Seasonal Classics

New laptop and wifi in the home now, so blog should burgeon more.

Thinking this morning about the emotional feasibility of showing Pieces of April over the holiday to the assembled family led to reflection on the greatest seasonal pictures of all time.

Summer
Mr. Hulot's Holiday.
Jacques Tati's classic B & W, semi-silent film about a dorky Frenchman's week at the shore. Incisive but measured satire of everybody mixed with filigreed physical humor and a beautiful picture of a vacation culture we'll never know. On another level, straight out of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Apollonian vs. Dionysian.

Fall / Thanksgiving
Pieces of April
The best Thanksgiving movie ever. Touches a myriad of family issues (estrangement, alzheimer's, Reliant station wagon with fake wood siding, cancer, food issues) and at once an allegory of America on a single stairwell. If you don't want to cry, don't watch. If you don't cry, see shrink.

Winter / Christmas
Auntie Mame
Rosalind Russell in a pure classic. From umpteen makeovers of an East Side apartment to Beaurigard T. Beaurigard in the would-be antebellum South to the sugary cocktails of Danbury, a movie every child and parent should watch once a year. I don't know why I see it as so Christmassy, but I do.

Moonstruck
They show it all the time for good reason. One of the top 10 Hollywood movies made in my lifetime.

Spring
Spring is tougher. The mind runs to Being There, or maybe Kusturica's coming of age classic When Father Was Away on Business.

While thinking of Tati, one scene comes to mind. At the end of Parade, something he did in 1974 for Swedish TV, after a couple of hours of filming his trained circus performer types do tricks, the by then oldish Tati trains his camera on two toddlers with a ball, and films them for a few minutes. You can just feel what's going on, this old guy, who's staged some of the most incredibly complex sight gags in history (the restaurant scene in the 1965 Playtime, for instance), lingers on the pure improvisation of youth. A physical comic who began as a ballplayer watching kids learn the rudiments of his initial metier.

Two weeks ago out at a pony ride, goats, and donut farm near Princeton, I saw an octogenarian guy sitting in the shade in a fold-up chair just watching kids and smiling broadly. I think he was on the same wavelength as Tati, having arrived at the point where the entertainment he needed was pretty elemental and elementary. We should all hope to get there.