Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
I think I saw this on cable, or … I don’t really remember. Must have been cable, or something.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
There are so many great lines and I have been guilty of quoting many of them over the years. “I hid behind the car.” “Any forward gear will do, here.” “Kids did this.” “Who taught you to alphabetize?” “I’ll hit you so hard, I’ll kill your whole family.” “Smile of the week.” They may not sound like much out of context, I now realize, which is how I typically use them anyway, so whatever. Also, this cast is insane.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
I like so much about this movie. When Kevin Bacon punches out the windows in the basement at the dance. When he tips his car over. The young Mickey Rourke and his popcorn trick. Daniel Stern’s record obsession. Paul Reiser egging Steve Guttenberg on in the diner about finishing his sandwich. All the diner conversations.

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I love hanging out in diners. Or at least I used to. The diner in Silver Lining Playbook was my hangout when I lived in Upper Darby. Just drinking cup after cup of coffee and bullshitting with your buddies. That was me back in college. I miss that.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
I guess Kevin Bacon’s character. Everyone thinks of him as this loose cannon, a loser. But he is smart. He knows all the answers to the trivia questions despite his brother asking if he’s ever read a book. He tries to light his cigarette on the store display stove top and he strips down and sits in the manger when baby Jesus is stolen from the nativity scene.

6 How did this movie make you feel?
 A sense of belonging, like I was one of these guys and their problems were my problems. And there was nothing so awful that couldn’t be fixed by going to the diner.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
Pretty accurate. This is one of my favorite movies, so I’ve seen it quite a bit.

2 How much had you forgotten? 
It’s not that I forgot it, so much as I didn’t remember until I saw it again: the scene where Steve Guttenberg’s mother chases him around the kitchen with a knife. When they go to see Seventh Seal and Guttenberg says, “What am I watching? The movie just started and I don’t even know what’s going on.”

3 Do you still like this movie? 
Absolutely.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
I don't know. I still feel like the same moments got me. Like when Daniel Stern and his wife get into the argument over his records and they are just not connecting and then he's driving away in his car to "Ain't Got No Home."

5 What is the take-away? 
The sense of camaraderie and sticking with your friends as life changes. Each of the characters is going through something different (except Paul Reiser – I don’t know what his deal was), but they always had the diner.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all? 
The kid who goes around quoting Sweet Smell of Success actually made me watch it. 

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
Ummmmmmm…. I think it may have been totally at random.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
I feel like I could probably watch this movie a couple more times. It is interesting, informative.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
The scr—atch-ing

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I always wished I could play an instrument. My first attempt was the drums. Then I dabbled on the bass guitar. When my grandfather passed, I got his ukulele and I played that for a while in college. But I never got good at any of the instruments. What I like about scratching is that it takes an apparatus that is not traditionally an instrument and it turns it into one. By manipulating the needle on the record, you can make all sorts of sounds and rhythms and beats.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
Probably DJ Qbert. Of all the music I got after watching this documentary, his was the first and my favorite. He uses a lot of clips from sci-fi movies. In the movie he says as a kid he had a Fischer Price record player and he used to play records backwards on it. Me too.

6 How did this movie make you feel? 
Cool. I like being introduced to new music, and this film opened up a whole new genre for me.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
I got bored a couple times. Maybe it was just the time of night, or, I don’t know. I felt there was only so much scratching you can really listen to all at once.

2 How much had you forgotten? 
Not much.

3 Do you still like this movie? 
Yes. I liked how obsessed they became with honing their craft. DXT tells Qbert that he must have spent a lot of time indoors. And when Steve Dee taught himself the turntables, he read that if he gave up women, alcohol, everything and just focused on practicing, in a year he would be good. And that was what he did.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
There is this sense of interconnectedness. Scratching takes old recorded records and cuts them up to make new pieces. A lot of the DJs talk about scratching as a language, of tapping into something extralingual (my word) that speaks beyond what is known.

5 What is the take-away? 
For me, I had always sort of ruled out rap and hip-hop music as a genre that I was interested in. But you can never rule anything out.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all? 
I definitely got into a lot of scratching and scratch-related music like Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, Qbert, Kid Koala, Mix Master Mike, etc. How will it the future now that I’ve watched it again? TBD.

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
I saw this movie in the theater. I picked this movie to watch because smo was over and I wanted to watch something that wasn’t sad. Also, we saw one of the pieces Andy Goldsworthy makes in this documentary when we went to the Storm King sculpture park.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
a.) it is beautiful, b.) it is about art in nature, c.) it is one of those movies that you can either watch intensely or just have on in the background.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
Andy Goldsworthy uses natural elements to make his art and lets nature take its course over them. His ice sculptures melt and his stone cairns are drowned. The wind carries away snow and leaves and the river washes out his natural pigment. He spends hours meticulously forming perfect images, only to have them be transformed into something else. And that is the nature of his art. He doesn’t view it as destruction because he does not own the art pieces. He enters into a dialogue where he shapes something, he puts his will upon the terrain and then lets the terrain continue on without him. He also documents his work with photographs, so at least there is some commemoration of his work that we as absent viewers can experience. / The very last scene where he throws handfuls of snow, almost childlike, and creates phantoms.

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I like the cyclical nature of his art, his philosophy and the poetry of his explanations. His pictures always struck me when I would see them in books, but watching him at work is different. And then seeing his art in person is yet another dimension. When I went to Storm King, I didn’t feel it was wrong to take one of the stones from his rock wall. I was acting like the tide or wind. I was incorporating myself, adding myself by subtracting the rock. I think he would approve.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
The river, obviously. No, the tide. Just kidding, it’s actually the river.

6 How did this movie make you feel? 
Contemplative, integrated, peaceful, inspired. When smo and I put the movie in, I cued it up and the first image appeared on the screen. It was a solitary rock cairn in a desolate, snowy landscape. I paused it as we settled ourselves in, and then we continued to not watch any of the movie.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
Pretty accurate. I’ve probably seen this movie six or seven times now.

2 How much had you forgotten? 
Nothing, really. Memory is like the tide. It takes away and brings back. At times, when you are not thinking about it, it is gone forever, seemingly. But then some small thing might trigger the memory, and it will come flooding back.

3 Do you still like this movie? 
Yes.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
The connection to Pi, with its patterns and circles.

5 What is the take-away? 
Life is a circle. We are inhabitants on an Earth that doesn’t need us, we need it. There are cycles and time inevitably moves forward. This isn’t an environmental movie, but it shows the connection to the earth and the way in which all things are connected from birth to death, change and growth. “The real work is the change.”

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all? 
I think it always inspires me to make things, which is something I’m not very good at. But what AG is good at is taking painstaking effort to make things appear effortless. I like how he made needles from nature and paint from rocks. He had $0 overhead because he found everything right where he made his art.

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
I saw it in a repertory theater. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this movie outside the theater. Sometimes when you watch a movie on the small screen, it makes less of an impact. We will see.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
I probably liked that it was about a clown, more or less. Another movie that takes place in a circus I might like to own is The Unknown starring Lon Chaney.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
I only have the image of the clown. I remember she gets bought from her poor family and travels the road under the guard of a strongman.

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I’m not sure.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
I forget her character’s name, but Federico Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina, plays the clown with perfection rivaling Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton for physical comedy and facial expressions.

6 How did this movie make you feel? 
Whimsical.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
I had forgotten what happens in the movie, how it ends. What happens to the characters, their journey.

2 How much had you forgotten? 
I forgot its sadness. The way that the clown sacrifices herself for the strongman and what ends up happening to her.

3 Do you still like this movie? 
Yes.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
I had a lot of thoughts and feelings. I thought about the way the clown and the strongman had their own lives, they were trying to survive in their own ways that seemed to be mutually exclusive despite that they were supposed to be working together. And but how they needed each other and how the stronger person was the clown who realized that and sacrificed herself. And even though what happened to her happened, and what happened to the strongman happened, she still had a richer existence for giving of herself.

5 What is the take-away? 
The strongman girded himself against the world. He filled himself up with machismo and this superficial strength. But he was very sad and he never let himself need anyone. “I don’t want no friends. I don’t need anyone. I want to be alone,” he says towards the end of the movie. “I’ll leave you to your fate, then,” the person he’s talking to says. He has doomed himself because he hasn’t opened himself up to be hurt, to be loved.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all? 
Everything has a purpose, the clown learns. Every pebble has a place in the grand scheme. And you and me.

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
I think this was about the time that I was just going to the library and systematically going through the documentary section. I like documentaries, especially ones about odd people who obsess over normal things (e.g.: King of Kong, Word Wars, Cinemania, etc.). But this movie isn’t like that.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
I think I was overwhelmed by the fresh style, just an onslaught of images and information.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
I specifically remember the documentarian filming himself lip-sinking to Marianne Faithful./  (from after) Jonathan has a dream he finds his father and his father says “I didn’t know you existed.” This moment really hit me. At the same time Low sings: “I fell down the stairs. I wished I were dead.”

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I have a strange affinity for homosexual narratives. I am not homosexual, but their struggle for identity and acceptance is one I can relate to. They have been outsiders and forbidden to express a natural human emotion. I suppose we all have a story in which we come to terms with our sexuality, however it may manifest itself. And I suppose the majority, or what used to be considered the majority, sort of just fall into social norms without question. But I know I struggled./ This search for self identity is echoed in the mother’s descent into mental illness and the loss of herself.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
I only remember the subject and filmmaker of this movie. I am not sure if he is my favorite character. I think his mother had some mental instability and he cared for her. But on the other hand, I seem to remember him being kind of self-indulgent.

6 How did this movie make you feel? 
I think it made me feel inspired because he created this lovely movie out of his own effort and the tools at his disposal.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
Well, it was much more focused on the mother, which I only remembered as I started answering these questions. Or at least it was supposedly focused on the mother. But of course it is his story.

2 How much had you forgotten?  
A lot of the details. I don’t think there was any one thing, specifically.

3 Do you still like this movie? 
I think so. I felt drawn into it even if it was at times drawn out.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
It was mesmerizing. I could feel myself staring into the screen, losing myself, like his mother lost herself to the shock treatments and like he lost his self to depersonalization. I could sense my self becoming folded in, like I was one part of a many-faceted organism. There was so much happening, and not just stylistically. There were the fucked-up grandparents and the fucked-up mom and the fucked-up kid, and how do they survive? How do they get through it? Well, they don’t.

5 What is the take-away? 
Something about family and protecting something. Renee would have never become mentally ill and eventually brain damaged if her parents had not given her shock treatments – and what for? There had never been anything wrong with her in the first place. They invented this horror. And then they just sort of sat back and watched it unfold. The grandparents are these horrible figures, completely lifeless and irreal. Anyways. The takeaway is to find your own path, maybe. If you are oppressed, to get out from under it. If you are miserable, to create alternatives. If you are victimized, to continue hoping.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all?
I write stories to get around some awful feelings. To re-author my life. I don’t think this movie taught me that. But it encourages me to continue. This movie is mesmerizing and effective. It mines the shit and the horror and everything that ever went wrong and it makes art, it makes coping mechanisms, it makes beauty.

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie? 
I heard of this movie while I was doing the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die project. There are probably about a dozen of these movies that I was introduced to that way.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning? 
That is what I am hoping to find out. Because, according to my memory, there doesn’t seem much that would make me want to keep it. I may have been impulsive. Or maybe there is something I am forgetting. It may have been remarkable. But a lot of other movies that I watched around this time stand out much more strongly that I don’t own. Such as Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket.

3 What are your favorite parts? 
The only thing I remember is that it starts out with Harry Dean Stanton walking through the desert, refusing to talk./ (from after) I liked the part when he becomes the rich father and he walks his estranged son home from across the street and the son copies the way he walks.

4 What do you relate to in the movie? 
I’ll have to answer this after the movie./ One of my interests is elective mutism. I used to spend days without talking to anyone. I think there were definitely things in this movie I could relate to. I’m not sure if I feel like delving into them.

5 Who is your favorite character and why? 
I only remember Harry Dean Stanton. I know someone picks him up (I think it is Dean Stockwell, which is funny because I always get their names mixed up) and he looks for his estranged wife who might be working at a strip club?

6 How did this movie make you feel? 
I’m guessing sad. And alone. Probably a lot of the movies I decided to keep made me feel that way at the time. Like, less alone in my solitude because of camaraderie with lonely characters in a movie, which reinstated my irl aloneness.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie? 
Well, they were accurate in that I didn’t remember much of it. I had the basic idea, but not the scope or depth.

2 How much had you forgotten? 
I forgot the emotions, the long empty roads. I felt a much closer kinship or affinity for the son this time around. Here is this boy who has been abandoned by his parents and adopted by extended family. And then suddenly his father reappears and wants to be in his life and reconnect him to his mother. There is a connection there. No matter how fucked up your parents may be, you still expect them to be better people than you are, to have their shit more together. You expect them to be wiser, to be able to help you. And sometimes they can’t or aren’t.

3 Do you still like this movie? 
Oh, it’s sad. I think it is sadder than when I first watched it even.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences? 
After he tells his lost love their story and reminds her of himself, she looks through the one-way mirror, and he looks back, his face superimposed over her face. He says, “If you turn the light off, will you see me?” And she says, “I don’t know. I never tried.” This moment is both simple and profound. “Do you see me?” he says. “Do you recognize me?”

5 What is the take-away? 
There is this promise, of movies, of life, that it will all work out. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it comes close, and the only way to make it work out to any degree is by sacrificing your share of it.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all? 
It probably didn’t affect what happened to me, but in retrospect it feels very informative about certain decisions about the quality of life and choosing with whom to spend one’s life. 

π, aka: Pi

Before the movie

1 How did you first come to see this movie?
I had actually gotten the soundtrack to this movie probably years before I finally watched it. I was into IDM at the time (I still am, sort of), listening to Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc. I think I was in college or just out and I don’t know why it took me so long to finally track down the movie and watch it.

2 What makes it a movie worth owning?
This is one of those movies I can watch over and over obsessively. It is about obsession and numbers and patterns.

3 What are your favorite parts?
I like when Max is in the subway station and he pokes the brain with the pen.

4 What do you relate to in the movie?
I like Max’s need for order and his withdrawal from society into science, which feels safe, but then having that safety pulled out from under him. I can relate to his sense of alienation, self-reliance.

5 Who is your favorite character and why?
There aren’t very many characters in the movie. It will be interesting to see how many movies I identify with the protagonist. In this case, Max is my favorite character. I guess I already said what I like about him.

6 How did this movie make you feel?
It gave me a sense of paranoia, tension, the rush of numbers and plot. I felt smarter, like I was being let in on a secret.

After the movie

1 How accurate were your memories of this movie?
I had a pretty accurate memory. It still made me feel anxious in a good way.

2 How much had you forgotten?
I remembered everything, almost. The only scene I had a “huh, oh yeah, this happened” moment was when he woke up in Coney Island and looked at the shell on the beach.

3 Do you still like this movie?
Absolutely.

4 Did you have any new feelings or experiences?
I don’t know if I have seen this movie since The Wrestler came out. I may have. But I feel the weight of Aranofsky’s films and their movement. This still remains my favorite of his.

5 What is the take-away?
I love the moment when he presses through all of the build-up with the noise and the running and the two sides of good and evil pressing against him and he is alone beyond his apartment in white light intoning the numerical code and everything is at peace. For me, I guess this is what I strive for. The idea that behind the patterns and the chaos and all the surface striving, there is some personal moment of purity.

6 How do you think watching the movie impacted/ will impact your future actions if at all?
I know that when I first saw the movie I was obsessed with the ideas of finding patterns everywhere in nature. I didn’t study the Torah or the stock market. But I think it made me more observant to my surroundings. Every time I put cream in my coffee, I think of Pi.

I have been wanting to do some kind of systematic project involving writing and possibly movies. And I thought I might like to rewatch some of the movies I have in my possession and see why I have them and what I think of them, etc. The idea was given me that I should make notes before and after I watch the movie, to track how or if my perceptions have changed and test my memory. So I have come up with six questions on either side to ask myself of each movie. I will do this until I get bored of it or run out of movies. Thanks, SMO, for coming up with some good questions.