Brush Burn

There is a bemusing sense of frustration when you catch a film in the middle, or at various points in its arc, know that you do not wish to follow through and pay attention, to the extent your hearing loss can field the lack of captioning. As a child of suburban familial dysfunction, I did not care for Green's screenplay in Snow Angels, and wasted my time with it on Wednesday with familiar repugnance for certain pretensions within the independent genre, when I would have been better off doing something else if I could not sleep, my writing life essentially funneled into the immediacy of always being *on,* my professors never having been faced with this problem, as the Internet was in its infancy in the eighties, but Rockwell's performance provoked me, my eyes fixated on his knuckle scabs on his hands in his final scenes with Beckinsale. Superimpose this meaningless intensity of blame onto a terrorist's cause, and this is basically my ravaged psyche on indigestion, fish oil, tobacco juice, and yet, within my self-hatred, I get distracted by putting on my Jerry McGuire failed scholar cap, asking what makes an independent different from a Bruce Willis action flick? A practiced academic would be able to make an immediate differential. I have to struggle, and come up with allegorical realism. Beckinsale's Annie is not particularly kind, to her husband or her lover, or the little girl, though she is wry with Angarano's Arthur, whose nascent attachment to the attractive four eyes girlfriend is a kind of anecdote to the sour familiarity of human maturity.

I'm weary of Robert Redford's pulp in the mill with his Sundance, but of course it will outlive him, his liberal film school, because he's Redford, the movie star who could act, guilty that he had the blonde nadir going. His look was never my type. I could engage in some sardonic hyperbole towards the American Nordic hero who is getting old, Redford, which of course I do not mean, but after the Charlie Hebdo attack? Poking at prominent figures for ventilation leaves us all socially uneasy, even me, who normally would not care, and look at what I'm doing, my diffident dance with a well meaning klutz who destroyed part of my personal history because she was nervous. Maureen, my neighbor, was a blonde klutz in the same manner.