Properly Screened

  "Keep it simple, stupid" was Weesner's first rule of film making. And this movie works largely because of how simple it is. There is very little in the way of traditional plot, and the film does not seem interested in building toward anything in particular. Instead, it moves through small, quiet moments and lets its world take shape gradually. It's a warm bath. In addition to being simple, My Neighbor Totoro  (1988) is strange, funny, and surreal. If the film is about anything, it's about the kind of imaginative space siblings create together, where the boundary between reality and fantasy doesn't exist. Having grown up with a younger sister, that dynamic felt immediately recognizable, and it grounds everything else the film does. Seeing it as part of a Family Film Series (something I’d typically avoid, given my aversion to children) ended up being surprisingly perfect. I expected a theater full of children to be distracting, but instead, their reactions mir...

I hadn’t seen this film in almost thirty years, but it was one of the screenings I’d been looking forward to the most, mostly for sentimental reasons. I was introduced to it in high school video arts by Mr. Weesner, who used the crop-duster scene to teach us about Hitchcock’s obsession with storyboarding and visual control. I can still picture him pressing pause on the classroom VCR, pointing at the leading lines and emptiness around Cary Grant, explaining how none of it was accidental. That sequence was conceived almost entirely in advance, planned shot by shot. The suspense doesn’t come from dialogue or music but from the composition of each frame. Hitchcock uses vast negative space --- Cary Grant stranded in an empty, sunlit field --- to heighten tension, subverting expectations of danger lurking in shadows. Each visual beat escalates with architectural precision. When the Mount Rushmore finale hit, I realized I had completely forgotten that the movie ends with Thornhill and Eve d...

I can't watch Alfred Hitchcock films without thinking about Mr. Weesner, my high school video teacher.  But to reduce him to that --- my high school video teacher --- is woefully inadequate. Weesner was a dear family friend and my mentor. Over the decades we must have talked about hundreds of films. And we watched at least a dozen in his home theatre. I was a cocky kid, but he somehow delighted in my hot takes. (Years after his death, I finally watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , one of his favorites. "A sad, toxic depiction of male friendship," I would have told him. That would have made him laugh.) There is so much I want to say about the role he played in how I think about art --- how I think about myself --- but it all gives me a lump in my throat. After his death, I stopped seriously watching movies for years, unable to love or hate something without being overcome with the grief of never being able to talk to him about it.  But, boy did he love Hitchcock, ...