Category: love

Pawing at love

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Now, it is true that Cubby the dog, who’s about the mass of a midsize carnival plushy, has no testicles. But that does not stop this little love-bird, this shameless horn-dog, from tailing a potential girlfriend. 

This is a perverse, lopsided love story, featuring interspecies and entertainment. It is a short tale about a dog and a cat, the former pining for the latter, and the latter not giving one goddamn. The cat’s sangfroid is nothing less than majestic. 

But Cubby can be a dingbat, as we all can in matters of the heart. He’s oblivious to Tiger Lily’s sniffy aloofness, her baroque indifference. It’s funny in its way, mostly in how it leaves Cubby bewildered, a Huh? thought balloon hovering above vacant brown eyes. He circles her, snuffling, his voluptuous tail flapping like a palm frond. And Tiger Lily rolls her eyes, arches her back, drowsily meows: buzz off.

It brings to merry mind the amorous cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew who invariably falls hard for a cat he thinks is a fellow skunk and proceeds to wolfishly stalk her. Unrequited hijinks ensue. Does Cubby think Tiger is a dog? Doubtful. He’s just cultivating a crush on a foxy feline, I suspect. He’s lonely, and he’s got a hot roommate playing hard to get.

Let’s anthropomorphize even more. When he’s not giving her fluttery bedroom eyes, Cubs, in a snit of jealous rejection, assassinates Tiger’s character: Tease! Floozy! It’s like “Love Island,” without the love or the island (or the silicone, spray tans and lavish idiocy). It’s not nice, but again, the cat is immune to any emotional attentions from the dog. She shrugs, then hacks a magnificent hairball.

Cubby’s a blundering suitor, awash in ineptitude, like a teen boy trying to seduce a 40-year-old — the reverse equation of “The Graduate,” say, though I think the dog and cat are about the same age. Anyway. You gotta feel for old Cubs. Except when Tiger gets too close to his chew bone and he lunges at her, Cubby is a perfect gentleman. 

Still, in her slinky wisdom, the cat’s having none of it. Flowers fail, chocolates choke. The dog’s cute tilted-head gazes are wasted. His wistful woofs ignored. This, she decides, is strictly platonic. Cubs returns to his doggie bed, curls up and sighs. Tiger steals away beneath the sofa. And so the pets remain furry frenemies, barking up the wrong tree and purring in exquisite solitude.    

Dog: “I like you!”

Cat: “Yawn.”

Things du jour

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Quote of the day

“I am not a recluse. I live like an unsociable person; it is different. People get on my nerves.” 

— Brigette Bardot, actress, animal activist 

Book of the day

“Bel Canto,” Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel about love, opera and hostage-taking, is one of those contemporary classics you should have read but never got around to, and now, 25 years on, it feels too late. It’s not. I started this book five years ago and put it aside for inexplicable reasons. That diss has haunted me and last week I gave “Bel Canto” another shot. The result was transcendent.

The plot is a small knot that unravels beautifully: A throng of international guests have gathered at the mansion of the vice president of an unnamed South American country for the birthday celebration of a Japanese businessman. A world-famous American opera soprano has been invited to regale the group, and soon, through her exotic talent and beauty, becomes the cynosure of the story. The party is abruptly crashed by leftist guerrillas looking to kidnap the nation’s president, who rather comically skipped the party so he could watch his beloved soap opera at home. Stymied, the invaders take the revelers hostage for what starts as hours, then weeks, then months. Thus the mansion becomes a human incubator, a constellation of international players, some of whom align as unlikely allies, others as peculiar romances fraught with forbidden yearning. It’s a rich tapestry that echoes the diners trapped for months in a similar mansion in “The Exterminating Angel,” Buñuel’s classic takedown of the gilded class. But Patchett is a gentler, less partisan observer, underscoring the universal languages of music, love and language itself for something divine. The book is so meticulously engineered — the many characters are spryly choreographed — and so big of heart that it dashes hopes of ever writing your own novel because it couldn’t brush these literary heights. There’s the hitch: You almost hate “Bel Canto” because it’s so stupid good.

Movie of the day

My love affair with Iranian cinema is long and varied, spanning Jafar Panahi’s charming debut “The White Balloon” to Abbas Kiarostami’s rigorously philosophical “Taste of Cherry.” Spare, talky and played mostly by untrained actors, the films are often covertly political, critical of the Iranian regime in as coded terms possible, secret messages packed with time bombs. But Panahi has used his recent movies for brazen broadsides and as such they are banned in his home country. Yet the director shrewdly snakes around these restrictions and his latest moral thriller “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a bold gesture tracing what happens when a band of former political prisoners kidnap and confront the man they believe brutally tortured them during their imprisonment. Amid the moral complexities of revenge — do they even have the right man? — comes relief via mordant humor and absurdist touches that goose the overall lunacy. (Note the wry allusions to “Waiting for Godot.”) Panahi has made a tough and moving portrait of keeping one’s humanity in an impossible situation. Its stubborn ambiguity is a hallmark of Iranian cinema, and this one’s a classic. 

Drink of the day

That’d be Mr. Pickles Gin. My newly discovered sip is named for the distiller’s pit bull rescue, Mr. Pickles, who nobly emblazons the spirit’s label as the official mascot and makes me like it that much more.

Time to taste. Open the senses to a bouquet of dog urine. No. The fragrance is lovely, the gin superb. Its aroma is juniper, citrus, pepper, with a whiff, I think, of dill. It owns a strong herbal flavor with earthy undertones and tinges of orange, pepper and, aptly, a speck of dill pickle. And I swear on Mr. Pickles’ fuzzy head that is not just the power of suggestion. Made in Oregon by Wolf Spirit Distillery, the drink features 12 botanicals, including green tea, blood orange, pink peppercorns and marshmallow root (I have no idea). If it’s not as grand and complex as my revered Monkey 47, which boasts a whopping 47 botanicals and that I drink neat, Mr. Pickles will be a snappy refresher during the dog days of summer.

Photo of the day

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. This one speaks four words: I am so screwed.

Books I’m not ambivalent about

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“Transcription”

I could see this happening to me: On the way to interview a very important person, you drop your phone, i.e. your recording device, into a sink filled with water. Phone ruined, you are forced to interview the person without a recorder, a fact you fudge by reconstructing the confab from memory for your article, a high-wire act and any writer’s nightmare. Novelist Ben Lerner — who’s also a gifted poet and has been dubbed the “most talented writer of his generation” — uses this premise as a springboard to something timely, profound and ineffably transfixing. A novel in name only — think the brainy consciousness streams of Rachel Cusk — the 130-page “Transcription” presents a nameless narrator and two other men in conversations about art, life, friendship, fatherhood and technology amid the backdrop of early Covid. Plot is nebulous and tricky to summarize, but the brilliance at work is distinctly Lerner’s. (I’m an avid fan of his novels “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04.”) Lerner writes deceptively plain prose with a wizard’s wand — simple on the surface, yet each hypnotic line peels layers of insight and meaning. It’s all mesmerizingly meandering, to a destination both uncommon and rewarding. 

“Lost Lambs”

In this sharp and irreverent new novel, Madeline Cash flips notions of family, marriage, community, church and capitalism to expose their crawly underbellies. It’s prickly, spot-on, strange. And hilarious. The book’s many moving parts include an open marriage that veers to amorous calamity; star-crossed trysts; a trio of precocious teens that grazes danger in a vile adult world; a tech billionaire whose dealings are creepy at best; and a church Father whose hands may be scandalously dirty. Cash trains a compassionate bullseye on those creatures called teenagers and a cynic’s bead on the perilous pact of matrimony. (“The biggest conspiracy of all? This whole love thing,” a character sniffs.) But Cash isn’t cruel. She exudes empathy and openly likes her characters — the ones that deserve it. “Lost Lambs” is frothy literary fiction, until it’s not. It is droll and buoyantly written yet lands the well-placed left hook. I can imagine it becoming a four-part Netflix series, a smart, soapy, surreal dramedy starring Ben Stiller and Laura Linney. If it happens, I won’t watch it. I’ll stick to the book. The book is always better.

Three humor collections by Sloane Crosley

David Sedaris is the standard-bearer of comic essays. I believe this is wrong. I believe he is drastically overrated. I believe he is rarely actually funny. I believe his prose is limp. I believe his professional persona is as confected as a Girl Scout Samoa. You know who’s wittier, hipper and more stylish? Sloane Crosley, who’s written three collections of humor essays that impressed me enough to sit down and commit hosannas. Her first collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” is best. It also has the best title. Although “How Did You Get This Number,” her second book, and “Look Alive Out There,” her latest collection (from 2018), also have wry, hooky titles. Part-journalism, part-memoir, Crosley’s essays are first-person escapades, experiential and anecdotal and typically relatable. They bristle with razor observation and social commentary. Here, she mordantly muses about her only slightly embarrassing collection of plastic toy ponies. There, she riffs on her fraught city-girl excursion to Alaska, where, in an SUV, there is one guy among many women: “He is our lone star of testosterone in a galaxy of chick.” She deconstructs the bizarro experience of playing herself on “Gossip Girl” and takes merciless stock of her dating life. It’s not all playtime. Crosley doesn’t duck drama and high stakes (her queasy adventures in altitude sickness are almost contagious). Like Sedaris, some of Crosley’s situations and interactions smack of exaggeration or plot-propelling fancy. Such is the plight of the mass-consumed writer — feed the beast. Though the humor is a soft weave, coolly conversational, she can be overtly jokey, and the jokes rarely clank. Her voice is reliably amusing, cut with a measure of snark that gives her sweet prose a tangy kick.

“Flesh”

In minimalist language so parched it’s practically puckered, David Szalay spins a story of the classic Solitary Man, a Hungarian immigrant in England named István who embraces a nearly non-verbal solitude as a shield against a world of discomfort. We follow this modern existential character from his cringey deflowering as a teen to his coupling with a rich married woman and decades beyond. Szalay’s tensed prose mirrors the character’s isolation, which occasionally sees shafts of light. While his interior life remains unexamined — his disaffection can be frosty — István is no cipher. He’s a well-drawn loner, a compelling picture of alienation. He’s also something of a symbol, a metaphor for class, urban malaise, the gesture of empty sex and deep loss. (It’s telling that his extravagant cigarette habit is a key character trait.) István fascinates by dint of what he shows as much as by what he withholds. What’s so remarkable about “Flesh,” which won the Booker Prize in 2025, is a descriptive precision and drum-tight realism that would make Hemingway beam. Grim and gripping, it’s a master class in control.

Recent tomes I’ve tapped

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I’m never not reading a book or two. These are a few new titles I got my grubby paws on: 

Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of Edward Albee’s corrosive play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” remains a dish-rattling, drink-spilling, daggers-in-your-ears delight, all marital earthquakes and social Molotov cocktails. (Cocktails. Of course.) Booze is big in that cracked portrait of a long-wed couple on the rocks. (On the rocks. Of course.) And you get a contact high reading the riveting “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter, who capably captures the play’s serrated edges, dubious morality and verbal drive-bys, as well as the behind-the-scenes hoopla of making a controversial movie with a controversial couple, no less than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — Hollywood nitroglycerin. It’s a bracing blast of theater and cinema history.  

“Headshot” is by a woman named Rita Bullwinkel. Let’s get that out of the way. (There, done.) This slim, tightly coiled novel is also a muscular debut, damp with the blood and sweat of a passel of female teenage boxers, zesty characters realized with pointillist panache. Time-leaping and fragmentary, the girls’ stories are told in intense vignettes for a scrappy scrapbook of pugilistic profiles that pounds with humanity and life. If not quite a K.O. — more tonal and rhythmic variety would shake things up — the book is a fleet-footed contender. 

With irksomely precocious flair — at 35, he’s a wizardly wunderkind — poet Kaveh Akbar conjures worlds of art and ideas in his radiant fiction debut “Martyr!” Reeking agreeably of auto-fiction, this dense but delectably readable novel is about an Iranian-American poet scouring past and present, life, death and love with the insight of an artist and the squishy heart of the wounded. Gorgeous language propels you through its lush, gently philosophical thickets. And despite some muddled mysticism near the end — I’m allergic to spiritual allegory — “Martyr!” had me pleasantly reeling. 

Lorrie Moore’s a personal favorite and her latest fiction is the knottily named “I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home.” Like all her books, tangy prose festoons the pages (a bite-size sample: “Fluorescent light rinsed the room.”). Yet the novel, with its arch surreal touches, rubbed me wrong. The narrative, centered on a man and his dying brother, is gawky, with sharp elbows and knobby knees. Plus, there’s heaps about chemo, cancer and croaking, and I’m not in a hospice mood. The novel just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, so call me bonkers. In this rare instance, Moore is less.

Not for the feint of heart but perhaps for suckers for sentiment, the bleak memoir “Molly” — breathlessly written by Molly’s husband, Blake Butler, a noted novelist of thrillers — starts with her gunshot suicide and continues with another bang, the crack of bared emotion and tell-all candor. This is the story of Butler and Molly Brodak’s three-year marriage, a melding of art and nature and words and, in her case, bouts of inconsolable darkness. Brodak, a published poet and author who said “I simply wasn’t good enough,” killed herself three weeks before her 40th birthday, in 2020. “Molly” is so much about her and her devastating secrets, yet equally about Butler’s clawing to the other side of grief through deep (and verbose) psychic excavation. He includes Molly’s suicide note (“I don’t love people. I don’t want to be a person”), along with the frantic blow-by-blow action of finding her body in a favorite field of theirs. These passages are tough-going, not only for the forensic particulars, but for Butler’s writerly histrionics as well; he pants on the page. A cult sensation, tugging readers to and fro like emotional taffy and kicking critics into superlative overdrive, “Molly” is a divisive read, by turns lovely, wincing and overheated. It is the first book I’ve read that opens with the phone number for the national suicide hotline. 

Chick lit

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“The idea of meeting someone in a library, in the aisle of a bookstore or while reading on the subway, for instance, remains stubbornly high on the list of many people’s romantic fantasies.” — from The New York Times (link below) 

I admit there are few things more alluring to me than an attractive woman reading a book or browsing in (or working at) a book shop or library. It’s a smashing combo, a kind of electrifying alchemy that I can’t quite explain.

For instance, in the 1946 noir “The Big Sleep,” I’ve always been partial to the bespectacled bookshop proprietress played by Dorothy Malone than to Bogart’s famous glamor squeeze Lauren Bacall — a nerdy example of my bookish bent.

My personal history of amore is lucky with literature. There was blue-eyed Guen, who brought on our first date a copy of David Mamet’s “Writing in Restaurants,” just for me. Laura, who made my knees buckle from afar, was toting the poems of Herman Hesse (we were soon a couple).

One of my biggest crushes was on the girl who worked at the hippest book store in Austin. Then there was the woman who, after a little wine, insisted we go browse the local used book store and buy each other a volume. Now we’re talking.

On the flip-side, I once invited a date to my place. She looked around at the Rothko print and various vintage movie posters, all without comment. Then she eyed my bookshelves and scoffed, “You have way too many books.” Deal-breaker!

Like movies, books are crucial to me, and a shared passion for them is just that — shared passion. It’s something in common, hot to the touch, and can be the bedrock of something more intense, meaningful and feverish.

All this was stirred up reading the above mentioned story in the Times titled “Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person?” (Answer: yes.) 

Check it out HERE.

Dorothy Malone, bookshop owner, face to face with Bogart in “The Big Sleep”

The reluctant bachelor

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

In my 30s, a pair of well-meaning coworkers nominated me for a title in a big-city glossy magazine that makes me blush even as I type this so many years later. 

The magazine was a strenuously vapid thing, slathered in food and lifestyle pap, all of it mawkishly upbeat. To attract page after Technicolor page of blaring ad copy, it was shamelessly obsessed with ratings and lists: Best Barbecue! Best Campsites! Best Burgers! Best Places to Get Off!

City magazines with ample ad revenue are like that. They traffic in pretty pictures of manicured affluence, catering to the beauty-salon and doctor’s office crowds. Without being trendy themselves — they are woefully unhip —  they try to manufacture trends. Only dingbats actually pay money for the periodical, which is so cloying, you could barf. 

That said, I admit up front that I participated in this paragon of sub-journalism. My coworkers nominated me for one of those knuckleheaded lists: the city’s Most Eligible Bachelors. I was flattered. I was humbled. I was mortified.

The magazine editor phoned me for a preliminary interview. And I blurted: no. I rejected the nomination. It was way out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t so desperate for a date. And this introvert definitely didn’t need the exposure, my bewildered mug spread next to an ad for the hottest tanning salon or 40 sparkly, smiley real estate agents.

I thanked my deflated pod-mates, the lovely Sarah and Sharon, and also apologized. I was being ungracious, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. 

My dis was apparently a big deal. Friends expressed dismay. My disappointed mother scolded me like I was eight. The topper: Ira Glass of “This American Life” called for a possible segment — man turns down most eligible bachelor nomination, how zany is that? — that, fortunately, never panned out. 

And yet, I’m only human.  

Forward a year: Same routine, but this time, for better or worse, I caved. I did it. I’m not sure why. I was strafed by anxiety. But I thought, what the hell, man up. 

During the in-office interview with the editor, I explained my job (movie critic, which I said wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be), noted my hobbies (world travel, books, film, drinks, drums), and things I’m not so crazy about (dancing, reggae). Asked the inevitable question of what I look for in a woman (sigh), I said something like someone bookish, worldly and intellectually curious (what a dope).

This is the story of someone quite bashful scraping himself out of his dark, lonesome shell. A comment the editor solicited for the article from one of my dearest friends, Courtney, included these bits: “His eccentricities are very endearing … Once he lets you in, you discover a kind-hearted soul.”

Yeah. That might be a bit much. But there I was in this glossy magazine with nine other “most eligible bachelors,” practically shaking in my boots with self-consciousness. Each of us filled a full color page, with no ads. In the photo, my head is enormous.

The issue hit the stands (and the beauty salons and doctors’ offices) and I braced for the worst. But instead: crickets. No one called, emailed, berated me, ridiculed me, asked me on a date, nothing. Disappointment? No, massive relief. 

I guess the moral of this tale is to get out of your self-defined — and in my case, distinctly neurotic — safe zones and take a chance on something new, even alien. I ate a whole cobra in Vietnam and got detained by Hezbollah in Beirut. A cheesy little spread in a city magazine is comparably nothing. Really. Nothing.  

Take a risk. It might be gut-wrenching. It might be exhilarating. Or it might be … crickets. 

Money can’t buy me love

~ Chris ~ 6 Comments

When I was 14, gangly and clueless, a fellow teen approached me in line for the Big Thunder Mountain rollercoaster at Disneyland. She was cute, shy and giggly, and she slipped me a piece of paper the size of a business card. A shiny dime was taped to the card, which read: “Here’s my number and a dime, you can call me anytime.” 

Hot damn! 

(Less hot: I probably still have this ego-tickling keepsake. What a sap.)

(Lesser hot: The lass was surely carrying several cards around like a rod and reel, fishing for quarry at a teeming amusement park. The indignity.)

If only that’s how things worked in this era of high-tech, horn-dog delivery systems. To hell with Match and Tinder, just hand me your card with a proposition and I’ll take it from there. Prepaid to boot, though I’m sure a dime won’t slice it anymore. Tape a fifty-spot to it and we can talk. 

Though I prefer the above messaging — or, equally effective, the hand-passed mash note in Spanish class — I have resorted to dating sites, if only thrice, to make my intentions known. Each time was met with lavish failure. They just didn’t work out, making me a member of about 20 million date-site suckers.  

There was the young woman on Yahoo!, a dark beauty with cotton-candy cheeks, who advertised herself as an inveterate reader and energetic world traveler, only to prove she’s a deft fabulist and convincing embellisher. 

We met up for drinks and jabber. I asked what she reads and she said Harry Potter (watch my face drop). I press. No, just Harry Potter. We never discussed what I’m reading. Travel? She’s been to New York, once, with her mother. And Canada. The tryst was a bust. Even more so, as she’s a fiend for top-shelf vodka. 

Later, I tried trés-hip hookup hotbed OkCupid. I contacted two women. My gentlemanly overtures — the meek shall not inherit the earth — fetched zero responses. I had no idea what I was doing. Still, I was crestfallen for about 17 minutes.  

I believe in fate, kismet, stuff happening for a reason. Actually I don’t, but stick with me. I had a distant, tormenting crush on a woman who worked at the local arthouse cinema. She didn’t notice me. 

One day, at my favorite outdoor cafe, I spotted her (alone, gripping a Hermann Hesse paperback; be still my beating heart). As if the heavens split, she saw me and we exchanged incandescent smiles. I wish, right there, I had a business card that said, “Here’s my number — just call me!” 

Forget the goddam dime. Life is cheap, and short; love’s even cheaper, and shorter. Loose change has no place in this picture. (I later learned that this melting vision, named Laura, didn’t own a cell phone, just as I didn’t. I should have handed her the card with a roll of quarters and a money order.)  

I was paralyzed, besotted, nerves ajangle. So close, I thought. Make a move, putz!

I shot her a few more smiles, and, helpless about what to do next — approach her? sure! — I got in my car. As I pulled away, we made final eye contact, smiled and waved at each other. I ached with yearning, dramatically misty-eyed.

That’s because this was the classic, tragic missed opportunity. And yet with some tactful sleuthing, I figured it out: I discovered her name, got permission to call her (trusty land line), and soon wound up at her place watching “About a Boy” on VHS. We were a solid couple — books, travel, beer — for more than a year. Not an epoch, but enough time for the earth’s plates to shift.

Success, without a dating service, without a dime taped to a brazen call-me card, without exaggerated CVs and eye-fluttery flirtation — it happens. And it’s the only way I’ll play the dating game. Chance, fate — I don’t believe in them. But sometimes, rarely, it all falls into place. And I cherish that, for it’s no dime a dozen.

Going to the movies with your girlfriend

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

“When I’m getting serious about a girl, I show her ‘Rio Bravo,’ and she better fucking like it.”

— Quentin Tarantino

It’s a truism that when you’re dating, or deep in a relationship, you want the one you adore to like what you like, be it a book, band, meal or merlot. That typically takes shared exposure, an excursion to a favorite restaurant, museum or bookshop. 

And, of course, to the movies. 

Romance in the flickering dark of a theater may be a dating cliché — shared popcorn, awkwardly slinking your arm around her shoulder — but it’s also a communal act of culture. It filters preferences and underscores taste. Will she like it? Did she like it? (She better fucking like it, as Tarantino says.)

I’ve taken risks on movie dates, bringing girlfriends to foreign arthouse films like “Fellini Satyricon,” Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” and Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali.” (I never willfully tortured them with a Bergman dirge.)

‘Seven Samurai‘

These aren’t the easiest movies. They can be long, slow, thorny, with subtitles to boot. I don’t force it. If the film is proving a slog, I’m flexible. We walked out of “Satyricon” when I noticed the corpselike look on my girlfriend’s face (I’d seen the movie before, luckily).

New mainstream movies are fine, but, when possible, I lean to classics, rarities and art films. I got most of my cinema education at great revival houses in the serious movie towns of San Francisco, Austin and New York. Those funky theaters — the Castro, Alamo Drafthouse, Film Forum — are where I lapped up, wide-eyed, gritty film noirs, widescreen westerns, merry musicals and foreign essentials. It’s where I met Buster Keaton, Rita Hayworth, John Wayne and Anna Magnani and fell in love. 

Sharing this love is part of a good movie date, and I’ve had wonderful experiences with women at “Casablanca,” “Duck Soup,” “Annie Hall” and “All About Eve,” as well as brainy documentaries by Werner Herzog and playful French New Wavers like “Breathless.”

They’re movies I want to see and expose my lovers to. I become an enabler, a tutor perhaps, unspooling new cultural experiences. I am, for one, forever grateful to my brother for introducing me to the fun, frenetic bliss of Hong Kong action flicks, from Jackie Chan to John Woo and movies like “Peking Opera Blues” and “Hard-Boiled.” You never forget the impact of that, much like your first kiss. 

‘Hard-Boiled‘

Going to current movies is different. It means we’re taking a shared ride of discovery in the dark. A serious girlfriend and I watched “Dazed and Confused” and “Pulp Fiction” during their first runs (she loved them as much as I did, thank god). We got our classics fix watching “Sunset Boulevard” and Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” on video, rapturously. 

It doesn’t always work out so well. One date rejected the virile operatics of Michael Mann’s crime masterpiece “Heat” (fail!), while another huffed and ridiculed my choice of adjective when I called “Reservoir Dogs” “astonishing” as we left the theater. 

I know the feeling. I’ve been in the other seat, when I scorned a shared movie experience. My rants and tiny tantrums after sitting through the brain-dead “Titanic” and “Independence Day” come queasily to mind.

Then there’s the movie mistake, like when my brother took a girl to the emotionally devastating downer “Sophie’s Choice” on their first date. Nice libido killer, bro. She married him anyway.

Movie dates, then, are a fraught enterprise. What seems an innocent night out for easy entertainment can reveal telling value judgements about taste and temperament (she actually liked “The Notebook”?). They can even be deal breakers. (Again: she actually liked “The Notebook”?)

You take it personally. If I pick a movie I’ve seen before, I sit giddy and expectant, trying to gauge my date’s response, praying she likes it or at least endures it. As seriously as I am about film, however, I’ve never broken up with a girlfriend over a movie disagreement. That would be petty and asinine.

But I do keep score. 

One magnificent mollusk

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Coiled near its rocky den, the octopus slowly unfurls a tentacle like a flower blooming in a time-lapse photo to the human hand before her. It glances the hand then suddenly sucks it, gently pulling it toward her. The moment carries the pitter-patter of courtship, of holding hands for the first time. Could this be love?

“That’s when you know there’s full trust,” says the owner of the suction-cupped hand, free diver and filmmaker Craig Foster, in his remarkable documentary “My Octopus Teacher.” A viral smash, the Netflix film has been shortlisted for the best documentary Academy Award. Really, it deserves a special accolade, say, Best Buddy Picture Between Man and Mollusk. The movie is something else: devastating octo-poetry. 

A simple story about a grown man befriending a gorgeously slithery cephalopod in the swaying kelp forests of South Africa, the film depicts the burly, soft-spoken Foster as a dedicated student of the ocean who is truly moved by the relationship he forges over a year with the sea animal that remains unnamed. (I suggest Octavia.)

Part of his lesson is noticing the striking similarities between us and these “alien” creatures, the way connection, interspecies or not, is essential and a well of bracing contentment. “It does give you this strange level of octopus joy,” notes Foster, saying words that have likely never been uttered before.

As a pupil, Foster is a keen observer, learning by watching his silent friend do what she does: hunt, hide, jet, crawl, swim and, sometimes, walk on two legs on the ocean floor. That trippy spectacle, both funny and boggling, is one of many scene-stealers.

She’s a gelatinous chameleon, enacting stunning physical transformations with her bulbous head, serpentine legs and polka-dot suckers to blend seamlessly into the Day-Glo surroundings. Her effortless shape-shifting is part of the movie’s multi-pronged magic.

“My Octopus Teacher” reminds me of many oceany things, like the charmingly odd adopt an octopus campaign at the World Wildlife Fund, where for a $55 donation you get a plush stuffed octopus, a photo, an adoption certificate and other tentacular goodies. It never occurred to me that octopuses were endangered, but WWF says they’re “vulnerable to toxins and pollution,” yet doesn’t that cover just about everything? (Please send me $55. I am endangered. My plush doll is amazing.) 

As much as I love watching the delightful octopus in the movie, I love even more putting octopus in my mouth. Almost unavoidable on midscale restaurant menus — perhaps another reason they’re endangered — grilled octopus is hot stuff, up there with bone marrow and short ribs. Both chewy and silky, the meat has a mild sea-foody flavor complemented by a good fiery sear. Here’s a spectacular piece I scarfed in Barcelona:

I don’t want to eat the movie’s affable octopus. She’s a darling — adorably clever, wily and pretty, much like the picture itself, which is also fairly wrenching (brace for some drama). 

It’s an elemental tale rife with homey pleasures: the hand holding, the snuggling, the mutual respect. The bond is inexplicable but palpable, right there on screen, like when Foster’s new BFF seems to be tailing him through the sea.

“That’s one of the most incredible feelings,” he beams, “to be followed by an octopus.”

It’s fantastic, and it almost breaks your heart.