Food and Footage

I just discovered that people are actually reading this blog, bookmarking it, and linking to it from google. It’s enough to make me have a Sally Field Oscar moment–but I will spare you all that self validation for now. Instead, I would like to direct you to a blog that I am writing in Berlin for a gem of an experimental film festival. The festival is called Directors Lounge and this is its 5th anniversary. I write reviews about the films being screened and sometimes I do interviews with visiting filmmakers.

http://directorsloungeblog.tumblr.com/

For the next 10 days, you can find me there.

10 minutes into this film I knew it. I knew it the way you know you’ll be gassy after a lot of cauliflower. I knew that I would wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. find my bladder to be full and my body and mind unwilling to walk the 6 steps to the bathroom because of paralyzing fear.

How is it that I can watch the images on the screen and understand that I am separate from them, that Adrian Lyne, while a decent director, threw just about every horror cliche into the hospital scene. How is it that even though I actually know the screenwriter and went to his son’s 15th birthday party and got high in their treehouse, I can not go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Somehow between the viewing and the waking up, Jacob’s Ladder has transformed itself in my mind into something close to sheer terror.

I sat  up in bed and I debated waking Brendan. There he was sleeping his deep sleep with no bladder interruptions and all I wanted was for him to wake up and walk me to the toilet and stand there while I peed, making sure that nothing pressed its face against the window while I did it. 3 in the morning and I am flicking his legs intermittently to try and wake him up but at some point I see the cruelty in that and I just sit there in the dark trying to build up the courage to walk alone to the toilet.

It was a really good movie. It was dark without being overly stylized ala Constantine or Saw. It was funny and sexy at times. Elizabeth Pena has nice tits and a plethora of open robes which she puts to good use. McCauly Culkin was memorably ingenue in his role as the dead son. And Tim Robbins is so human on screen. He has such a weird startled face and his expressions seem so open and natural; at times ugly in a base way; at times full of wonder and sweetness. Throw in Danny Aiello as the guardian angel chiropractor and Jason Alexander as the schmuck lawyer and the movie is a fortress of good casting choices.

But this doesn’t help when it is 3 in the morning and you just want to pee really bad and you’re having that debate about how to get to the toilet without stepping on evil goat’s heads. I congratulate myself, my 28 year old self, for not peeing in the bed, for making it to the toilet with a racing heart, peeing as quickly as possible and running back to the bed at lightning speed where I sought Brendan’s hand out under the covers and made it, in its dumb sleeping numbness, sort of clamp over my hand. Finally my heart rate went back to normal and I fell asleep again.