Sloth And Dignity

(Originally posted at https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6766469/?ref_=tt_urv)

THIS IS IT! You found it—the one, the only, the inimitable BUG—the single greatest cinematic achievement not just of the admittedly crowded field of mid-20th-century apocalyptic mutated insect sci-fi horror film, nor even only in the sci-fi or horror film genres, but in human motion picture history, writ large unto itself. The unrelenting cinematic greatness that Bug doles out in heaping helpings to your uncomprehending cerebellum—line after line, minute after minute, scene after scene, shrieking burning head explosion after shrieking burning head explosion, without pause from the opening preacher's sermon to the closing descent into the stygian bowels of the earth itself—simply cannot be adequately conveyed within the constraints of this forum. It has to be experienced firsthand.

The mere fact that this is one of the only opportunities in American cinema to see a woman's head get set on fire in the Brady Bunch kitchen set would likely be foremost among the draws of virtually any more ordinary film it might appear in. But Bug is no ordinary film. Even something that would obviously be the highlight of most movie-goers' entire seasons is here only the very most trivial, the most trifling footnote to the veritable cavalcade of entertainments bestowed upon the fortunate viewer of this inestimable apotheosis of thrilling human visual storytelling endeavor.

Me: "Sometimes listening to Bill Evans I get a flash that those 12-step people are right, like there’s something out there much, much bigger than me."

MMcC: "Oh yeah. For sure. I have more to say about that than I can text."

MMcC: "Some things are really only knowable because of him."

Me: "It’s amazing. I’ve been listening to him on Pandora all morning, and, you know, they won’t stick to a single artist, so it’s a lot of piano jazz trios, and every time they flip from him to someone else or back it’s like a night and day difference. I was having a daydream, what if I could go back to being about 12 years old, and I thought, I’d probably ask my parents to get me a bunch of Bill Evans records. And then I thought, could 12-year-old me even begin to really appreciate his music? And that’s when I realize, I’m not sure 50-year-old me is capable of really appreciating his music. He just really seemed keyed into something huge and ineffable. I only get flashes of it, and mostly it comes in the form of a flash of total incomprehensibility, a big blank spot where it seems like something is that I can’t see."

Me: "When I was younger, I read a lot of existentialism at much too young an age, which probably is what’s most directly responsible for my depressive streak. But when I was in college, a friend of mine said, “You have to read Sartre’s ‘Nausea’. It’s the only book by any one of those guys where they propose an answer.” So I checked it out, and it’s typical existentialism, entirely about a guy slowly becoming alienated from everything he thought he cared about. But in the end, just when life finally seems completely futile, he hears some old jazz and suddenly makes a human connection with it, with this pianist he’s never met hunched over in a sweaty studio thousands of miles away. And sometimes I think, you know, much as I love music, that’s kind of a facile thing to assign that kind of meaning to. But then, I have these moments like right before I texted you, with guys like Evans, and, Sartre did get it. He got it enough to write the only book in all of existentialist literature that doesn’t end in complete hopelessness about it."

Truth is unknowable, because we can only know with our minds. I mean, no, of course truth is knowable. I'm sure, to an ant, truth is apparent: follow formic acid trails, dig in soil. To us, probably the same, our own equivalent of formic acid and digging. Comparably broader, of course, but, equivalent in terms of limitation relative to capacity.