OGIC: Commuter cars and darkened rooms

Summer 2007 has been a season of nearly compulsive movie-going and video-watching. This year, books have taken a back seat. For one thing, I started commuting again for the first time in 14 years. It’s a train ride of ten to fifteen minutes merely, but it changes the texture of weekday life completely. The one plus is that I can read on the train, but the short spans of time don’t accommodate anything very demanding, only books I can slip into and out of with ease. So it’s been Reginald Hill mysteries for the most part, though I did manage to polish off “A Buyer’s Market,” the second novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, during the first two weeks of this brave new life. While I appreciate the newfound intervals for reading, truth be told, half the time I find myself more absorbed in the people around me and the scene outside the window. And once in a while I just want to close my eyes and extend last night’s sleep.
Instead of reading, I’ve been watching movies left and right, in the theater and in the living room. And the batting average has been high. Among revivals I was swept up in the glittering hauteur and proper passions of The Earrings of Madame de… and rolled with the punches, funny and bleak, that life in Watts deals to the hero of the gentle but unflinching Killer of Sheep. Some matches were made in heaven, or at least a planet or two away: a late spring viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris lent Danny Boyle’s ravishing Sunshine, seen only a few weeks ago, added layers of resonance. In both movies, the seductive visuals serve first to mitigate, then to heighten, the scariness of the something out there that means us harm.
But what of the blockbusters, you ask? Ratatouille afforded simple, easy enjoyment. Spider-Man 3 was batty, blockheaded fun–considerably more enjoyable for me, who had few expectations, than for my date, who was hopeful. Laughing at a movie can, I think, be as gratifying as laughing with one, and I totally cop to having had a great giddy time watching this franchise leave skid marks.
Once: did you see this movie yet? I don’t know of anyone who saw it who wasn’t taken with it. Modest and surprising and complicated, it left me unsure how I felt, in the best possible sense. The Departed on DVD was the opposite, manipulative to its core–right down to the soundtrack loaded with bait for personal nostalgia–and distractingly strewn with star power. The very premise of the script is a kind of stunt, let alone the casting. The last word on the Boston accents, of course, goes to the Cinetrix.
Today finds me shifting gears, as I have four hours to spend on an airplane to Seattle this afternoon. Believe me, I’m not the most comfortable, cool, calm, and collected flyer in the world, but I’ve always loved one thing about a plane flight: that there is no excuse not to read a book, nothing more productive I could possibly be doing with myself. (I know, I know–spoken like someone who hasn’t had to travel for business very much.) The question of the night, of course: what to read? Truly, four-hour travel stints come rarely enough in my life that this is no small dilemma. If I choose wrongly, the missed opportunity will rankle and when I’m back soon enough to my few stolen minutes with something slight. Next week I’ll let you know how I did.