' ' Cinema Romantico: keira knightley prays that we all make it through 2018

Friday, December 22, 2017

keira knightley prays that we all make it through 2018

It was a long week in America. I feel as if I’ve said that, like, every other week in 2017, but then that’s been perhaps 2017’s defining quality, at least to a blogger of a certain disposition, this unrelenting cocktail of despondency, dread, outrage, and weariness contributing to making every seven day week feel more akin to twelve or thirteen. And this week, the lead-up to Christmas, has felt, for me, less festive than tiring on account of being sick and professionally busy while Present-Day America has been busy wrapping up the year by Present-Day America-ing. I’m wiped, man. So Cinema Romantico will be shuttered for the holidays with plans to re-appear on New Year’s Day in order to begin our Best Of 2017 lists as 2018 starts because we like to slide in after the whole year-end list rush has already finished and no one’s interested anymore.

I had grand plans for today’s holiday send-off post to be a State of the Union. This address would have been entirely about one of my all-time Top 10 favorite movies, “From Here to Eternity”, and how Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed enact this allegory of America, all of it, from the Puritans crossing the Atlantic to the pioneers trekking west to now, with lies not so much passed off as truth as a nation so fully inhabiting a delusion that the urgency of the reckoning is lost, like my homegirl Donna at the end, on the boat bound for the mainland, living her fabrication about Clift so intently that the notes on the soundtrack slack-key sound less like paradise than ruin.


But, to go there, to get that deep, to phrase it right, simply wasn’t something that I had in me, not in my current state. So I scrapped that plan, as sad as it made me, and thought about just throwing up a Youtube video of Noveller’s “No Dreams.”

“No Dreams” was released in 2013, but I did not discover Noveller, the one woman guitar goddess, until this year through her release “A Pink Sunset For No One”, which led me back in time to “No Dreams”, and which, on the strength of its indelible apocalyptic atmosphere, with what sounds like this persistent ring undulating just underneath the whole song that reminds me of the ship alarms my family sometimes hears on the big ore boats that come through Duluth harbor, which made me feel like the whole song was taking place on some doomed metaphorical watercraft, like Noveller was the lone character in a sonic Winslow Homer painting, spoke so acutely to my state of mind this past year that I made it my 2017 anthem.



But then, going on that song’s emotional journey for the 1,700th time this year was something else that I simply did not have in me. And so I decided not to put up that Youtube video either.

So I thought, hey, it’s still 20th Anniversary of Titanic week! Maybe I could do a whole post centered around paparazzi photos of Kate & Leo, the kind where it seems like they’re a real couple, which are the apple of any Titanic devotee’s heart, fulfilling our not-so-secret wishes that one day these two might be all like “You? Me? YOU? ME? You-Me-You-Me-You-Me”, and which are always good for putting smiles on the faces of the Rose DeWitt Bukater fan club members even at their most forlorn.


Like this one, which Al Gore is inadvertently photo bombing, where they look so at ease in each other’s company that it’s all I can do to stop myself from just up and [melts].



Or this one, which I really like, because they look like two people with such a shared intimacy that they don’t even seem to realize they are standing on the red carpet on camera with flash bulbs popping. They’re just, like, giving each other shit in that way people in love do.

But, this isn’t fair. It’s not fair to them, and it smells of Donna Reed in “From Here to Eternity” delusions to boot, and anyway, it’s too inside baseball. And what’s worst, Kate has gone bye-bye in her dispiriting defenses of Woody Allen on the “Wonder Wheel” press circuit which has merely added to my red alert levels of despondency and, oh my God, why don’t we just cancel Christmas this year?

So that led me to the only place all this could — that is, you know where. Where else? Our favorite (your least favorite) movie blog meme. In a year where we have so often turned to frames of this blog’s beloved for solace, so do we one last time in turning the calendar to 2018 where we hope for the best even as we steel ourselves for the worst.

Earth, hear Keira’s prayer.


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