Jason Gives Thanks
Tuesday, November 20, 2018 at 4:00PM Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Jason Adams...
For all of the hairs on my head and the hours of sleep that I've lost in 2018 I do feel, just a little bit, as if I've traded them in for a couple of worthy life lessons this year. Enough to make up for the state of the world? Not for all the hair and dreams that have ever been or ever will be. But I will say that feeling in a near constant state of emergency has made me a smidge bit of a better writer, and it's nudged me ever so gently towards getting some of my shit together. To paraphrase Ryan Gosling's schtick -- one small step for me, one giant leap (into the abyss) for mankind. Helluva trade. Here's some of the great stuff I'm thankful for the nudges from...
• Moviepass burned high and too too bright this year, echoing our migraines, but I'm thankful to the service at its height for letting me see Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name in the theater a personal record shattering 18 times - in a crazy world those six summer weeks learning about love and peaches with Oliver and Elio and Elio and Oliver were the only thing that made any sense to me. For a film so warm and sunny I'll weirdly forever associate it with walking through cold weather in Central Park to get to or from the Paris Theater, "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs blasting in my ears. (I rounded up most of my writing on the film right at this link.)
• Funny enough the end of 2018 belongs to Luca too, as the only music haunting my ear buds this Autumn has been Thom Yorke's by turns gorgeous, terrifying score for Suspiria. I'm thankful for that whole unholy beast of a film, bursting with ideas and emotions and Tildas...
If you ask me it gave birth to an entirely new way to think about remakes, exploding the source material out in a dozen different ways, and I'm hopeful that creative filmmakers will be looking to it for inspiration on how to imaginatively make something that was somebody else's fully your own.
• That I live in a place where I'll get to see Alfonso Cuaron's Roma on a big screen at least three times, hopefully more, before it shuffles off to the wrist-watches of Netflix consumption. Every frame is so stuffed with world and character building detail - from books on shelves to dolls on shelves to violently flapping foreskins - that as big as you can manage really is a must
• For Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant clinking together their bourbons over plates of meat in velvet-draped dive bars, complimentary cuss words batting back and forth between them like love music
• Nicholas Hoult about nine feet tall from wig to shiny shoe buckle, resplendant and ridiculous in The Favourite
• Toni Collette attempting to yank nasty words back into her mouth by sheer force of wild-eyed will in Hereditary
• The devastating final shot of Wildlife, which summed up the several years of my parents own belabored divorce in a single image, doing what the movies do best - making pain beautiful and true, sharpening chaos down to a fine point
• The driving to the city sequence in Tully where the sound of Cyndi Lauper stutters forward, wringing a succinct laugh from the delayed bridge-and-tunnel party experience
• The confusing fluttering feelings we all ache with in our bellies alongside little Jonah as he watches his Paps Raul Castillo dance around the kitchen in his tighty-whities in We the Animals. Body heat, Body heat, Body heat.
• Alessandro Nivola standing in a back-room being mournfully serenaded as he comprehends the possibility of a bitter fate and decides he can make it a little bit sweeter, that it's in his power, and all it will take is a hug big enough for three. The generosity of that decision in Disobediance (title of the year, that) informed a lot of my way through the world these past eleven months - be good to good people, everybody. We're all just managing the hours. Have a happy Thanksgiving.
🦃
While Jason Adams wishes his parents had named him after the killer in the Friday the 13th movies, he takes comfort in the fact that on their first date they went to see The Exorcist. He writes lots of daily nonsense at My New Plaid Pants, mostly about movies and dudes in movies, not necessarily in that order. Read more from Jason.
Reader Comments (16)
Thanks to Moviepass I think I saw Call Me By Your Name ten times. I guess we're to blame for the company's hard times.
I can start calling you Pamela Vorhees if you want??
Clever, Brodie! Ghostface never woulda got you ;)
love all of these writeups but particularly the absurd joy of Nicholas Hoult visually (and his performance, too) in The Favourite and that amazing finale of Disobedience, which I think is going to age so well as a movie.
Yeah I woulda got him high like Shawty
Jason, are you named after Jason Miller? Happy Thanksgiving!
18 times! That's amazing. I wish I had gotten Moviepass earlier - the first movie I saw with it was Isle of Dogs.
Choices.
Jason, thank you very much for all of your vivid, excellent writing, and for being so into Guadagnino's wonderful re-imagining of Suspiria, unlike its many detractors on this site!
brookesboy -- No I wish I was named after Jason Miller, I might actually start saying that though! That's a good story. From what I was once told my father got the name Jason from some character on some TV show that aired in the 70s but he can't remember what it was. This was a compromise after my mother refused to let him name me Adam, as in Adam Adams, for which I am eternally grateful to my mother.
Rob - There are plenty of us around who love Suspiria, you and I are not alone! But yes I figured I had to speak up for it here since I had my doubts anybody else would :)
I thank you for your undying love and coverage of Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Michiel Huisman and Miguel Ángel Silvestre. We can share them in paradise.
Is it only me who finds Jason hot? Hahaha
i give thanks for jason's fantastic reviews - some of which read as evocatively as a raymond carver short story
Jorge is definitely not alone haha.. Thanks JA, for letting us share in your obsessions like the good little voyeurs that we are. Peace.
No, Jason is defiantly hot!
I feel like Raul Castillo is an actor who deserves to have a big breakout role and a big career to follow it!