Loose Change: 35mm Film Day at the Sie
Two days ago (3/5) was 35mm Film Day at the Sie, and for the occasion the Denver Film Society showcased four films on 35mm. That alone will draw me to my favorite place to see movies, even now that I live in a different city, but the 3/5's programs were worth seeing anyway.
The day kicked off with the light-hearted and airy Swing Time (1936), a black-and-white Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film that showcases just how magical good cinematic chemistry can be, especially when that chemistry dances like Fred and Ginger. The film is marred only by a sequence in which Astaire dances in blackface, a wholly unnecessary addition to the film’s most technically impressive musical number. Racism of the sort found in Swing Time is painfully familiar even in this day-and-age, even if many people try to pretend cinema has moved on. In many ways what’s moved on is the form, not the substance. Some things are uncomfortably static.
The next 35mm print was Hayao Miyazaki’s unsung 1992 gem Porco Rosso, a film whose silly flying-pig subject masks an etherial beauty. I’ve never been a fan of Casablanca, to which this film is compared (“but with a pig”, kind of like how Jaws is basically Die Hard on a boat and 13 years earlier), but Porco Rosso’s ode to sky and sea moved me like the best animated films do: through madness and motion. Leaving the central character’s potential transformation a secret only serves to highlight the film’s, and the day’s, overall ambiguity.
Following the animated Porco Rosso was one of the few live-action animated films ever made, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a face-punch of a film that combines the pop-culture reverence of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s source material with the unmatched energy of Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright. Think of Scott Pilgrim as a romantic comedy but without zombies, in which Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead et al brawl their way into our hearts. And like Scott Pilgrim, “I think I learned something” too.
What that something is I’m not sure, but I know it was something about love, romance, and the self. All four films in the program make love their central theme. Big surprise; cinema is a medium awash in love stories. Whether it’s the meet-cute dance-sex of Fred and Ginger, the forlorn cosmic love of Porco Rosso, or Scott Pilgrim fighting off seven evil exes for the heart of Ramona, love looks different everywhere and yet somehow it’s all the same: people overcoming their own neuroses and baggage to momentarily come together, maybe for now, maybe for the future.
I’m working on an article on loneliness, and specifically lesbian loneliness, that will hopefully amount to more than me screaming into the void about how alone I sometimes feel. I skipped Scream Screen’s presentation of David Cronenberg’s Crash on Valentine’s Day because I didn’t think I could emotionally handle it, but apparently I was good for a day of off-kilter love stories involving anthropomorphic pigs and people vaporizing into loose change. I guess that’s what counts as personal growth. I do feel somehow different than when a few months ago when I was spiraling into an abyss of self-hate and self-pity over my non-existent love life. A day of 35mm films tends to put things in perspective, too. Cinema is the best (and possibly also the worst) therapy around.
But then, I haven’t even mentioned the day’s finale, Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo ’66, and if Scott Pilgrim is a sucker punch to the face, then Buffalo ’66 is like a hard blow to the groin, in the best way. If I’m inspired to change my lonely ways, it may be because of characters like Gallo’s Billy Brown, a character so ruined by self-hate and self-pity that he barely understands how to interact with the rest of the world. I don’t ever want that to be me: blistering with a sense of entitlement over the things the world never seems to give out. That’s not how the world works.
Gallo’s twist on Beauty and the Beast, contrary to the inevitable pop-feminist critique, is not so much a lesson in misogyny but on the way we talk about romance in cinema: a love story through the looking glass. Buffalo ’66 does everything that Swing Time does, only backwards and in high heels.