Dear Diary: Not Cool
Because the weather was going to be unseasonably warm today, I planned on going to the movies. If I stayed home, I probably wouldn’t get any work done — for the second day in a row. Now that I’ve emerged from my estival depression, temperatures in the high seventies are totally unendurable (and it was supposed to be even warmer today). I’m done with that for 2009. Tomorrow is supposed to be lovely — perhaps even a tad brisk. I’m looking forward to a productive day.
(Which is foolish, because almost any contretemps can disable the higher functions that allow me to write with pleasure.)
The only movie showing that a) I hadn’t seen or that b) wasn’t out of the question — there seems to be an awful lot of animation (9) and dystopian fiction (District 9) on the city’s screens at the moment — was The Burning Plain, about which I knew nothing more than what IMDb could tell me, which wasn’t much. Charlize Theron, check; Kim Basinger, check. Joaquim de Almeida would have been a check if I’d remembered seeing him in Clear and Present Danger, but I didn’t place his name. Other prominent members of the cast have done a lot of television work, but that only means that, as for me, they might as well not have bothered.
I wasn’t looking forward to The Burning Plain, which I’ll be writing about tomorrow, but I loved it; more anon. When I got home, I was so demoralized by the humidity (and by not being able to reach Kathleen, momentarily) that I read A O Scott’s review of the film — something that I wouldn’t ordinarily do, for the simple reason that I might spoil my write-up by thinking too highly of somebody else’s. The danger in this case, however, proved to be entirely hypothetical. Beginning with this crack,
… which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday after spending about a month as a video-on-demand insomnia cure.
Mr Scott launches a seriously nasty review — as well as one that isn’t particularly funny. (Gloriously savage reviews that make me howl with laughter are my guiltiest pleasure.) As if the weather weren’t depressing enough, the review lowered my spirits even further. Why publish such nastiness? You can always say, “I didn’t care for this movie,” or “It wasn’t for me.”
But those movies, which were directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, balanced their silly conceits with some seriously good acting. (Mr. Arriaga’s best script, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,†was directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred.) In this case, with Mr. Arriaga in the director’s chair for the first time, the acting is merely serious.
I don’t think that it’s crazy to say that Kim Basinger, always a luminous movie star even if you wouldn’t particularly want to see her play Shakespeare or Racine, may have done her best work ever in The Burning Plain. Again: more anon. What’s offensive about A O Scott’s review is its jerk-off presumption that no intelligent moviegoer could possibly enjoy the movie as I did. What kind of cool club is he striving to please, by pissing off the filmmaker, a regular reader, and Charlize Theron?
Second Avenue, by the way, was a parking lot, thanks to UN Week. I would never have gotten to the Beekman if I’d hailed a cab. I’d still have been in it two hours later, when I walked back home.