Practicalmadness

The management expects that we lack the requisite attention span for what we are proposing, but the idea has popped into my mind for a series of articles about Why Great Movies Matter.

Formatically (yay, I coined a word!) it would be not unlike Harold Bloom's How To Read and Why, a wonderful book I promise I'll get around to finishing one of these days, in the sense that I will choose from my personal canon one of these so-called "great movies", and explain why it is relevant to us now, however many years after its release.

Some choices are obvious, in the sense that I'm not sure if I could say anything about them that wouldn't have popped right into the head of any brain-damaged chimp with a love for classic film. Into this category I would plop Network, which I've watched twice since I got it on DVD yesterday, and which is so goddamned timely that I really have trouble remembering that it was made almost thirty years ago.

Then there are the movies that people think they know, but they don't really. Last summer I happened to find myself ranting to a professor about Lawrence of Arabia, and apparently I was quite persuasive and the conversation ended with this avant-garde video artist actually seeing some merit in what he had previously written off as bourgeois narrative drivel.

This would and would not be like Roger Ebert's ongoing series of "Great Movies" reviews -- they are personal recollections (which is like), but not necessarily based around placing the films into any sort of canon or explaining/justifying their greatness (unlike).

They may be Towering Masterpieces of Cinema, these things you call (in hushed tones) Citizen Kane and Wings of Desire, but they are personally relevant to me and I want to tell you about them.

Additionally, all the movies currently in release suck. Yes, children, I am including the indie and art-house movies in this. When Cannes goes as badly as it did this year, I take this as a sign that The Matrix Revolutions and The Return of the King are probably the best I can expect from this year at the cinema, and so I hope you will forgive my less-than-eagerness to waste a few hundred words on The Hulk.

Scratch that: I may yet waste some words on The Hulk, and as soon as I've got the magnificent Morvern Callar programmed, categorized and easily referenced, I'll let you know. But I don't have any new movie reviews planned, per se. This Why Great Movies Matter scheme allows me to resurrect certain elements of practical cine-madness without feeling compelled to make the producers of Terminator 3 any damned richer.

And I will. I may yet, if I don't lose my nerve.