Last night Ed, as usual, had the remote. For me it was TV Hell. He lingered a while on “Alexander”, story of Alexander The Great. It begins with Al’s childhood. The actor playing him as a young boy looked like he belonged in “Leave It To Beaver”. The kid was about to tame a wild horse, a scene that momentarily captured my interest because there was an animal in it. Ed, who has ESP and knows when I am looking, clicked away. Even Leonard Maltin, who likes a lot of stupid movies, gave this one only one and a half stars. Val Kilmer, before he got fat, plays Alexander in later life. By then Ed was watching The Seven Samurais”, the original, with Japanese titles. Starting with “Rashomon” a thousand years ago, I have detested films with Japanese titles. Rashomon was everything I don’t need to see in a movie. A tone poem about a rape. Oh, joy.

I know, I am hoplessly un au courant when it comes to art movies. My friend Inese goes to all the movies as soon as they are issued. Pays money, buys popcorn, sits in a theater. Years ago we’d meet about every one to two weeks and see a movie together. The bummer is by then she had seen all the movies I might have wanted to see and was down to the foreign films, some of which were arcane indeed. One, in particular I remember, had several pauses in the film during which the audience watched a black screen, the director’s attempt to be really deep.

Another one, A French film (titles of course) was about a couple who move into a neighborhood where, unexpectedly they are living next to a couple the wife of which (whom?) had had an affair with the husband of the new arrivals. (This is convoluted. Bear with me.) The affair had been so intense the lovers had torn themselves apart because, I guess, they were consuming themselves. Critical mass or something. What do I know. Good intentions don’t last long and they resume their affair. At the end of the movie the miscreant wife persuades her husband to move to another neighborhood to again break this all-consuming spell. She comes back to the now empty house one last time and her lover joins her. They make love on the floor. At the end, she reaches behind her for a gun and shoots him and then herself. I turned to Inese and said, some people just can’t handle a little extra nookie.

Inese also dragged me to “The Return of Martin Guerre” set in 16th century rural France with Gerard Depardieu. (About the only period pictures I like were written by Jane Austen.) This particular story line is about a wedding and on the wedding night, the very young groom freaks out and runs away. Seven or eight years later he comes back in the person of Depardieu. Apparently the groom got into the army, died in a battle, and his buddy, Depardieu, took his identity because he was lonely and footloose and wanted to have a place to be. The abandoned wife says nothing because she likes Depardieu better than the fellow who ran off. However, nosy villagers expose him. I hate a bad ending. The Maltin review says the movie was a blockbuster hit. I seem to remember that. Could never figure it out.

Jay and I had gone to an art house in New York years ago with some friends who were eager to see the Apu trilogy, being shown back to back in one afternoon. For those of you who might not know what I am talking about, in the late 50’s, the Indian director Satyajit Ray made three movies about a fellow named Apu. Starting with Apu’s desperately poor childhood, he grows to manhood in India, gets married, fathers a child, is widowed. A great deal of footage is spent with the camera dwelling on Apu’s face as he walks through fields of tall grass contemplating each stage of his difficult life. Oh, deep. Jay turned to me at one point and whispered “The Indian Stella Dallas”. Bleary-eyed, we staggered out of the movie house 6 or 7 hours later, but we loved our friends and never said a word.

Meanwhile, I hid out in the den writing this post and waiting for Law and Order or whatever the 10 o’clock would be.

xx, Teal, the artistic Philistine