Cinema Sideshow

Revisiting: Catch Me If You Can

Another in a series of new-to-you reviews, written by me. Enjoy.

 

The year 2002 was a good one for Steven Spielberg — it was the year that he returned to making movies that were fun, rather than beating audiences over the head with Important Social Messages. On the heels of his surprisingly breezy SF action-pic Minority Report, Steve spent a quick 52 days shooting Catch Me If You Can, his slick, slightly loopy period piece about real-life con man Frank Abagnale, Jr. (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). It may not be Spielberg's best movie — but, by golly, it's his happiest, friendliest film in a long, long time.

The Saul Bass-inspired opening credits and jazzy, retro score (courtesy of longtime Spielberg music man John Williams) set the swingin' '60s tone. Based on Abagnale's autobiography, the movie tells his true-life, believe-it-or-not story: As a teenager, Abagnale faked checks, diplomas, and birth certificates. He also cashed forged checks for millions before his 21st birthday and flew around the world for free posing as a Pan Am pilot. He later went on to successfully impersonate a doctor and a lawyer. Then, after serving several international sentences for fraud, he was paroled at age 26 on the condition that he go to work for the FBI and teach agents how to catch guys just like himself.

Spielberg's film follows five important years in Abagnale's life, from the point where he started kiting checks through his Pan Am adventures and, finally, to his capture and detainment in a French prison. To make the story more than just an admiring bit of fluff about a charming grifter (and to add more than a little of Spielberg's own thematic obsessions), we're given the Freudian background on the lad — an obsessive admiration for a larcenous father (Christopher Walken), deep pain over his parents' divorce, and a burning desire to shine in his parents' eyes. Fleshing out the daddy complex undertones is Abagnale's cat-and-mouse relationship with the FBI agent who's chasing him (Tom Hanks, in a spirited take on your standard 60's G-man). All of this is presented as a witty, glossy fairy tale — truthfully, one may feel a twinge of guilt enjoying Abagnale's shenanigans without any concern for who he may have hurt in the process — with ever-so-slight subtext about fathers, sons, families and the personal need for validation.

 

(Read the rest at DVD Journal)

Revisiting: Blue Velvet

In which I send you back in time to read a review I wrote somewhere else. And why not?

 

In his excellent deconstruction of David Lynch for Premiere magazine in 1996, David Foster Wallace attempted to define the term "Lynchian":

An academic definition … might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment with the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that's definable only ostensively — i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim's various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian.

Lynch's disturbing, sensual, sickly funny masterwork Blue Velvet — his defining film — fascinated and repelled audiences on its release in 1986. Closer in tone to his freaky first film Eraserhead than to either his mainstream debut The Elephant Man or his follow-up fiasco Dune, audiences were simply unprepared for the experience. Although Lynch's distinctive style has become recognizable and less shocking over the years (and served as inspiration for such diverse directors as Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Todd Solondz, Terry Gilliam, and the Coen brothers), at the time of its release it was stupendously shocking because there had never been a mainstream Hollywood film even remotely like it.

Many critics roundly condemned Blue Velvet in a way that made it sound like they were more disturbed by their own reactions to the film than by the film itself (Roger Ebert wrote that "The movie is powerful, challenging and made with great skill, and yet it made me feel pity for the actors who worked in it and anger at the director for taking liberties with them"), and it's commonly held that only Pauline Kael's enthusiastic review in The New Yorker convinced audiences to give Blue Velvet a second look — saving the film from box-office oblivion. After all the uproar, Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, and Lynch and actor Dennis Hopper were honored with awards from the L.A. Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. Many years later, Blue Velvet isn't the shockfest that it once was. But it remains an audacious, uneasy examination of the rotting underbelly of small-town America, combining elements of film noir with a Preston Sturges innocence, all seen through a film of Buñuelesque surrealism.

 

(Read the rest at DVD Journal)

Lessons Learned, Week One.

 

 In dealing with this new world of dialysis, Patrick and I have learned a few things. At least, I've learned 'em -- Patrick's more content to just go with the tide where it takes him, doing what needs to be done, and not overthinking it. The overthinking is my job. And I do that well.

So, a week or so into all of this, here are a few things I've learned.

 

1.) Doctors believe that you have unlimited resources, and payment for services will come from the Mystical Medical Money Faeries.  I think this is because they all make a whole lot of money so they never worry about it, and they have front-desk people to deal with all the complicated stuff like paperwork and billing. Because almost every doctor we've seen has been eager to leap directly into a Very Important Procedure without any concern for our meager bank account, the relative generosity of our insurance, or our work schedules.

And speaking of work schedules ...

 

2.) When you have a medical condition that must be managed, it is assumed that you have no other places to be during normal working hours.  The dialysis clinic where Patrick goes is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and dialysis takes from 3 to 4 hours. Pat has a job that normally starts at 8:45 a.m., and he has to do dialysis two weekdays (he has three sessions a week, one on Saturday.) So, yeah. Try doing that math.  There's "nocturnal dialysis," overnight in a few clinics, but they don't do that with the temporary catheter that he has right now. In a couple of weeks he'll be getting a permanent catheter to do peritoneal dialysis at home, and that will normalize our schedules. But first, there'll be a day off work (both of us) for surgery, a couple of days recovery (just him), and then -- when it's healed -- we both have to attend a full week of 9-to-5 classes to learn how to manage the home dialysis. We're already not making enough money to cover our asses (see: Item 1) and now we're also expected to work a good 20 percent less to attend all of the classes, doctor's appointments, and outpatient procedures.

 
3.) We're now automatically part of a friendly, inquisitive, chatty brotherhood of Families Dealing with Illness.  In doctor's waiting rooms, at the dialysis center, at the class today ... everyone wants to hear our story and share theirs. They smile, they say hello, they introduce themselves. They show me pictures of their dogs on their phones. They offer encouragement, saying, He looks so great! His numbers are that good, already? That's awesome! and even, on occasion, try to hug me.

I understand their desire to connect, their desperation to feel like they're not alone in all of this. I get that. And so I smile, and look at the dog pictures, and answer the questions, and nod and respond to their stories. But it doesn't come easily to me. I'm a private person about a surprising number of things, and when I'm stressed and have troubles, I fold even further into myself. This sudden inclusion in a cabal of instant friends with whom the only thing I share is my husband's need to plug into a machine a few times a week ... I'm not comfortable with this.  I don't want it. I want polite nods, and personal space, and to be left the hell alone.

I realize that I'm not the norm in this way, from what I've seen so far. But there you have it.

 

4.) It's never too early to start filing every piece of paper that you're ever handed, for any reason.  Obviously, back in December, we had no idea that we'd be here. Now, I've been advised that some of the paperwork I'll need to fill out will require us to list every doctor he's seen, and at Legacy alone, before he ever got to OHSU, there were six.There are requests for lists of medications, and doctors asking for dates of procedures, and then there's all the bills to sort and send off to the flex-pay company. I'm playing catch-up with a hundred pieces of paper -- and it didn't help that we moved in the middle of all this, either. Yipes.

There will undoubtedly be more things to learn, most of it about bags of suspicious liquid and various types of plastic tubing. Both of us are feeling a lot less side-swiped about the whole thing now, and it's looking less like a life sentence and more like an enormous, long-term inconvenience. Inconveniences aren't tragedies. They're just annoying. And honestly, I've dealt with a lot of annoyance already in this crazy business we call show.

In the meantime, so this post isn't one huge downer, there's this: