Ever Encounter Someone Famous in the Street?

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During the two years I lived in Paris, we used to play a game whenever we saw someone with the slightest resemblance to a well-known person. If a bald-headed man walked down the street, we said, “There goes Yul Brynner.” There was a woman who sold vegetables on the Rue Mouffetard, the longest market street in Europe at the time, who bore an amazing resemblance to Brigitte Bardot, or so we thought.

One day, I was about to cross the Avenue des Gobelins. A tall figure stood ahead of me and to the right. I could only see his profile. Playing the game while we waited for the light to change, I remarked to my friend in a whispered tone, “Voici, Samuel Beckett.”

Slowly, the figure turned to look at me, piercing blue eyes – the face of a hawk – exactly like the photo I knew from the back cover of my copy of what has been called “the most influential play of the twentieth century.” Disarmed, I could only stammer, “Bonjour.” He said nothing.

The light changed at that instant and he crossed the wide street. Halfway down the block ahead, he stopped to shake hands with someone. Having read his novels and plays, so stark, so preoccupied with stillness and aloneness, I remember thinking how surprising it was to see him alive and walking, exchanging words with another human being. Only later, did I realize that in my back pocket I was carrying a copy of En Attendant Godot.

On the night of July 8, 20 days ago, we saw Waiting for Godot in the space once known as Studio 54, starring Nathan Lane, John Goodman, Bill Irwin and John Glover.

Where were you when a man walked on the moon?

On July 20, 1969, I was in Rome. I had just returned from seeing the Coliseum for the first time. There were black and white television sets with rabbit ear antennas perched outside in the streets with small crowds standing around them. An excited young Italian ran up to me, and said “Your brothers are walking on the moon.” I can still see his face and hear him saying the words, “fratelli… sulla luna…”

Is there a more influential film than this short documentary of ourselves?

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker succeeds in putting you in a place where no one would want to be. That all of the characters do not share this sentiment drives the theme of the movie.

Very few members of the audience have been anyplace as strange, threatening and dangerously confusing as the landscape of this movie.

The famous early scene in Platoon dropped you into the jungle; you couldn’t help but identify with the frenzied desperateness of those recruits, especially looking down upon them from that increasing aerial shot. The jarring transition from wedding celebration to field of battle in The Deer Hunter says everything about the difference between talk of war and how it actually is; then everything follows.

I believe we are the sum of our experiences, including secondary experiences that come from books, movies, plays and our exchanges with each other. There are images in Hurt Locker that will become part of you.

The audience is consistently kept off balance. We see big name actors without the usual protections against sudden and early disappearance from the screen; this alone compounds our feeling that as an audience we are out of our element here.

This is not to say that Hurt Locker thwarts expectations from beginning to end. It enlists certain formulas and where it does it is less interesting. There are so many movie reviews. Movie Sightings tries not to be a critic (who finds shortfalls), but rather an ecstatic -- grateful for whatever a film shows us that helps explain the world. The Hurt Locker certainly does that.

My Son and I Go to the Moon

There are few pleasures that compare to going to a film knowing nothing about it and finding it completely absorbing. This can really only happen shortly after release, before the trailers hit, and the buzz begins.

There seems to be a recent trend where films of a certain nature are introduced sparingly in select theaters in major cities.

I drove with my son to Times Square Sunday night (June 18) to see Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. We saw it on the fifth floor of the AMC Theatre, nearly halfway to the moon itself.

The deepest experience it communicates is sudden loneliness, in which there is a moment when the character suddenly discovers the extreme loneliness of his condition. I got the same feeling in Revolutionary Road towards the end when the Kate Winslet character stands by herself in the backyard and at moments sprinkled throughout the television series Mad Men.

This movie also has introductory power. Even if you saw Sam Rockwell in the Green Mile or any of a number of other movies or television shows, this is the film that will introduce him to you.

Twenty-six days later, today, Moon sent me back to my bookshelf and a short story by Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” which takes place on a vessel, too, where there are parallel events, and the mood is identical. Although the inevitable comparisons will be made to the 2001: A Space Odyssey, my personal antecedent is this story, read many years ago, enigmatic and unsettling.