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{"id":8557,"date":"2014-07-03T18:44:49","date_gmt":"2014-07-03T22:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=8557"},"modified":"2014-07-03T18:44:49","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T22:44:49","slug":"a-1987-of-the-heart-i-rewatch-less-than-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2014\/07\/a-1987-of-the-heart-i-rewatch-less-than-zero.html","title":{"rendered":"A 1987 of the Heart: I Rewatch “Less Than Zero”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2026because of course I do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So this used to be on Netflix streaming, but I didn\u2019t tell you about it then, because what am I, your butler? Anyway, you can still get it through Netflix Delayed Gratification. The first time I watched LTZ<\/em><\/a> was December 2011, about a month before I had my last drink (so far). I don\u2019t know if it was what I do for a living\u2013the compulsively analytical eye of the person who gets engulfed by art for money\u2013or the emotional numbness and batteredness of active addiction, but I was somewhat distanced from the movie. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I loved it. But it was great this time to know what it would do and just let that thing wash through me. With the exception of the AfterSchool Special ending, this is a nearly perfect movie, in which every frame does exactly the thing you want it to do.<\/p>\n

My scattered notes from the rewatch\u2013this is a list of perfect things:<\/p>\n

* Fire-engine red, sans-serif credits<\/p>\n

* Andrew McCarthy\u2019s callow doughface, no edge anywhere in his face at all but you can see the pores<\/p>\n

* McCarthy and Jami Gertz deliver their lines like sentences cut out from some other movie and pasted together. It completely works. They\u2019re displaced, in over their heads, mannered and inadequate.<\/p>\n

* The constant candy-eating in their parents\u2019 houses<\/p>\n

* the sincerity and openness, submissiveness, in Robert Downey Jr\u2019s face and body language (curving upward, consistently lowering his face so he\u2019s looking up at whoever he\u2019s talking to)<\/p>\n

* red white and blue comic-book lighting in the balcony scene<\/p>\n

* more red white and blue in this pool scene, also more Julian tiny in huge landscape, like the scene where he\u2019s tapdancing at foot of carpeted stairs<\/p>\n

* the beautiful white sun in the graveyard scene<\/p>\n

Look, it\u2019s not that I \u201crecommend\u201d this movie in some universal sense. But if you think you might need it, you do.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"