I’ll write about different pieces of art that I enjoyed and talk about what spoke to me or made me think.
2/6
- Uncut Gems 2019
I watched Uncut Gems a couple of nights ago and I liked that it was a story told from the perspective of a gambling addict instead of the loan sharks that mob movies usually focus on. I could feel myself cringing and wanting to look away from Adam Sandler’s character as he lied to people and then pawned their stuff to place bets. Or when he embarrases himself infront of his children and friends. The movie had plenty of highs, but they were short and laced between the rest of the time spent chasing them. I thought the movie did a good job at telling the story of an addict and showing how even the most glamourous addicts, like a high rolling jeweler spends too much of their time chasing the high and embarrassing themselves.
2. The Sopranos 1999
I finished watching this the other night, and its probably now my favorite show of all time. I remember my dad being annoyed about the last episode when I was younger. But now that I’ve watched it, I thought the last episode tied things together pretty well even if it cut to a black screen mid scene. I also watched the last season in around a day, so I remembered a line earlier in the show where a character said “I bet you don’t even hear it” when you get shot.
One of my favorite story lines in the show was between Tony and his son AJ, who at the end of the show is about 22. Tony looks and sounds alot like my own father, a big and stoic north jersey guy. Maybe I’m just at a transition period in my life and looking for the similarities, but their characters conflicts and Tony’s private takeaways from them with his therapist gave me a sense of perspective about my own conflicts with my father. Mainly, the fact that Tony and AJ are both trying to find common ground and make the other proud, even if they have a hard time figuring it out.
2/13
3. Free Solo 2018
I watched a documentary the other night called Free Solo. The filmmakers, all rock climbers themselves, document their friend Alex while he prepares himself to climb El Capitan mountain in Yosemite national park without any ropes or harness. My friend that I rock climb with from time to time sent me the link to this, and didn’t say much beyond “check this out, this guy can climb.” I was on the edge of my seat watching Alex hanging thousands of feet above the ground, my palms even started to sweat during hairier moments up on the mountain. Alex does make it to the top of El Capitan without any gear, in about 3 hours and 50 minutes, close to 3,000 vertical feet.
Every once in a while I’ll watch something like this documentary that I think is incredibly inspiring and sort of tragic. Every time Alex goes up to climb without gear, he’s seconds from death. Before I sat down and wrote this I double checked to make sure Alex is still alive. He is, but another climber from the documentary, Brad Gobright, died last year while attempting a two-person climbing technique with Alex. When people are this dedicated (I’m not sure that’s even the right word) to something, they come off cold and almost inhuman in their ambition. Most of the people who were doing the close filming for the movie were Alex’s close friends. And a good amount of the documentary was spent reviewing the moral and ethical questions surrounding the movie, like what they should do about filming if Alex does fall and die. After watching it, I felt like Alex and the team performed and documented an incredible feat of mental and physical strength. But I also felt like the movie was a mistake to some extent. It almost seems wrong to include the people you love in your potential death this way, but I also think that people should be able to do what they love. I think Alex is chasing the adrenaline he gets from climbing without gear, and from the outside its looks like he doesn’t really care if he dies. What I’m taking away from Free Solo is maybe a little bit more perspective on my own addictions and ambitions, but still a strange sense of admiration for Alex.
Parasite (2019)
I watched the movie Parasite after hearing people talk about it constantly the past couple months. I thought it was great, it touched on so many different ideas, and had so many high suspense moments throughout the movie. And overall it was good looking, like all of the sets and camera work. But the coolest part, I thought, was that the whole thing was centered on class conflict. The main characters were put into a situation where they had to make serious decisions about right and wrong in the grand scheme of things. The father of the family at one point even says that people don’t have any obligations at all, that it’s fine to “kill someone or betray your country.” The whole thing just got me to think about what I think about in the grand scheme of things. By the end of the movie I was just so annoyed that this wealthy family had such direct control over these working people’s lives, and that these wealth disparities aren’t just a movie. I couldn’t really place my feelings on the mom or dad in the movie, maybe that’s part of the point, I don’t really know. But I did feel a weird sense of conflict about what they did, killing two people. One of the more off-putting parts of that conflict for me was the way the movie set up these two murders parallel to one another. One, the murder of the housekeeper, was in self defense in the end, the other was just revenge.
Rich Gorski 