We went to see the Mister Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Everything we read and heard warned us to be ready to cry. One friend told me she had taken a box of tissues to the theater, then passed it through the crowd when everybody started sobbing. The movie is amazing – thoughtful, powerful, spiritual – but for me the heart punch didn’t happen until right at the end, when the filmmakers create a brilliant little moment that I won’t spoil here. The tears came then, and they came hard.
But I don’t want to say much more about the movie. I want to talk about after the movie.
There was a pretty good crowd – maybe 50 people on a Thursday night – and most of them left when the lights came up. But a dozen of us stayed. There were four people a couple rows behind us, and three people a row in front of us, and five of us – Alix and I, a friend we used to work with, and her parents.
And all three of our little groups just sat there and talked about the movie.
The people behind us talked about watching Mister Rogers when they were kids. A young woman in front of us got out her phone and found a YouTube clip of a moment shown during the credits. Our group got out the box of cupcakes our friends had brought – Alix and I just had our 20th anniversary, and each cupcake had icing that looked like a baseball with “20” between the seams. (Our first night out together was at a Hickory Crawdads game.)
Ushers usually come in right after every movie ends to sweep up and make sure everybody leaves. But nobody came. So the folks behind us lingered, and the ones in front of us lingered, and our group ate cupcakes in what I am sure was a flagrant violation of Regal Cinemas policy. I wish now that we would have talked to somebody in one of the other groups, but in the moment we were all deep in our own conversations.
Our group talked about what Fred Rogers would think of the way our world is now — if he would think that he had not done enough. We wondered what happened to some of the children in the movie. We agreed that the things Mister Rogers stood for – kindness, tolerance, love – are not naive or shallow but are the most profound and deepest things of all.
We all stayed for a good 20 minutes. I’ve been to hundreds of movies, but I’ve never seen that happen before.
It felt like we were sitting out on our porches on a long summer night.
A group of us went to see “The Wrestler” on Friday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it, but I needed to. I doubt any other subject could cut closer to the bone for me.
I’ve loved professional wrestling, and hated it, my entire life.
When I was little a lot of the bad guys wore masks. When a bad guy with a mask came on the TV, I would run and hide in the other room. Then I would peek around the corner to see what happened. That’s pretty much the way I’ve dealt with wrestling ever since. Not wanting to look, not being able to help it.
My daddy was a believer — wrestlers, in the carny language they use, would call him a mark. He thought wrestling was real. He was a smart man, brilliant with tools, self-educated, but everybody has a hole in their swing and that was his. He took my sister to a match one time, and they sat in the front row, and one of the wrestlers got tossed out of the ring right into their laps. My daddy saw the blood streaming down the wrestler’s face. After that no one could tell him it wasn’t real.
He was right about the blood. Wrestlers call it blading and an early scene in “The Wrestler” shows how it happens. The Mickey Rourke character — Randy “The Ram” Robinson — hides a piece of razor blade in the tape on his wrist. During the match, after his opponent rams him into an exposed metal turnbuckle, Robinson falls facedown on the mat. While his opponent distracts the fans, Robinson slips out the razor and slices open his own forehead.
I’m sitting here writing this, trying to figure out how to justify loving something where guys cut open their own foreheads with razor blades. I’m not sure I can.
As soon as I figured out wrestling was a show, I’d pick fights about it with my daddy. Can’t you see how that guy pulled his punch? If they were really fighting, would they bounce off the ropes like that? He would scowl at me and turn back toward the TV. We would watch in silence. It was years before I could sit down with him and enjoy it my way and let him enjoy it his way. That was one of the ways I knew I was finally a grown man.
The best wrestlers are storytellers. It’s usually a simple story — most wrestling storylines can be summed up as I hate what you are or I want what you have. (You can sum up most of Shakespeare that way too.) Other writers learned from the classics, or from pulp fiction, or movies or comic books; I learned from Dusty Rhodes and Ricky Steamboat and Ric Flair. There’s no wrong way.
Here’s a little bit of Dusty, thanks to the great wrestling site Death Valley Driver:
Dusty was my favorite. But my dad and I knew that Ric Flair was the best. He created such a great character — the rich playboy who dressed in custom suits, the dirty fighter who always had backup but was legit tough on his own. Even when he did the most heelish things, some people cheered him anyway. Maybe out of admiration for someone so good at what he did, even if what he was good at was being bad.
Flair grew up in Minnesota, but he made his home as a wrestler in Charlotte. It was a base for a lot of wrestlers in the ’70s and early ’80s because one of the main wrestling TV shows taped there; even after the show left, a lot of the wrestlers stayed. I moved to Charlotte in 1989. Not long after I got there, I was stopped at a red light late one Friday night when a black Mercedes pulled up in the lane next to me. Ric Flair sat behind the wheel, just as cool as I always imagined.
Years later, I wrote about him. He had come out with a memoir about his years in the wrestling business. It read like a nonstop party — he must have passed out on half the kitchen floors in Charlotte. That’s how I led off my column. The morning the column came out, I was at my desk when the phone rang. Ric Flair was on the line. He wanted me to know that he thought the column was just fine… but his wife was upset. She didn’t like all the stories about the partying.
I can understand that, I said, not believing I was actually talking to Ric Flair. But Ric, I got all those stories from your book.
I know, he said. But, well, I didn’t actually show her the book before it came out.
Not to give anything away, but there’s a point in “The Wrestler” where Randy “The Ram” has a chance to straighten things out with someone he loves… and he blows it. It made me think of Ric Flair, publishing a book without showing it to his wife first.
The truth is that wrestling attracts people on the fringe — people who got kicked off the football team or spent some time in jail or never learned how to hold down a regular job. “The Wrestler” is matter-of-fact about how wrestlers get jacked up on steroids to build muscle and gulp down painkillers when those muscles break down. It’s not any different than the stories I’ve heard from people who worked in and around the business. Like a lot of things, the more you know about it, the harder it is to love.
Over the years, especially after my dad died, I didn’t watch wrestling as much but I followed certain wrestlers. One of them was a Canadian named Chris Benoit — a small but powerful guy who was great at making the wrestling ballet look like a real fight. He was so good that you could forget his absurd body — his neck twice the size it should be, his muscles way too big for his frame. He was taking in bad things and two years ago they came out. He killed his wife, their child, then himself. That just about put me off wrestling for good. Now I check in on a couple of websites but I hardly ever watch the shows. It’s too painful, knowing what’s real.
“The Wrestler” is a sad, great movie because it feels real. I know wrestling about as well as I know anything and the movie got everything right. Especially the broken-down old wrestler who can’t get through the day without hurting but can’t stay out of the ring. He’d rather die than give it up.
That’s the end of the story for “The Wrestler,” and for wrestling, and even for wrestling fans. We know the whole gruesome thing is not worth loving. But at some point, back before we knew better, we cut ourselves open, and it got in our blood.
One of the gifts I got Alix for Christmas was this book “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.” (She gave me a subtle hint about this gift, something along the lines of “You should get me this book called ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.’ ” Once you’ve been married awhile you pick up on these little clues.)
So this got us talking and thinking about movies, and somewhere in there I had an epiphany.
You probably know that the fortunes in fortune cookies gain a whole new level of meaning if you add the words “in bed.” May you always live in interesting times… in bed. You are known as wise and generous… in bed. 6, 14, 23, 31, 42, 47… in bed. (Wait, that’s the lottery numbers on the other side of the fortune.)
Anyway… it turns out that the title of any movie takes on a whole new aspect if you just add the words “of love.”
Cool Hand Luke… Of Love
Citizen Kane… Of Love
The Maltese Falcon… Of Love
Return of the Jedi… Of Love
The Matrix… Of Love
The Sixth Sense… Of Love
I’m not that interested in that new Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino — at this point Clint’s face on the big screen is scarier than all the Saw movies put together. But Gran Torino… Of Love ? I’d stand in line for that.
The best part is, it makes all those art flicks — the ones that exist solely to be nominated for Oscars — instantly watchable.
The English Patient… Of Love
Sense and Sensibility… Of Love
The Remains of the Day… Of Love
Try it! Although, be warned, it doesn’t work every time. Frost/Nixon… Of Love will be giving me nightmares for weeks.
(Found on YouTube: a camera-phone video from Friday night’s show)
Some of you know about my obsession with the movie “Once.” It’s really not a healthy thing. I’ve seen the movie four or five times now, listened to the soundtrack probably 100 times, watched all the DVD extras, read way too many interviews with the stars. This is all time I could have spent working out or cutting the grass or maybe reading the philosophy I now have as homework for one of my classes. Maybe by now I would have been able to understand John Stuart Mill. Probably not.
The couple at the heart of “Once” — Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova — were playing in concert up here, so of course we went. The show was at the Boston University hockey arena — not exactly the perfect venue for soul-searching acoustic music — but when you have a hit movie and 5,000 people want to see you, a hockey arena it is.
Hansard is the frontman for the Irish band The Frames, who were onstage about half the time and closed the show with their signature song, “Fitzcarraldo.” A few people hollered out requests for Frames songs. But most of us came to see Hansard and Irglova. A beefy guy in a Red Sox cap three rows in front of us kept screaming for “The Hill” — Irglova’s heartwrenching piano ballad about a woman who feels invisible to her lover. It was like watching a dockworker beg Barry Manilow to play “Mandy.”
But when you strip away the beefy guy and the hockey arena and everything else, you’re left with two people making music. This is why “Once” hit me so hard. It’s not just a story with music in it, it’s a story ABOUT music, why it means so much to people, why people are willing to sacrifice so much for it — fixing vacuum cleaners to pay the bills or playing in the street all day for tourists who never throw you a dime.
(One of my ironclad rules to live by is this: Always pay the street musician. This turns out to be a problem here in Cambridge, where at any given moment in Harvard Square there are roughly 642 street musicians.)
It turns out that Hansard and Irglova were walking around Boston the afternoon of the show and ran into a street musician. It also turned out that the guy was coming to the show. So — you know what comes next, right? — halfway through the show they invited the guy up on stage to do one of his songs. (You know you’re in Boston when… the street musician has a Web site.)
Hansard was a busker himself in Dublin, back when he was a teenager, and he still plays the beat-up acoustic guitar he had back then — it has jagged holes where the pick guard should be. He plays it hard. But he can also play it slow and pretty — usually when he’s singing with his partner in music and in life.
“Falling Slowly” won an Oscar for Hansard and Irglova — they had the best moment in the Oscar show, where Irglova got cut off trying to give her speech and they brought her back after the commercial. They’re both professional musicians now, making serious money, but they give off the feeling that they’re still scrambling — Hansard was proud to announce that he had shopped the Boston thrift stores and paid 3 bucks for his shirt.
Sting isn’t a real person to me — he’s such a star that he’s somehow other than human. Prince, the same way. Even Springsteen, even though he tries harder than anyone to prove that beneath it all he’s a regular guy.
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova still feel like real people. Maybe it’s just because we’re catching them at the right time. But maybe it’s because they’re just as surprised as we are at the moments when we find our gifts, and the moments when we fall in love.
They played “Falling Slowly” early in the set Friday night, and when their voices came together you had to imagine that they heard what we heard, that no matter whether it was love or friendship or whatever, once they made one voice out of two, they had to be together.
Free couch on the street! Somehow, we turned down this deal.
Last night we saw our third Hitchcock movie in two days. The Brattle Theatre in downtown Cambridge is doing a retrospective on Hitchcock’s 1950s films; on Sunday we saw a double feature of “Rear Window” (my all-time favorite movie*) and “Vertigo”; last night it was “Strangers on a Train.”
*My top 5 favorite movies:
“Rear Window.”
“The Princess Bride.”
“The Searchers.”
“Richard Pryor Live in Concert.”
“The Sure Thing.”
Of course these aren’t the five GREATEST movies of all time — no “Godfather” in here. These are just the movies I’d happily watch over and over all day long not just because they’re great, but because they match up with some other special moment. No. 6 on the list would probably be “Airplane II,” which is not nearly as good as the first “Airplane!”, but I went with my friends Perry and Virgil and we were the only people in the theater laughing, but we were laughing so hard we just about rolled around on the dangerously sticky theater floor. That’s what makes a favorite movie — the memory of what your life was like when you saw it.
And by the way, I am totally stealing my good friend Joe Posnanski’s Pozterisk idea here. When he patents it I’ll be glad to pay up.
Back home we might not see a movie once a month, much less three in two days. But time is chunkier here. We’re not racing to make deadline or lingering at the office to catch up on e-mails. There’s plenty to do — and will be plenty more once classes start in full next week — but there’s also some air in the day. You can read a book. Or go hang out in Harvard Square and compare the street musicians. Or just take a long walk at night and think about who else has walked these old brick sidewalks.
There’s also air in the day because of what we’re not doing. We’re reading the Boston Globe every day but not like we read the Observer — we don’t need to know how the mayor up here is doing, we won’t be covering the first day of school. We watched the Obama and McCain convention speeches (and Sarah Palin’s, of course*) but I’m not as tuned in as I’d normally be. We’re sort of checking the news in Charlotte — that United Way thing turned out to have some legs after all — but we’re pretty much unplugged there, too.
*So doesn’t Sarah Palin look like she walked right out of the “Hot For Teacher” video?
I have to say, being unplugged is not a bad thing at all.
As a newsman I should whack myself on the knuckles for saying this, but sometimes it feels like there’s just too much news. We’re drowning in it. You can’t ever keep up. It’s like going into the record store and realizing that no matter what you pick, there’s 5,000 great CDs in there that you’ll never get to listen to. (Driving around today I heard 20 great songs on the radio by bands I had never heard of, and of course it was one of those college stations where they ID the songs every two hours, but then they played “Celebrated Summer” by Husker Du* and it was like being lost and finally seeing your house up ahead on the street — hey, I know that song!
*Husker Du. What a band. The loudest band I’ve ever seen live — even louder than the Ramones. Bob Mould lived my dream — he fronted a great rock band and then wrote storylines for World Championship Wrestling. Now that’s a career.
At home I think, most of the time, we try to do it all. But one of the things we have to learn up here is what we can’t do. We can’t take every great class. We can’t read all the books in the library. We can’t go see every great speaker or hear every great band. So, in a weird way, the pressure’s off.
I say that knowing that in a couple of weeks we’ll be pulling all-nighters to get our reading done and dashing across campus to catch a brownbag speaker. But we’ve already learned something important: Find those air bubbles in your day. Then breathe deep.
They’re showing 12 Hitchcock movies at the Brattle. We might have to go 12-for-12.
