th. On the next page, there's no Wednesday, February 15th; I won't be making appointments or taking meetings that day, either. The same goes for February 29th.

The day planner was free--of charge, anyway--because there are a few days missing, torn out by some thoughtful customer.

I am not free. Not on those days, and not on any others.

What passes for a movie review in this day and age

I don't know if THE FUTURE is a good movie or a bad one. I try to judge that sort of thing as whatever I perceive the filmmaker—or author, or playwright—intended against what I actually experienced. But I'm a simple viewer, and if I don't feel like I understand a film—or, in fact, FILM as a medium-- I can't be equipped to judge it. I have no idea what Miranda July might have been trying to do or why. From the opening voiceover by a dead cat to the overexposed closing by the same dead cat, I was terribly affected by a hollow hopelessness, a sense that, as affected as July is or chooses to be, THE FUTURE was one of the darkest, least redemptive movies I have ever seen. Between the consciously too-cute exchanges by her leads, July's characters turn away, over and over again, from anything like redemption. They sleepwalk into filthy relationships, they bathe children, they dance inside too-symbolic t-shirts, and they argue with the moon. They vaguely pursue satisfaction without ever achieving it, without ever even identifying what would satisfy them, and the story grows dense with unrealistic and unrealized aspiration, and with incoherent longing, and with half-hearted movement. For me, this was nauseatingly real and it left me completely subdued, unable even to laugh at the dead cat, unable to laugh at the awkward sex, unable to laugh at the Lollapalooza crowds I saw on the way home. I just felt kind of sick.

It's possible that I've never written a review of a film before, and it's certain that I've usually preferred not to comment on movies beyond whether or not I liked them, or found them funny, or whether or not they made me cry. It's possible that July wanted me to be sick, in which case, bravo, I guess. I don't really understand filmmaking, and I only intermittently understand what is good, and what makes a thing good. Today, though, it seems to me that a movie can have varying levels of depth, and the unfortunate analogy I came up with on my bus ride home from the movie was that of knitting. I know next to nothing about knitting, but bear with me, if only because you already have.

It seems to me that knitting can be tight or loose and that a movie can also be either tight or loose. A filmmaker can present a complete image of a world, a tightly-knit experience on the screen that is complete in itself. Or, in silence and by using a sort of cinematic negative space, a filmmaker can create a loose-knit sort of film through which the viewer can glimpse in what might be a mirror what could be their own experience--or what might be the world outside the theatre. It might be the difference in evoking an emotion, in plucking whatever emotional strings might be there to pluck, and in allowing a person to feel something about what they've seen. I don't know which is more manipulative, but I'm confident in which is more devastating. What Ms. July—that sounds oddly like a centerfold; I take back the "Ms."—has done is she's created a hazy and centerless web of story, a knit that might have been made only for her, that is loose around the middle, and tight at all of the edges.