Fever Dog

Film: Almost Famous
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

As I come closer and closer to the end of this Oscar project (slowly, if you’ve been paying attention—more on that in a few days), I’m finding the movies that have waited to this point harder and harder to get to. There’s something that feels like it’s preventing me from watching them. In the case of a film like Almost Famous, I don’t have a real explanation for why that is. This is a well-beloved movie, one that almost everyone I know who has seen it has an extremely positive opinion about. And so it’s been a long time since I’ve been this conflicted about a movie.

Here’s the thing—I’m supposed to like Almost Famous, and I have a feeling that if I had seen this when it was originally released, I probably would have liked it a lot more than ultimately do. Two decades ago, I cared a great deal more about music than I do now. And yet, even then, there was always something about music that I found at least a little depressing, at least in terms of live music. There’s something that always feels a little like a funeral to me when it comes to live music. I have no explanation for that, but it colors how I feel about a film that is in large part about a band on tour.

Show Me the Money

Films: Jerry Maguire
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

For whatever reason, I’ve avoided watching Jerry Maguire for more than two decades. I seem to prefer Tom Cruise in science fiction and action more than I do drama. And yet I think two of his best performances, Born on the Fourth of July and Rain Man are straight dramas. I don’t know what the hang up was, but I just couldn’t come around to pulling the trigger on it. It might also have something to do with Patton Oswalt’s epic stand up routine (seriously, google “Patton Oswalt Jerry Maguire”).

Since I’m probably the last person in the world to see this (even my wife has seen it), I won’t go too deeply into the story. Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) is a sports agent, and a very successful one. One day, while dealing with yet another concussion for one of his hockey clients, Jerry is confronted by the man’s son, who more or less tells Jerry that he’s full of shit. Jerry has an epiphany and spends the night writing a 26-page manifesto of everything that is wrong with the business. This earns him accolades in the moment and costs him his job and all of his clients but one a week later. The engineer of his career demise is Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr), Jerry’s protégé. When he leaves the company, he takes with him one person, Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), a widowed mother with a young son named Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki) who has some health issues.

Peter Gabriel

Film: Say Anything
Format: DVD from NetFlix on Sue’s Mother’s Day gift.

I tend to watch films on my own, and I tend to watch them on my portable. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes I have to use the laptop, sometimes I hang out in my living room, and at least once a week I iron, so I watch something on my giant television in my basement. This is when I tend to watch VHS tapes, because that’s the only television with a working VCR. Anyway, Sue wanted a nice television for the bedroom, so that was her Mother’s Day present this year. And she also wanted to feed her John Cusack obsession, so I watched Say Anything with her. It’s a bit of a change-up from my normal movie watching pattern.

Cusack made his name early in his career as the hero of teen rom-coms like Better Off Dead and The Sure Thing. Say Anything sort of marks the end of this phase of his career. He still played a few romantic roles after this, but much more as an adult—he couldn’t pull off the “recent high school graduate” thing much longer. Anyway, the film follows a lot of the conventions of the genre; it just does this really, really well.