Two films — one new, one nearly seventy years old

I’m sitting in Park City, and I’ve seen two movies recently.

I’m going to report on them.

Why?

Because I feel like it, and because this is my blog.

Park City, site of the 2002 Winter Olympics, is a mountain resort town located just about precisely one hour from my house, and we have the ability to stay here from time to time.  It’s relaxing, it’s a change of venue, I’m hard to reach when I’m here, and, typically, I get a lot done here.  Moreover, my work is such that, when I’m not teaching, I can do it from various places.  So, sometimes, I choose to do it in Park City.

So sue me.

That my doing such things — traveling, seeing plays, watching films, attending concerts, listening to music, reading books, and writing about them — evidently drives some of my more deranged critics even crazier than they would otherwise be isn’t a primary or even secondary motivation for me.  But it’s a gratifying fringe benefit.

I check in most days when I’m in the States on two apostate, largely atheist, message boards.  I haven’t posted on either of them for years.  Still, although I was assured that, if I stopped trying to correct their errors and, thus stopped provoking them, they would soon lose interest in me, I knew that wasn’t true.  Accordingly, today, just like every other day of every recent year, several threads on each of them are devoted to . . . me.

A principal current theme on one of the message boards, and (judging from the enthusiastic tone of its participants) quite a popular one, is my exceptional insignificance.  Nobody, it seems, thinks about me any more.  I’m completely obscure and deeply unimportant.  I’ve already been forgotten.

I’m not making this up.

The other message board, though, was inflamed and enraged by my recent post entitled “Some desultory cultural notes.”  They think I’m grandstanding.  Showing off.  Pretending to a level of culture and sophistication that I don’t actually possess and surely don’t deserve.

So here’s some more of the same:

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives.  I’ve heard about it for years, but had somehow never managed to see it.  A fascinating product of its time, with some of the foremost actors and involving some of the leading filmmakers of its era.  (Read the Wikipedia article about it here.)

The twentieth century — its look, its sound, its jargon and cliches, its concerns, its issues, its weaknesses and blind spots — is documented in a remarkable way that exists for no previous century.  Whatever other values they have (and there are plenty of other values in them), films are historically significant.  In watching The Best Years of Our Lives, I felt that I had, in a sense, traveled back to the sensibility of 1946, when it was made.

That’s the great thing about reading old and foreign books, of seeing foreign and old movies.  For a few hours, you’re experiencing a different world, living a different life.  It’s literally mind-expanding.

Movie number two:

Tonight, my wife and I finally saw Woman in Gold.

I loved it.

It hit more of my personal buttons than I can count:  World War II, the Holocaust, spoken German, familiar sites in Los Angeles, familiar sites in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg (I passed Schoenberg Hall at UCLA every day while I was there), and Gustav Klimt (my wife and I are particular fans, with a large print of one of his paintings hanging in our bedroom).

I strongly, strongly recommend the film if you haven’t already seen it.

And, by the way, I got a huge kick out of the fact that Justus von Dohnányi portrays the Austrian official who tries to block the recovery of paintings stolen by the Nazis.  And especially given the fact that his opponent happens to be (as, in reality, he is) a grandson of the great Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg.  Read the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry, and you’ll see why I think von Dohnányi’s selection to play that role is so ironically amusing.

Posted from Park City, Utah