D.C. this week. Got back from Kentucky with a story, worked on the follow-ups all week. Spent more time than usual catching up with friends, once at the sort of Beltway cocktail party that people who hate the city imagine when they’re angry.
That’s right, I’m talking about the Bulwark Happy Hour, which fit the front line of the #NeverTrump movement onto one rooftop bar and patio. Bill, Mona, Sarah, Sonny, Jim, Andrew, the illuminati. They were all there, some of them ordering the gimlet-ish official event cocktail, talking about the coming DeSantis campaign, asking me what I’d seen out there; then, talking about the focus groups they’d conducted, and how what I’d seen out there was misleading.
That was Wednesday. Thursday brought me unwillingly back to the movies to see “Fast X,” which my friend Matt insisted would be fun. This is always how I end up seeing the films of the “Fast Saga,” which I’ve never gotten into, and use when I’m trying to explain what sort of blockbusters I don’t like. The high-stakes, big-cast action movie always moves the same way, and the overuse of CGI is so distracting that the “Mission Impossible” franchise now advertises by showing you little “Burden of Dreams” of Tom Cruise actually risking his life.
There were around 15 of us in the party, and if anyone was there to enjoy the movie, we wrecked it — the laughing started at the very first shot, zooming out from Benjamin Franklin’s black pupil in a stack of $100 bills. Some people in the party truly enjoyed it, and movies like it; they see a legitimate place in the universe for stupid, loud movies in which any two celebrities onscreen need some reason to fight. These movies have been self-aware for a while, too. In “F9,” there’s a running gag about Roman (Tyrese Gibson, cinema best-looking schlemiel) being convinced that the Fast family have become invulnerable super-heroes, and in this one, a brick-jawed bad guy talks about how ridiculous the family’s ability to turn villains into blood brothers: “It’s like a cult.”
I saw “F9” with a friend as a way to break post-pandemic tedium, and saw “The Fate of the Furious” at an event co-sponsored by Cuba’s consulate in the United States; the opening Havana car chase was a high point, perhaps the high point, of the Obama-era diplomatic thaw. The one thing I enjoyed on Thursday was the search for an all-seeing spy device that must not fall into the wrong hands only comes near the end, instead of powering the whole plot.
We had fun catching up after, anyway. All other free time was spent worrying about wedding tasks or doing them, and catching up with a friend who hadn’t seen “Brawl in Cell Block 99" yet. I finished work at 5 on Friday and toured the National Portrait Gallery; I got a haircut, interrupted briefly by a panhandler who’d walked in off the street and was muscled out by identically solid men in identical blue shirts. And I read a little.
The Best Thing I Saw: Of what I finished, clearly “Carnal Knowledge,” the 1971 Mike Nichols film, uncomfortable then and a little bit prophetic now. Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel) fool around in college, change partners, end up middle-aged and watching Jonathan’s “Ballbusters on Parade” slideshow tribute to his sexual conquests. The moral’s the same one that powers Judd Apatow movies; you will be unhappy in love, but even less happy if you don’t pair off and try to make that work. (Sexual revolution had won, and birthrates were about to start falling - watch more movies, this comes up later.)
The horny-guy two-hander is a classic story structure now. Think of handsome Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and schlubby Howard (Matt Malloy) psychologically manipulating a deaf woman for “In the Company of Men,” or the two nerds played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in “Superbad.” Stretch out the timeline and you get something gripping and depressing.
The Best Thing I Read: David Levering Lewis’s “W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race,” a Pulitzer-winner I’d picked up used in Adams Morgan and schlepped around to three apartments without cracking open.
The Best Thing I Heard: The first few episodes of Movie Mindset, high-quality conversation on mid-quality cinema.
Another short one this time, as I make my way to South Carolina.