All My Stars (5)

By: Joanne McNeil
February 4, 2016

Just a few weeks after I wrote I’d never really watched westerns, I was on the old set of Gunfight at the OK Corral in the Santa Monica Hills. Yesterday, I went to the Paramount Ranch Art Fair. Yes, that’s Paul McCarthy’s Tree in the background.

I’m in LA this week. Away from the snow. A few days before my flight I went to see Anomalisa. Now, I love Synecdoche, New York (here’s the review I wrote several years ago). This one didn’t hit me like Synecdoche but it was good and smart and much better and smarter than most things. It took until I collapsed on a hotel bed before the conference I attended — the reason I’m out this way — for the movie to sink in. Business travel feels like a test to find where my frayed memory stops and where my insincerity begins. I remember when I was younger I never could understand how people would forget faces or forget who said what, and misattribute conversations to the wrong friends or colleagues. But I also never had the experience of endless environments of new people and the disorienting soup of breaking the ice again and again with people I’m unlikely to see again. Most of this is covered well in Up in the Air too. One thing that bothered me a bit was there was no friction to indicate that most of the people the protagonist interacts with are paid to be perky and interested in him. A little emotional labor analysis could have gone a long way here.

Something else I’ve been thinking about: True Crime, a 2008 story by David Grann in The New Yorker, soon to be a movie with Jim Carrey and Charlotte Gainsbourg. I am curious how the film will use the tiny internet details that ratchet up the suspense like web analytics records of traffic locations and the browsing history of a user on a Polish auction site. All these things were possible in 2000 but users didn’t yet have a sense of how their movement online was recorded and surveilled.

I flew Virgin Atlantic, which is kind of like an Amtrak quiet car but for people paid to be cool for a living. I have never had a Cayce Pollard reaction to an airline like that before (hashtag VX safetydance). On the cool plane, I watched the coolest possible movie, also likely the best movie they had on deck: Straight Outta Compton. First you need to read Dee Barnes on the film (“F. Gary Gray, the man whose film made $60 million last weekend as it erased my attack from history, was also behind the camera to film the moment that launched that very attack.”) Many complicated feelings, but, the film does prove my hypothesis that music biographies are the best thing to watch on a plane because the music is the focus of the film. Or maybe movies where Paul Giamatti swindles famous musicians out of millions? He is even better here than in Love and Mercy and that’s because Jason Mitchell and Corey Hawkins are both tremendous. Maybe at 35,000 feet I was more inclined to be moved by this story, but I don’t think stories of contract disputes in the arts can be told enough.

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One in a weekly series in which Joanne McNeil recommends books, films, exhibitions, and more. You can also subscribe to the All My Stars newsletter here.

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All My Stars (5)

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