I just watched Garden State with the director's commentary, Zach Braff along with Natalie Portman. This probably qualifies me some "geek" or "nerd" title, which I'll accept gracefully. I love knowing why. You understand right? It's not all the little trivia facts (like that Natalie Portman had never played a vinyl record before the movie and had to be shown how to "put one on" for a scene) but it's the why that I enjoy. I love to listen to people talk about why they did something, granted they have something to significant to say. Of course, there's a little bit, okay a lot, of this being about validating my own desire to explain myself. I love to explain myself. (Which of course leads to meeting the need of wanting to be known.) So movies, good ones like Garden State, fascinate me because they say so much about us, about people, about relationships, without saying it directly, or at least without loosing the feeling, or the essence. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. About art.Here's what I have so far.
I'll use the movie Crash as an example. The movie is all about the complexity of racism and racial brokenness. The film conveys the truth about racism is a much more accurate way, I think, that a seminar on racism would. Because the movie is art and not just facts, it contains both truth and the essence of what that truth looks like or would feel like if experienced. Someone I know who just watched the film said they thought it was good but that it was unbelievable because of the connections between the characters, the way each characters story overlapped with the others was too coincidental to be realistic. But I think the movie isn't supposed to be realistic, it's supposed to be truthful. You can't make something that is only two hours long convey the truth and complexity of actually reality. In order to look at reality in it's entirely, something has to be fake, unrealistic, pretend, in order to convey not the same reality, but the same truth. This a mystery of Art. Art takes something that is unrealistic to convey the truth about the realistic. Of course realistic things are involved in the process, but facts have to be bent and broken in order to convey the meaning or essence, truth.
Something like that. Still processing.
Here's a cool tangent. It's portraits of people, many over 100 years old. Facinating to think about their lives.
