Anora

I'm SOOOO glad I watched "Anora" on Friday night and was able to tell people about it on Saturday before everyone was talking about it on Monday.  I said it was as gritty as "The Florida Project" without realizing that the writer, producer, editor, and director of "Anora," Sean Baker, had made both, and also "Tangerine," another wonderfully gritty film.  Man. . . this guy.  He shot "Tangerine" on an iPhone.  He made "Anora" on a six million dollar budget.  Sounds like a lot of money to most of us, but not to Hollywood.  

The budget for Dune was $140 million, for "Wicked," $100 million.  

Anora was not a Hollywood film.  

Now my friends are telling me they want to see the film.  But my conservative friend wrote, "This is the first I have heard of this movie. Does it play in multiplexes or in the back of porno shops?"  

I spent a lot of my morning replying to him.  

"Sounds like a good one to watch on my next flight if I have a kid next to me kicking the seat in front of him or one behind," he spoofed.  "Then again most of them will have already seen it."

"There is a whole lotta fucking in it," I warned him.  

"Weird for a movie about a sex worker," he said.  

"Just another great take on The American Dream," I opined.  

"Sounds like movie magic."

"It is fucking great."

To which he applied the "Ha ha" emoji.  I told him I didn't think he'd like it, neither him nor his wife, but maybe his kids would.  

He was the son of a prominent doctor and went to private Catholic schools.  He was a prankish kid who rebelled in gentle but meaningless ways against his upbringing, but he never strayed too far afield.  He admitted that he and his pals had been afraid to wander into the realm I lived in. 

"I grew up in the heart of darkness, dude.  I was running with the hunted.  Crime Hills Pride.  I had to learn a lot to get out of the clutches of the worst shit you could imagine.  The movies don't even begin to touch the evil shit I saw before I got out of high school."

I went on to illustrate a little of what I had been witness to or had participated in, stuff I won't write here.  It was sickening, monstrous stuff that people think I am exaggerating or simply making up, but they are the kind of things you can't believe unless you were there.  The movies don't begin to touch it.  But, I told him, I was a different kid from the ones I ran with.  I didn't do drugs and I didn't like drinking and would pretend to drink while spilling my beer on the ground.  An only child, I liked reading and the quietude of my own home until that blew up, too, and after that I was simply a nomad, always moving, never lighting anywhere.  

From the moment I stepped foot on a college campus, though. . . my life drastically changed.  I put on layer after layer after layer of social change. . . but the kernel remained.  

So yea. . . "Anora."  It examines the relationship between the rich and the poor and the scramble for scarps by the working class subjected to the whims of billionaires.  

"I live in Leave it to Beaver Land," I told my buddy, "and I love it.  But I grew up in Area 13 and the things I've seen in life would make your balls shrivel.  I love living among the doctors and lawyers and Indian Chiefs, but I know Area 13 and still go out to see it once in awhile.  But it scares the shit out of me now." 

"I see. Sort of like floating on a glass bottom boat peering at the jungle below."

"Yea. . .but the power of billionaires scares me more.  Fuck the syphilitic president and all his chancered cronies.  Any of you who voted for him (twice) are worse than the worst kids I grew up with.  Amen."

The film is about inequality, but I'm afraid all the puritan population will see is sex.  And for all of you who haven't yet seen the film, the final scene is the sell.  It's what most of us have.  It is what most of us get.  It is what we have instead of The Dream we have believed we deserved and thought was our own.  

But enough of that.  Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about the documentary I worked on interviewing nude pole dancers back in the last century when everyone wanted to be their boyfriend, when they were on a level with rock stars.  Remember? 

One good thing about texting with my buddy is that he sometimes has good taste in music.  He sent me this one.  He can be trippy sometimes.  I'd never heard of this group before.  So. . . I'll make it up to him.  Here.