On Nostalgia, or things to do in Alameda with friends you don't see often enough

My old friend, Clint Marsh, tells me that my posts tend to go on too long. So, for his sake, as he's one of maybe three people who ever read this blog, I'll keep it short.

This past Saturday was a celebration of nostalgia, both nostalgic for me on several levels and about nostalgia in odd ways. A combination of a couple of Ancient Greek words, nostalgia literally means "aching to return home," and was originally coined to describe a kind of homesickness. I can only say that these days, ye gods, I ache.

In the morning, I wandered up Park Street, which was closed off once again for the annual classic car show. I am not really a car person any more, admittedly more for political reasons than because I don't actually love awesome cars, a huge variety of which were on display on Saturday.

The above was one of my favorites, almost certainly out of nostalgia for my childhood Hot Wheels. No matter how you feel about a particular hobby that you don't engage in yourself - such as, say, one that celebrates huge, resource-hogging machines that have contributed mightily to the destruction of the environment, our sense of interconnectedness, community and place, not to mention the public health over the last century - it is wonderful to see so much geeky enthusiasm and joy on display. Besides, some of these cars are really fucking cool.

After the car show and requisite breakfast burrito from Viva Mexico,  Thomas Carlson came over. I've known him since high school, when I was dating his older sister, still a dear friend I barely ever get to see, so hanging out with Tom always has a faint corona of nostalgia, and a longing for home. We went to the Alameda Theatre to see the re-released Toy Story 1 & 2 double-feature in 3D. These movies, still among the very best Pixar has put out, have nostalgia as their subject. That got me thinking that I would like to see a database of movie subject matter - I mean, there are a lot of movies that make you feel nostalgic, TS1&2 among them, but how many are about nostalgia, for example?

The 3D aspect was fairly subtle, but enhancing, and we agreed that TS2 is still one of the all-time greatest movie sequels, one of those rarest of sequels that manage to top the original, like The Godfather, Part 2 or Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.

We got back home and found that Clint had just arrived, in time for the evening's nostalgia to begin.

There was, of course, the usual Ottumwa gossip and chitchat, then delivery from Dragon Rouge, the great Vietnamese Bistro on Encinal between Park and Oak. Clint figured out that this Dragon Rouge was not this Dragon Rouge, then the three of us went across town to the Lucky JuJu.

It was my first time there, but I don't know what Alameda attraction can top, for good times or nostalgia with a capital P, the Pacific Pinball Museum at the Lucky JuJu arcade. Just go: Go! - and in the flash and tumult, the spinning bells and bright lights, surrender, as a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

W.

Weak tea from Oliver Stone, broad strokes and little insight, a shallow biopic of a shallow man. Richard Dreyfuss and Josh Brolin turn in finely-tuned caricatures; the other performers, less finely-tuned. I've been looking forward to this film, though I still had low expectations. My biggest question, having just seen it, is why make it? Bush is neither lionized nor demonized, and he's only vaguely humanized; I can't figure out what the point was.

W. is an interesting cultural artifact, however. Have any other sitting presidents been the subject of a film? As divisive and ruinous a president as W has been, is this film simply a symptom of our exhaustion? Is it too much to ask the filmmakers to find an angle and play it to the hilt, assuming they're not interested in real subtlety and nuance? Maybe even Stone just doesn't have the heart, as surely the American people do not, to really press this subject. One day, perhaps, someone will make the George Bush film that George Bush deserves.

I think, given some distance from these terrible times, someone might have the balls to really sharpen the knives and make the brutal, pitch-black comedy this might have been. Or even, the great tragedy as we've seen it unfold these last eight years. But, for the moment, we long to forget...

Hamlet 2

In a summer with more than the usual number of smart comedies, Hamlet 2 is the best of them. It's a clever parody of the Inspirational Teacher Movie, at it's best zany, filthy and sharp. One can complain about an underused cast - Elizabeth Shue and Catherine Keener are both great actors who barely register here, for starters - or the sheer ridiculousness of the enterprise, but why bother when you have Steve Coogan's best film performance to date, a case of a great comic actor slipping completely into the skin of his character.

Or when you have co-writer Pam Brady, who co-wrote also South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and is a producer of the TV show, most certainly putting the phrase, "Those Bible-humpers can suck a bag of dicks," in Amy Poehler's mouth, or helping to pen the glorious "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number that is Coogan's apotheosis.

If it doesn't work at all times, I am inclined to forgive. Director Andrew Fleming also directed Threesome, a 1994 Harlequin Romance in which Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin and Josh Charles have a kind of drawn-out, repressed ménage à trois. I remember watching this film with two female friends of mine in, perhaps, 1995. It was a fun evening.

So, again, Fleming gives us a movie that is an enjoyably bad farce; here, there's also something brilliantly subversive about it. It celebrates free expression with a fuck you attitude, a foul mouth and its "heartsoul" in the right place.