"Exodus" is Americana? Who would have known. Of course, this version sounds conspicuously English, and I don't remember understanding any of the words in my parents' CD. Oh well. Now that I have head-phones, I have proportionately increased the amount of variety of music that I listen to. I once stated that almost all moments of life should be accompanied by music. Of course, Plato muttered something or other about music enriching the soul, but then he also exiled it from the Republic -- you have to be careful about secondhand Plato.

Today is okay. The sky is very grey, but the trees contrast with a lovely green. The music is lively of course, but beyond the exuberance of "Exodus" I can still feel the lingering after-effects of my family's own exodus from Portland back to Colorado: my mom and sister came to visit for the weekend, and they are now gone.

It was an okay weekend. I saw them, joked around with them, played music for them (two performances, one for orchestra and one individual performance with my instructor), and saw a movie. The movie was entitled, "Phone Booth" (forgive the quotations but I can't underline or italicize online) and it is actually a pretty interesting movie. Now I'm going to contradict myself here, but I think the problem with Phone Booth is that there was too much music. It switched, perhaps, between two many modes, using music and sound-effects and background scenery noise in order to emphasize and provoke the excitement of a script that could have very well carried itself. The idea is captivating, indeed almost existential -- a man receives a phone call from an unknown sniper who forces him through all of his sins until we arrive at a final and very public burst of catharsis. However, the script and direction overemphasize the New Man at the expense of a thorough examination of the processes by which we account for our sins and redefine our own identities. The movie is divided into two parts, one slim, the other bulky: the pre-phone-booth loud-mouth ritzy snob and his recreation of himself through the medium of communication at the end. But the problem is a character cannot move from a two dimensional portraiture into a three-dimensional self-discovery. The first character is unreal, and the only claim he has to any existence beyond the pages of a script is his complete ignorance of the sorry state of his character, but this is hardly a novel psychology -- the snob, despises by all others while at the same time placing himself head and shoulders above them, is at least as old as the Greek comedies which Plautus was to then copy for a Roman audience in his piece, "The Braggart Soldier." Thus I would argue that the lack of depth in the initial portrait, the lack of space devoted to expounding on exactly who this character is (and I can't remember his name for the life of me :-) leads to problems in the phone conversation that dominates the film. There is not interplay of wills, no real battle between the anonymous sniper and his victim -- the victim does not really change so much as collapse, and when catharsis comes it seems as much the self-indulgent babbling of a victim as the confident apology of a changed man. The movie does not offer us a conclusion, except for a hazy drug-induced scene at the ending when the main character is carted off in an ambulance and the sniper, now become God or the personification of men's inner conscience, moralizes in a monologue addressed as much to the audience as to the character and coming off a bit like the fool at the end of Misdummer Night's Dream.

Well, now that I've got analysis out of my system...needless to say my mother and I had a long "discussion" about the movie. My mom advocating I suppose a kind of realism in movies when she criticized the logic of the final revelation of the sniper's identity (or you could call it a non-revelation). I recognize the limitations of the movie, and have discussed them in depth above, but I do give kudos to the script-writer (if not the director, who bumbles through what should be a Hitchcockian psychological thriller by trying to turn it into a whodunnit comedy action piece with flashy music and dizzying technological 3-D renderings, including a horrifically over self-conscious opening sequence) for creating a script in which the majority of the action and interchange involves a single conversation in a single day's time which concerns itself with a single, primary subject -- the sins (or rather, a primary sin) of the main character. Now if you'd told me before I saw "Phone Booth" that I would ever see a movie about a phone conversation that was interesting and sustained, I woiuld have said, "Bah." But I must say, for all the limitations of the directing choices and even the acting (whoever played the main character could have done a much more interesting job and appeared much more in control of the situation instead of babbling like a death-crazed man), it was nonetheless a pretty good movie. Heck, it's even classical -- single location, single day, plot unfolding pretty much in real-time. Wow.

By the way, Americana is pretty good stuff. :-)