what a night for hollywood it was last night. everybody's tits came out! one for all and all for one cause, that of agreeing to promote their industry by pretending to care what the other one thinks. while in fabulous attire. i wore american apparel, thank you for asking. now, lest these first few lines erroneously lead you to believe that i disapprove of the hollywood system, let me assure you that your assumption couldn't be further from the truth.

those movies have value because they still represent a point of view, show us how someone might react to something in a certain circumstance as imagined by a writer, an actor, a director of some kind. believe it or not, as outlandish and exaggerated as these actions and reactions might be, we, as living, breathing, sometimes conscious things, still are informed by them. isn’t it mark twain who said that truth is stranger than fiction? but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't. aren’t we sometimes shocked by what’s on the news, by what people are capable of doing in real life? most of the movies, hollywood movies, that come out today are presumably un-relatable, such as iron man, because, of course, none of this exists, there are no men in suits that fly around. but that’s not quite true, what we can relate to are the people within those movies, they are still ordinary people most of them, being placed in extraordinary circumstances perhaps but the idea is that they have basic human traits, who react in a way we might. even if they may be a vengeful pirate captain bent on the death of an eternal flying child in neverland or a protocol droid. there are ancestral mythological dramatic plot points in even iron man, the dead father, the older friend, who becomes a friend and then a rival. there are ancient storytelling processes at work throughout all of entertainment, even rob schneider comedies, that we relate to. those are the shadows on the wall of the cave.

now, there is a point at which we say, no more. i have to be nourished, not merely entertained, by this art form. well, i think you can be nourished by just about everything. there was a point in my life, while attending nyu film school, where i was supposed to be critical of a lot of things in film as you are expected by most of the community to think that, well, everything is crap, or so i was told. but i went through it quite wide-eyed, thinking that pretty much everything i saw was amazing. to the derision of my friends who boasted critical viewpoints. even though more aware than before about film language, i found myself loving every movie i saw, during those four years, from jules et jim to hook by way of clockwork orange and the fugitive, every movie i thought was amazing because it just showed me a side of life that i didn’t know. i was almost fresh off the boat from france and was thrown into this context and community of american post-teens, and i loved the idea that at my beck and call was this encyclopedia of behaviors, real and imagined, right there on the screen. it was an amazing process to go through, so much so that i confused the value of an experience with the value of a film. i was not really being critical enough as a craftsman because i was so interested in the human part of it. and ultimately, isn’t that movies really do? they create mass hysteria, in the scientific meaning of word, which is being in a room with a bunch of strangers and all believing the same lies, willfully, understandably, sometimes with joy. if the craft is well accomplished and we revel in such hysteria, we take enormous pleasure from the fact that we are discovering a little bit about somebody else’s experience through which we might learn about ourselves, understanding that however different we might be, at the end of the day, we are basically the same carbon-based lifeform. and you know what? if i were a serial killer with a cold heart and a purpose for vengeance, i might act like javier bardem in no country for old men. who knows? maybe i have that in me, built-in, ready to pounce, perhaps we all do. maybe movies at their best are not really being imaginative at all, but merely peering into the cauldron of human possibilities which only artists are supposedly able to reach into and retrieve testimony. because we, as people who go to our jobs every day, well, we reach into a few facets, maybe a couple, three, four, if we’re lucky. but filmmakers get to not just peer but fashion idols out of what they believe to be there to begin with. as i said before, every character we’ve ever seen at the movies has always been and will always be some version of a human being.

fiction rarely supersedes reality when it comes to imagination. we seem to be able to out-imagine the movies when it comes to profiting from our own multiple personalities. i mean, in truth, could you invent the civil war? could you invent the gold rush? when you look at history, it’s extraordinary what we’ve done with our bodies, from our thirst for knowledge to our thirst for blood and love. only a small percentage of that opportunity has been taken advantage of in the arts, and especially in the movies, which is why we keep telling true stories, or remaking old movies. look at andy warhol’s process of filmmaking, empire, for example, is an 8-hour film of a stationary camera focused on the empire state building. it doesn’t move. nothing happens. eight hours of the empire state building. the light changes, and it’s eight. hours. long. done. sleep is five hours of a guy sleeping. thinking of the film camera as a witness to the doings of man and beast is perhaps the best way to think about it. it is but a witness to our madness. and sometimes you bear witness in a way that is documentative and sometimes you do it in a way that is fictional, but at the end of the day, the human always remains firmly at the center, whether he is the star or simply the enabler.

and then there’s craft. there’s skill. and, of course, you can name dozens and dozens of people with craft and skill in every department of the movie production process, from the casting director to the director of photography, to the editor, to the composer. and to a certain extent, the projectionist by way of the aforementioned. at the end of the day, though, it behooves a director and, more often than not unfortunately, his studio, to consider the needs of art in order to deliver a product as it must be called, that is satisfactory on all counts. why is citizen kane perennially number one on the list of best movies ever made? because it is precise. it is thoughtful. it is unique. it is original. it is detailed. it is ambitious. it speaks of the human condition. it speaks of behavior. it does so with incredible bravado and skill. it is inspiring. it was the wrong thing to do at the wrong place at the right time. it was based on an inimitable ego that cared for no dissension. it is basic. at once simple and complicated, like the men and women who made it. it is the result of freshness. it is the result of cockiness. it is the result of pride. it is a prayer that things can be both perfect and imperfect at once. it is the ultimate moving image tribute to the duality of man. it is a game predicated on human frailty, and that is why we can see bits of ourselves in citizen kane, in charles foster kane, in jedediah, in susan alexander, in mr. thatcher and mr. thompson, in the parents, in the child. it plays with our ambitions. it plays with our wishes. and it both disappoints and excels. and it arrived at a time where films were not that. it signals a hinge in time, much in the way in which mozart wrote the mass in c minor and shakespeare wrote romeo and juliet, that defined a moment in which an art form was no longer what it was teh day before, because a man or a woman took it upon him or herself not to listen, but simply to do, with the help of a few helpful believers. today, that would be a remarkable trait. there are a few, very few people who do what they must. in filmmaking, in our lifetime, stanley kubrick, orson welles, p.t. anderson, federico fellini, jacques tati, robert altman to name but a few of the few, are rare artists with cameras for eyes, who showed us another version of the world which, much as when you close your eyes during mozart’s requiem, induce you to proverbially leave your body. you do not know who you are anymore. you discover another way to be because of the influence from an intently selfish point of view, from an artist that you will never meet.

the power of movies, of course, is that they are almost all-dimensional. sights and sounds give us a lot of the information we need in order to put ourselves in somebody’s shoes. now, 3-d cinema is coming into being, introduced into our lives very aggressively, and so it is reality, for lack of a better term. it is virtual reality. and it is an opportunity, not simply entertainment. an opportunity to immerse ourselves into other people’s lives, other people’s behavior. this means something. this is important. it is not something to be merely cineplexed. it is for the fan boys who will sleep outside a movie theater for days in order to get tickets for the first showing of a surely-to-be cult film, something that changes lives, and it’s extraordinary. and it is not superficial to recognize in a fictitious character the possibilities of yourself. that’s what movies can do. that’s what they’ve done to me. have a wonderful week and, for god's sake, stop it with the gum-chewing!