april showers & a tuesday top ten in one!
Do you ever think of The Truman Show (1998)? I really and truly loved it in 1998 naming it 'The Best Film of the Year!' to anyone who would listen. (This was in my pre Film Experience days of course... though it's hard to remember such a time).
My Top Ten Of 1998 - Unranked
- Bulworth (Warren Beatty)
- Celebration / Festen (Thomas Vinterberg)
- Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon)
- High Art (Lisa Cholodenko)
- The Idiots (Lars von Trier)
- Living Out Loud (Richard LaGravenese)
- The Opposite of Sex (Don Roos)
- The Thin Red Line (Terence Malick)
- The Truman Show (Peter Weir)
- Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes)
...with Central Station and Shakespeare in Love just outside the top ten though I'm always considering reinstating them. They were both once on the actual list (The Idiots and the Malick I saw a little later). I haven't seen any of them save Velvet Goldmine for at least...seven years? Would my list hold up? Would yours? How often do you revisit your #1s from various years and do you ever lose track of them completely the way I did The Truman Show.
Today the movie popped into my head in an existential "is this all there is?" crisis moment I was having. Then I thought about the malfunctioning sudden downpour that drenches the star of that show. Truman is played by Jim Carrey (in the first of his series of FYC performances that Oscar sadly passed on). The childllike man still hasn't figured out that his life is actually a TV show. Despite his ignorance oddities like the malfunctioning rain start waking him up to life's surreal absurdities if not yet fully to his own life's precarious relationship to reality. He stares in confusion and disbelief as the shower follows him and eventually he ends up laughing and yelling with joy as the glitch gives way to a fullfledged rainstorm.
I worry that I wouldn't be as amused if this happened to me.
I need to find a way to be that lighthearted and childlike when I'm suddenly drenched. After all, when it rains it pours and we aren't always carrying umbrellas.
previous shower
Anna Karenina's stylish snowfall