INSIDE MAN

MOVIES ARE WHAT THEY ALWAYS WERE, BUT more so. The way I keep describing the current situation is that everything you watch plays like an airplane movie now. When I say this, I’m assuming that you’ll know what I’m talking about, and that you, like me, are rendered especially emotionally susceptible to the effects of films viewed while 31,000 feet above the Earth. I don’t know if it’s the air in the pressurized cabin, or the customary sleep-deprivation that results of never learning your lesson and staying out late the night before an early-morning flight, or the usual melancholy attached to comings and goings, or some combination of all three that makes me respond with disproportionate feeling to moments that I might not otherwise mark as exceptional, and with a spluttering breakdown to those that I would be moved by under any circumstance. I’m thinking of a particular transatlantic round trip on which, due to a combination of inclination and lack of viable options, I watched The Bridges of Madison County (1995) going both ways, in a middle seat on the return, certainly discomfiting my neighbors with wrenching, ragged sobs at Clint standing in the pitiless pouring rain with the saddest plastered-down forelock in cinema.

plays a key role in Ulrich Köhler’s (2018), most of which takes place in the aftermath of the unexplained disappearance of seemingly everyone on earth aside from Armin (Hans Löw), a pushing-40 failson who is born again in self-reliant isolation, seen at one point vaping in solitude while watching Eastwood’s movie. Köhler’s film struck me as a little too droll for my taste when I saw it, but this scene, along with Charlton Heston firing up (1970) in an abandoned movie theater in (1971), has been much on my mind