Entry 10:

Dear Phillip,

Indeed, after us the deluge. Or not so much after as during, a troubling thought for one who, like myself, lives on landfill. Well, perhaps the flooding will help dilute all that arsenic in the ground water that the mining industry is so intent on protecting. It does make you wonder about the long-term prospects for all those New York waterfront developments that are ever so slowly taking shape. By the time they're realized, we may be fishing from the marquee of the local multiplex, with only your book to remind us of how things were. (It makes me wonder if the false-alarm storms and bouts of fear-mongering that emanate from the Weather Channel and other meteorological outposts aren't merely deliberate dry runs, so to speak, for the genuine catastrophes to follow. Just kidding.)

Let me add my vote of support for Laura Linney and Agnes Jaoui. Linney is moving and funny without being in the least schmaltzy, respecting all the little edges of her character. Her interplay with Matthew Broderick is really funny (he should have been up for supporting actor), and I can't even begin to understand why Mark Ruffalo wasn't nominated--he's right on it from first to last. The whole movie is nice for the way it keeps the pathos at bay in situations that could so easily tip over the edge into that orgy of mutual commiseration that tends to stand for emotion in American movies.

I trust that Agnes Jaoui and her collaborator whose name I can't remember continue to turn out scripts like The Taste of Others. (The Same Old Song deserved a better fate. I think it lasted a week in New York. The device of people expressing their feelings by bursting into fragments of pop songs, excessively cute as it might seem, was used far more meaningfully than in Woody Allen's superficially similar but not so hot musical Everyone Says I Love You. In the Resnais film, there was a sense of the songs as a kind of universally available safety net for lives otherwise in disarray. They grab at the air and come up with a piece of a song.)

Re ontological beauty: that whole notion of capturing moments of being on film, already strained, is going to be largely phased out by digital filmmaking that turns even live-action into a form of animation. No moment is illuminated because there is no moment, just a collage of separate elements cunningly (or not so cunningly) combined into an illusion. Of course, half the movies I love (from Melies to Michael Powell to Frank Tashlin) might be said to be on that track already, but that still leaves the other half. Movies used to seem like a showdown between reality and illusion, a showdown that interestingly was never resolved. Maybe illusion finally won: Or maybe, as you suggest, there will be a restorative breeze from outside the Empire of Technology.

I hope your daughter is feeling better.

Best,
Geoffrey