I’ve seen several movies in the last couple weeks: Priscilla (a sad peppermint sigh), The Killer (chaos meets The Container Store), Trolls Band Together (they all shave their heads).
But the two that have stuck with me longest are documentaries: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life and Flipside.
I’ll start with Defending (streaming on Max), which is directed by Brooks’ longtime friend Rob Reiner and is pretty by-the-book as far as these things go, though that’s more than fine, because the work speaks for itself. This week Brooks also appears on WTF after years of refusing Marc Maron’s requests. Maron isn’t entirely prepared for this conversation, but Brooks still offers much wisdom and may bring a tear to your eye.
The summary: Don’t get your emotional fill from an audience, don’t look back too much and receive all compliments with gratitude. But it’s so much better when Brooks says it and throws in strange, sad stories about Jack Benny and Johnny Carson.
The other film, Flipside, is harder to talk about because you can’t see it yet; it streamed as part of the DOC NYC film festival. I love filmmaker Chris Wilcha — you may know him from this doc about working for Columbia House in the ‘90s:
Wilcha also turned This American Life into a rad ‘n’ short-lived TV show in 2007. But, as with many artists (perhaps including myself?), years went by where I didn’t see anything he had made. What happened?
Flipside examines how life starts to go by sosofast once you reach a certain age. You get so caught up in Paid Gigs to make rent — it was commercials for Wilcha, it’s a lot of ghostwriting/PR stuff for me — that you can forget what you loved doing in the first place. Kids may enter the picture, and they consume the time you used to spend making things.
Wilcha digs into boxes he has stored at his parents’ house. He visits the record store where he worked as a teen, which is stuck in time, for better or worse. He talks to Judd Apatow, whom he met while making a documentary about Funny People that basically disappeared. He talks to Starlee Kine and David Milch and Uncle Floyd, a former children’s entertainer who’s still trying to entertain in a world that’s trying to leave him (and the rest of us) behind.
Milch, who is 78 and battling Alzheimer’s disease, captivates and inspires. At one point, Apatow recalls Milch suggesting they should write something together about regret. Apatow asks what he means, and Milch gives a quick reply:
“Failures of generosity,” he says.
I hate to write so much about a film you can’t watch, and I’ll let you know if I hear of more screenings. But man, I treasured this movie — and was comforted by seeing so many others struggle with the passage of time. None of us are gonna beat it, so now what do we do?
diary comix 2023
Thanks to all who have ordered my diary comics — I’m about to go drop a bunch in the mail. To order, send $10 via Venmo (@whitneymatheson) or PayPal (whitmath@gmail.com). PLEASE include your mailing address in the note section as well as whom I should sign it to. More info here.
gift ideas galore
Here are Part 1 & Part 2 of my slanted/enchanted gift guide, as well as a smattering of final thoughts:
T-shirts — Shirts from Nashville-based shop Imogene + Willie don’t come cheap, but they’re really well made and come in unisex sizes. For band merch, surely there’s someone on Hello Merch that you wanna support. And I want every shirt on Bitter Southerner.
Fun tech — I bought this cheap-ish projector for our studio — it’s not top-notch quality, but now we can watch movies on the walls, which was my dream. I also got my kid this $40 Discman so they wouldn’t have to rely on a screen for music. It’s rechargeable and has a built-in speaker so you can play it out loud or with headphones.
Subscriptions — It takes 30 seconds to give someone a subscription to something that they can bask in for the next year. I’d dig subscriptions to the Criterion Channel (it runs between $11-$100) or The Paris Review ($59, plus they have a cool store with totes and socks and things). And here’s a guide to fun subscription boxes, although personally I’d rather not receive seafood in the mail.
That’s all I have — see you on the dancefloor.
trimming trees/taking names/breaking hearts,
mx claus