Dreams in the Dearth of Winter: Who Needs Hollywood?

28 January 2008: Dreams in the Dearth of Winter

     I am trying to figure out why all these drop-dead wonderful movies are coming out. I don’t have the time to see them all and feel frustrated. They are all Hollywood movies, and we all know that foreign films are better and that I hardly ever lift that curtain of excellence to view the real art, the depth, that not-so-easily analyzed perfection.

     However, the trend right now is to keep whatever flimsy funds there are within our borders, so in a way I’m being patriotic by slipping off to the cinema for discount matinees.

     Shall I drop everything and “hot turkey” my complete list of must-sees?

     I have already taken two excellent films and found curious parallels between them at the fundamental level—that is, The Reader and Doubt. Do you suppose that I might bring Laredo andFrost-Nixon into this loop, along with The Strange Case of Benjamin Buttonin?

     I do not plan to. I am not a publish-or-perish academic whose livelihood depends on this level of critical ingenuity. I am a work-or-perish freelancer.

     I also plan to write a bestseller, bringing the public into the fold of my latest apocalypse. But I’m not betting on that either.

     I have handed my basic thread to an academic who might inform me today to fuggedabuditbecause I’m wrong. Chill, hot springs—that sort of thing.

     I can take it.

*****

     And that brings me to the real apocalypse occurring less than 5 miles away from this desk and simultaneously throughout the world.

     Obama has been in office for nine days and things are happening.

     That noose of righteous punishment is hanging closer to Rove’s neck.

     Guantánamo will be closed.

     Russia’s defensive retreat into cold war behavior is slowing down.

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