We Didn’t Miss It. This Is It.

When I was sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty, when I was learning how to be who I’d eventually become, I think it was safe to say that I was an idiot. Like the time I destroyed my wheel hitting a curb on the way to see Primus, then rolled the car back in the jack. Then the show sucked.

That said, all those nights of going to shows with my friends and hanging out at the Gypsy until it closed followed by coffee all night at Denny’s, then slogging through school the next day, they were great. I remember what those nights felt like. I thought I had problems then; I didn’t. And now all that’s left is a stylized, romanticized set of memories that are better than the actual times could possibly have been. I had friends, I had dreams, and I had forever in front of me. Same as I have now, minus the responsibilities.

Sometimes I get wistful for those times. I remember thinking how big everything was, how much the things I was doing mattered, how grown up I was. But I wasn’t. I was a child. I’m safer now, and happier, and smarter, and a whole host of other things. Including more cynical.

But sometimes I am reminded of who I was then. How much fun it was not to know what I thought I knew. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist reminds me of that. Driving around all night chasing down a dream.

It makes me feel that. And that’s a wonderful thing.

I Got a Line on You, Babe

theatrical poster

Burn After Reading is the Coen brothers‘ first movie since No Country for Old Men, which everyone decided was the movie to honor for the brothers’ career of nearly unbroken awesomeness.

(Nearly unbroken, rather than just unbroken, because of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.)

As one might expect if one has followed their careers at all, they didn’t exactly get full of themselves. Instead, they made a weird, awkward, blackly hilarious movie starring a bunch of great actors. That’s as opposed to their other style, the weird, awkward, dramatic movies starring a bunch of great actors.

Burn After Reading is not a great movie. It is, in fact, a very very good movie. It’s light, it’s funny, it has unexpected moments, and it’s good to see great actors actually appear to be having fun.

With lesser talent, this movie would have devolved into an insoluble mess. However, the brothers enlisted J.K. Simmons to play the director of the CIA in a couple of scenes. Without these scenes, the movie would seem incompetent. With them, it proves that they did what they did on purpose and expected the audience to follow along.

I appreciate that sort of faith in the audience. I appreciate that sort of storytelling. I appreciate this movie, and the Coen brothers.