awesomest ever wife/best friend
kittens
the extra time we had with Theo
just being here
terrific friends
being able to move both sides of my face
being able to hand wash a heavy bowl without wincing
family stuff trending upwards
having a job at all
having a completely awesome job
being part of a great team
opportunities to make things better for people
serious challenges
a roof over my head and food on the table
our completely awesome home
really good health insurance
opportunities to worry about stuff at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy
steel frame bicycles
being able to ride 125 miles in one day
health
ridiculously awesome recording and performing experiences beyond the merit of my talent
punk fffffffn rock
the Marshall/Gibson pairing
the internets
the internets in my pocketssss
the freshly repaved stretch of Mass Ave
coffee
good coffee
MBTA, as flawed as it is
olives, oranges, bananas, and other perfect foods
high-brow lit’rature
not-so-high-brow lit’rature
a short vacation

I certainly didn’t dislike this movie, but I also didn’t love it. I think what bothers me most about it is that it’s just not very surprising. It certainly creates the impression of candor (Flender corroborated this in the Q&A: he said O’Brien did not ask for unflattering material to be cut). But the putatively candid O’Brien is more-or-less as you might imagine him: he’s engaging and interesting (well, duh), he’s ambitious and driven (again, duh), he’s funny off-stage (so there are definitely some laughs in the film), he seems like he’d be a challenging co-worker (his long-suffering assistant Sona Movsesian perhaps emerges as the real hero), and he has a very ambivalent push-pull relationship with his fans (throughout the film he goes above and beyond the call of celeb duty to be nice to strangers, then expresses resentment afterward).

Of course, this observation is more about the nature of the film’s subject than the merits of the film, which I thought did a good job of presenting this not-terribly-startling picture of a big TV star. It’s paced well, and I think Flender selected enough moments from his copious footage to build an impression of character without having too many sequences that illuminated O’Brien in exactly the same way. (Arguably, the most redundant moments in terms of character-building are among the funniest, so they don’t seem problematic.) I would have put in somewhat less of the live music footage, but that’s probably just me.

And if I were a big-time fan of O’Brien I might well have totally loved it.

* It would be easy, but unduly harsh, to make a crack like “as a singer and guitarist O’Brien is a pretty good comedian”; in fact he seems sturdily competent at both. But I can’t imagine he’d have had a career that led to selling out mid-sized theatres if that had been his main gig.

Adrià’s creations are intensely sculptural — there’s a sequence of the entire menu near the end, and many of the dishes look positively otherworldly. While talking about this film with friends the other day I jokingly suggested that Adrià seemed almost to be striving for a platonic ideal in which the diners don’t actually eat the food, but just visually appreciate the dishes in sequence as they appear and disappear, like an art gallery brought to your table.

This was ridiculous and wrong-headed, and I’m sorry I said it. But it has a germ of an idea that I think is much more on-target: El Bulli is creating art with food as a medium. I suspect that to Adrià a yard stick of “this tastes good” is as naive and uninteresting as “this painting is pretty,” and perhaps at El Bulli, the notion a meal provides sustenance is about as useful as expecting modern art to communicate specific concrete information.

I found Wetzel’s film very thought-provoking, and much more engaging than I expected to. One caution: if you make a drinking game of imbibing something every time Adrià tastes something and looks pensive, you will surely die of alcohol poisoning.

Maybe the highest compliment/most useful thing I can say about Septien is that after seeing it, I didn’t want to go straight to another screening. I wanted to let it percolate around in my head without competition.

Charles Fairbanks’ “Irma” spends a good proportion of its running length on the titular figure’s laborious journey to work (she has trouble with her legs). I thought the framing and pacing of her trip was terrific, by the time she reached her destination I was desperately curious to know what was worth all that effort, and pretty well astonished by the answer.

I really did not expect to like Matt Morris’s “Mr. Happy Man,” about Johnny Barnes, who stands at a busy intersection in Bermuda, and waves to people and tells them he loves them. I was quite unexpectedly won over — it’s neither saccharine or preachy, and thanks to its 11-minute run time, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Alex Mallis’ “The Dentist” was working for me as a portrait of a man with logorrhea, so a detour in his mildly unusual hobby and quite unusual venue for indulging it took me unawares.

Catherine Van Campen’s “Flying Anne” was probably the most visually striking film I saw in the entire festival - the subtlety of color in the cinematography gives it an almost other-worldly quality. Anne lives with a medical challenge, and I thought the treatment of it veered just a tiny bit toward afterschool special educational territory. But the humanity and humor of Anne’s interactions with her family and schoolmates is warm and vivid.

Sean Dunne’s “The Bowler” is another logorrheic dude — and also a professional hustler.

Lisa Mannhiemer’s “The Contract” is about an arrangement Beverly Charpentier enters into with Catherine Robbe-Grillet.* How to describe this without spoilers? It’s tricky. Mannhiemer describes the contract in terms that initially leave some details vague, in a way calculated, I think, to raise questions in the viewer’s mind. It’s simultaneously subtle and intense.
* not particularly relevant to this short, but yes, the writer Catherine Robbe Grillet, wife of writer Alain Robbe-Grillet)