There's been a sea change in the ground rules of visiting our niece & family.
As noted previously, Timmy's traditional behavior is to screen 10 or so minutes of a handful of different films, whichever recent purchases have sunk barbs into his subconscious.
This cornerstone of our social relationship was cracked on my birthday, when I was allowed to not only choose one film to watch but enjoy it all the way through to the final credits.
On our last visit we made it to the end of OniBaba.
And last night we endured a disorienting extension of this New Way as we got through an entire tripleheader- Visions of Light, a good doc on major cinematographers, Wild Bill , a doc on director William Wellman (very interesting cat, although the doc was hamstrung by TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE WRITING. Alec Baldwin did the honors narrating, and at times sounded like he was in the middle of an SNL parody) and capped it off with The Shining, in widescreen at long last.
The archetypal truth of the Shining becomes more pronounced the older I get.
Although I suppose its profundity may be especially evident to people raised by desperate maniacs. It's almost too bad Kubrick coaxed that performance out of Jack. Nicholson never did manage to get that genie entirely back in the bottle.
Seeing entire films was wonderful, but if the trend continues we'll have to re-jigger the whole visitation process as 3am was approaching by the time we got to bed.
Needless to say this is sub optimal for an old man who works Saturdays.
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