My mind is still reeling from having seen Linklater’s new masterpiece “Boyhood”, a work of such startling depth and deceptively simple beauty. There are individual moments that I just cannot get out of my head.<\/p>\n
The scenes I remember most vividly were not big and flashy at all. They were simple conversations in which people found themselves suddenly able to break through and find a way to show their love for each other. These scenes always came as a surprise — just as they do in real life. The night we saw the film at the IFC, the entire audience was rapt from beginning to end.<\/p>\n
I imagine that audiences must have had a similar experience in 1938, seeing Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town” for the first time. That was another experimental work which took its audience on a journey through twelve years of “ordinary” lives, only to arrive at the same powerful conclusion — that there is nothing ordinary about life.<\/p>\n
I am reminded of the conversation in “Our Town” between Emily and the Stage Manager, after she has found herself emotionally overwhelmed by the simple act of revisiting a single day of her childhood:<\/p>\n
\u201cDo any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” she asks. “Every, every minute?”<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d He replies, \u201cThe saints and poets, maybe — they do some.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mind is still reeling from having seen Linklater’s new masterpiece “Boyhood”, a work of such startling depth and deceptively simple beauty. There are individual moments that I just cannot get out of my head. The scenes I remember most vividly were not big and flashy at all. They were simple conversations in which people … Continue reading “Saint and poets, maybe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15127"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15131,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127\/revisions\/15131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}