A few words about Jim Ridley.

     I've started and restarted this probably about twenty times. Ironically, it's the sort of situation I would have eMailed or called Jim about.

     I don't know how to qualify Jim Ridley in a way that does him justice. For almost the past twenty years, he's been my mentor and my friend, and my editor for the vast majority of them as well. But he was more than that. 

     A partner-in-crime in putting together the lineups for the Belcourt's Twelve Hours of Terror. A source of more confidence than I ever had in myself. And the best movie buddy anyone could ever have... 

     That time that Tilda Swinton touched my shoulder, Jim was who I called first.

     Truthfully, neither of my parents have ever met anyone I ever dated, but Jim met three of them.

A few random tidbits of Ridleyana I cherish deeply:

     Summarizing over the phone the Brian DePalma/Eamonn Bowles kerfuffle at the NYFF press conference for Redacted.

     Our Sam Peckinpah sojourn, when we roadtripped to Atlanta with Zack Hall, for a pre-deadline screening of Prometheus, and back one Thursday night.

     Having the Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Futurama discussion.

     Opening night of Femme Fatale at the Green Hills 16, the most ecstatic moviegoing experience I ever had.

     Those VHS tapes of the Alien3 workprint and The Ring.

     The Cornetto Trilogy (see below).

     The post-Out 1 discussion at the 12 South Taproom, with old friends and new friends just tripping out on the mad possibilities of cinema.

     Friday afternoons and Monday mornings, when we'd talk about whatever we'd seen over the weekend. 

     Any of the times we were on panels together for the news. 

     When my Grandmother was dying of Alzheimer's and we talked for an hour about Kore-eda's After Life.

     His annual tradition of running through the aisles of the Belcourt during 12 Hours of Terror, gleefully pelting the audience with candy.

     It's not an exaggeration when I say that I don't know how the city is going to get by without him. I really don't think a lot of businesses, collectives, cooperatives, bands, and teams in and around this town really realize how much work Jim did to fix the cracks and fissures that come from unresolved tension and anger. 

     He was like Santa Claus or Baretta, but with a specialty in crisis management and resolution. He had a superhuman ability to sense if you were in distress, and was always willing to perform a surgically precise intervention if he saw you cornered at some social event in an enervating conversation. He was a model of graciousness and sincerity when dealing with anybody, and I was and am in awe of it.

     As an editor, he was the best kind of improv partner, “Yes and”ing a lot of borderline sweaty pitches that somehow yielded fruit. Seeing the same film in multiple formats, Eva Green saving otherwise crappy movies through sheer force of will and artful deployment of the groceries, an epic appreciation of Pootie Tang, a pair of Elm Street thinkpieces, a Laura Gemser-style investigative piece about why it was so difficult to see that last 3D Paranormal Activity movie. 

     He was both cheerleader and civic engineer, keeping you hyped and encouraged but also able to fix the foolishness that wasn't absolutely necessary.

     I regret that we never went through with dressing as Statler and Waldorf for one of the 12 Hours events.

     There was no feeling in the world like being able to show Jim something he'd never seen before; it was no easy task. He was a fountain of enthusiasm, and an amplifier for joy. He could make a bad movie bearable, and a good one great.

     So how, in the end, do I qualify Jim Ridley? It's not just that he made me a better writer, because he did that with everybody. But I look at who I was back before that fateful VHS of the Sundance Cut of The Blair Witch Project brought Jim into my life as a friend and colleague, and I know he helped make me a better human being, and I miss him so much I don't even know how to put it in words. 

     So I guess I'll have to rely on a few lines from one of the greats; an artist who fueled a lot of the best conversations I ever had with Jim.

“Sometimes I wish that life was never ending/

But all good things, they say, never last/

And love, it isn't love until it's past.”

Famous People talked to me: Michael Haneke.

Another of my exploitations of the press conferences an attendant hoopla at the NYFF. Michael Haneke, talking about Amour.

At the Movies: Biutiful.

New AGI film finally making its way to Nastyville, with two Oscar nominations to boot. Check out some thoughts on it here.

For those of you who didn't know-

and there are apparently many throughout the world, my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee got flooded during a torrential bipartite downpour last weekend. There are a horrifying number of people who have lost everything- their homes, their possessions, their vehicles, their pets, some would say their very selves.

I was lucky. Luckier than most.

My house flooded, I lost a bunch of stuff, and I've spent the past week hopping from one friend's couch to another, trying to keep on keeping on, as the axiom goes. I'm back in my home, with a place of my own to sleep in, and I am grateful.

But I can't even begin to express the surreality of the situation, and part of me (perhaps praeteritively) questions whether I should even try. The water shortages are a hurdle, to be sure, and there's nowhere in the city you can go that isn't offering up personalized devastation, sitting in the front of thousands of yards. And the number of homeless pets is heartwrenching; I've seen so many animals in and around the city, with collars and a frantic look on their faces, trying to find home.

But there's something that feels completely off in the air, and it isn't just the near-omnipresent stank of stagnating water (or the mosquitoes that ensue in such situations). I love this city, in the way that you can only love something that occasionally threatens to push you over the edge into madness. I love this city like an old married couple who occasionally exchange gunfire at one another while remaining completely devoted to one another.

The way to avoid feeling helpless, they say, is to help others. And that's exactly right.

In the words of Haven Hamilton, "They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of."

At the movies: Frozen River.

I don't envy how this pitch meeting must have gone. 'It's a movie about two poor and disenfranchised women who find themselves smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border and a dangerous river into lives of indentured servitude. Nobody has any moral awakenings. Nobody gets an unrealistic happy ending. And it's also at Christmastime." But thankfully, someone listened, and the end result is one of the more quietly devastating films of the year.

Ray (Melissa Leo) and Lila (Misty Upham) are great and uncompromising characters. They're both mothers, and they're both fighting their way through life, put upon by how things are in a way that is relatable but not too easy to identify with; these are women who make difficult choices that cannot be justified by any rational person, and yet there's a very seductive pragmatism at work in the script that lets us follow them into their course of action even while all that is decent screams out "No."

The mood is bleak and wintry, and the ragged DV photography adds to that effect. High quality images of any kind would seem out of place in this poverty-stricken upstate New York milieu, and Leo and Upham both approach their parts without a shred of vanity or any specific agenda. Both women can be rather unlikable, but never really unsympathetic, even as their choices grow harder and harder to accept.

I find Tattoos on characters in film are often distracting (though sometimes necessary to the plot), meant as empty signifiers or used as instant street cred (or as a point of mockery). Here, we are allowed a couple of glimpses of Ray's morning rituals, and her tattoos, couple with her mottled skin, reads like a silent journal of betrayal and the passage of time.

We're given the same as we watch Lila perched in a tree, tossing food to a large dog to keep it from hassling her, watching the home of a family. Eventually, we learn its significance, and eventually we are able to find context for who Lila is and what she does. But for that moment, early on in the film, we watch her sit in a tree and watch over some family's evening through the front plate glass window, and there's nothing else in the world that hits so hard.