movie singularity event

What a great movie discussion. Tonight is the reason I started going in the first place. Someone new made it to the discussion and I have this sense that she is the closest I’ve found to my particular tastes in movies. When she said she looked for stuff to shock the shit out of her my ears perked up. She was very active in the discussion. Atom Egoyan, Hal Hartley, Peter Greenaway, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad these names came out of her as easily as the names of old friends. Originally I’d planned to go see The Sea but I was so engaged in the discussion I didn’t want to give it up. The group dwindled down to me, her and Chris.

Eventually it ended up just me and her talking, mostly about movies but frequently I diverted. I was curious as to what forces in her life had made her this movie watching freak. Her husband’s frustration with her taste in movies reminded me of times I frustrated friends with my own tastes. That need to eliminate artifice and communicate honestly and directly, I understood that too. Although, I hadn’t had the liberated youth she’d had saying whatever she wanted. I was far more restrained. She was born in Rhodesia (Zambia nowadays), grew up in Boulder, lived in Chicago awhile, used to be a flight attendant for American, and lived in France as a teaching assistant,

I wanted to keep talking. Movies, life, people they kept coming up and they wove together in ways they don’t for other people I talk to. I said I had to go but I couldn’t help myself and I blurted out about Korean and Japanese films. (I’d mentioned Takashi Miike and Visitor Q earlier.) I stopped myself again I told her I had to go and pulled away. I shuffled down the steps of the Angelika and I wondered for a second if that’s what Kathy would have been like at 40. I wondered not in a melancholy way, but in a way that brought hope and peace. It was like I lived in a world of infinite possibilities and the point was to accept it and keep exploring.

Then I was like holy cow it’s 1am. I need to go to sleep. Listening: Sex is Personal - The Faint