T's Take on THE GRADUATE

The graduate was awesome. M didn't get it, which I fully understand, because she doesn't get anything that's important, ever.

List of things I get that M is clueless about that are completely important and should never be overlooked:

1) International Politics
2) Mindfreak (you know who I mean)
3) Monty Python
4) Internet Flash Animations

That's basically the top four, but you know there's tons of other stuff. This movie is absolutely hilarious, in that awkward larger-than-life (but still pretty serious) way that so many great movies conduct themselves. It's like Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, or Smart People, except forty years previous. M and I had this same problem with Youth in Revolt. It's about this little square who hurts and destabilizes an incredible amount of systems and people in pursuit of a girl he loves. I loved it. M hated it, because all she could think about were the victims. She saw a selfish person acting on selfish impulses without regard for all the well-meaning people around him. I saw somebody with wrought-iron guts who absolutely refuses to settle for less or give up on his convictions.

It's never a positive comment to infer that the viewer need search out the comedy, but I'll say it anyway, because the editorially cutty humor we've been trained to look for in cinema is absent here and as such it tends to boggle the modern viewer. The punchline is this dude's life, really, and Ben's stiffer-than-wood attitude is so unflinchingly sincere and unsure that it'll make your heart ache and cringe for him. Watching this movie is like reading a protracted Beatnick retelling of some distorted confluence of events... The main character is rarely remarkable and the deeds he commits are often completely backward on the layperson's moral barometer, but they're pure in a way that is always miraculous and noteworthy. Much of this movie is made up of unsure, jangled interactions between people who feel an overwhelming urge to constrain what they're feeling and modify emotional responses to fit their over-inflated sense of appropriateness.

The beautiful revelation here is that Ben realizes he's not supposed to have sure footing. He learns that being oblivious to the ambiguous nature of what one's career and life should look like is very much okay. He seems to understand that moving compliantly in the direction of what is safe and well known and proper will not make him happy, that achieving his undergrad and then plunging into a career in plastics at twenty-one is just not the way. Indeed, we see through his actions that doing virtually anything but a set course of events has to be better, if only on the basis that it was his choice in the first place.

He charges through the exact center of everything laid out before him and ruins lives and destroys relationships and desecrates religious institutions and publicly humiliates well-meaning family. He does it all because he wants to, because it feels right in the moment, and because he believes in himself above absolutely everything else. I see in Ben a young man in the very moment of True Realization that everyone lucky enough to glimpse through the fog of Education and Propriety eventually must have. He is a person grappling with the idea that everything he's been taught and believes in might actually be ridiculous. In the movie's beginning he is already grasping at this concept, but it takes the illustrious and beguiling Mrs. Robinson to bring him into the Desert of the Real.

I always felt as a young person that drinking and sneaking out and going to parties actually elevated me to a form beyond that of simple adolescence but falling short of pure adulthood. I understand now that what I was tasting then wasn't what I thought it was. The momentary stimulation was the key, the actual notion of power and independent action was so completely intoxicating that I probably would have chased it no matter how it was represented to me. When you do something at any age that you have believed for your entire life was Bad and Crazy and realize that it actually isn't at all, you can't help but question everything else, especially if it's your first time brushing against such an experience. When Ben realizes that family and the institution of marriage might actually exist as a procreative function that developed out of necessity (instead of the Holy and happy-granting secret-to-life he may have believed it to be) he completely snaps and throws away everything else. This is the folly of youth, but also an intensely necessary one.

A generation of human beings that does not seek to bend its limitations and demand answers from the construct around them is not one I'd like to see. Ben has it right: a person must blaze their own path, and when they see something that's important to them, they absolutely must sacrifice everything necessary - even that which they're supposed to need - in exchange. Regret makes for uneasy bedfellows, and I wish I could say I cared as little for convention and peer approval as Dustin Hoffman's character. Growing into a man is about as messy a process as I've encountered and it cannot be done gracefully. The best favor anyone who understands the great hoax can do is dirty your perceptions and force you to act for yourself. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.

Watch The Graduate.

T's Take on THE TOWN

You know what's awesome?

Violence.

There were a bunch of gunfights in this movie, really more than was necessary, but whatever. There were dudes with huge guns shooting at cops. And the cops? They were like, shooting back.

There's really not much to say here. If you saw the trailer, you saw the movie; the plotline is about as formulaic and baseline as it gets. The characters are exactly as deep as they need to be, which is to say that they aren't, and by the time you've met all of them it's not hard to tell who's going to make it out alive.

You mean the underdeveloped nobody third-wheel driver dies? And so does the bad guy? And so does the third-strike "I'm never going back to jail!" hardass with a penchant for unnecesary cruelty? There are no twists, per say, but again, that isn't to say that any were needed. This thing could only have gone one way, and though I was never surprised, I can't say I was ever disappointed either. The odds are good that if you find yourself walking into a theater for The Town you know exactly what you're there for, and you're going to get it, too.

Ben Affleck is what he is. It's like when I first saw Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity and thought to myself, "Wow, this guy can actually carry a serious role." I guess I had that moment with Ben in The Town, but in a different sense. His character is this beaten down ex-drunk fuckup with nothing to live for and a bunch of leftover friends/acquaintences that really do him more harm than good. He's got this really convincing washed-out unable-to-care disconnect that I as the viewer couldn't help but sympathize with. He's got this depressing 'poor-me' attitude as somebody who goes through life totally unloved because he doesn't love himself. Which suits him.

I guess what I'm saying is that Ben Affleck has found his place in my life, finally, and I could watch him go uncared for all day. For the first time he subtracted nothing from the work overall and fit in nicely with his surroundings.

Watch The Town.