Before Sunrise

Let’s start with a confession: Until it became the most requested film here at Story24, I had never seen Before Sunrise. I never had any intention of seeing it. It felt a little too close to home.

Before Sunrise premiered five years after my own long European misadventure, and with Ethan Hawke being near to five years younger than I am, the whole idea felt an awful lot like looking into a mirror — and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those times. As difficult and as ugly and occasionally violent as things sometimes got, I’ve always held those years close as precious and golden. I didn’t want my own memories tainted by someone else’s fantasies. But what is it that Jesse says?

People have these romantic projections they put on everything, you know, that’s not based on any kind of reality.

Maybe it’s because I was young. Everyone thinks the world was better when they were young. But there was something about being lost and aimless in Europe before cellphones and apps and debit cards. We stashed our traveler’s checks in the bottoms of our packs and we slept on our packs so they wouldn’t get stolen. We hiked and hitchhiked with no idea where we would end up at the end of the day, catching rides on tractors and sleeping under bridges and in caves. We tore out pages from our outdated Let’s Go guides and shared them with passing new friends headed to where we’d already been. Maps were made of paper and so were books, and we always carried at least one of each.

What are you reading?

And so that first scene on the train with Jesse and Céline almost took my breath away. How many times had I lived that moment? Me with the Le Carré I’d picked up at that English-language newsstand in the south of France, or that first Murakami I discovered at the old bookshop on Charing Cross Road — or Tom McGuane, how did it take traveling halfway around the world to find out about that homegrown Bushwhacked Piano?

I remember one rainy afternoon in Dublin, reading Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God in a damp hostel lobby. Uta from Hamburg wrote the text of Desiderata into the margins of my book, the ink bleeding from her pen onto the moist paper. It still has a place on my bookshelf today, dry now, bent from all the miles.

Was Uta my Céline? I promised to meet her in Hamburg but never did. Or was it Anna from Brussels in Naples? Or Pauline from P.E.I. in London, walking hand-in-hand through Hyde Park after midnight?

Yes, Pauline. It’s always Pauline, it’s always London.

Romantic Projections.

My other thought watching Before Sunrise for the first time is this: What were you people thinking, asking me to analyze the structure of this movie? This feels like some sadistic challenge. I'm really not in the mood.

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Pulp Fiction

Gather around, kids, and I'll tell you a tale of what it was like to see the movie that changed everything on its opening weekend — going in cold with little idea what it was about and no idea what I was in for.

It was the fall of 1994. I was deep into my own private post-college Gen X slacker wasteland, trying to figure out what to do with a never-quite-finished degree in English. I had spent a year wandering Europe, then another year writing a novel that nobody wanted. I took a job at a book store that went out of business shortly after I started, and then another at a record store that did the same.

If you're all right, then say something.

The internet wasn't much, and what it was wasn't pretty. There was no streaming, no YouTube, no Rotten Tomatoes. The closest you could get to a spoiler was digging deep in an AOL chat room. My small-town newspaper published at most three movie reviews per week — usually syndicated from Roger Ebert — and if more than three movies opened that weekend, you took your chances. I was a regular at my local indie arthouse cinema, but if Reservoir Dogs had played there, I must have missed it — which is all a long way around to saying that Pulp Fiction seemed to come out of nowhere.

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Write with me.

Hi friends. Long time, no post. I’m proud of what I’ve created here at Story24, but I've been so busy with the rest of my life that I've probably only averaged about one new story a year since the site's debut. This place has been a labor of love and neglect.

So this morning I had an idea: Would you like to write with me?

I mean, don't everybody jump up at once. It's not like I can pay you. But you'll get a byline and a link back to your own site if you've got one.

Learn Something New, Share What You Know.

If you're interested, send me a message and I'll get you the details of what I would need from you. But here are the highlights:

If you're interested, use the contact form to let me know what you'd like to write about. I'll be in touch with more detailed instructions. Thanks so much, and I look forward to hearing from you!

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Moonrise Kingdom

There's no story if there isn't some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it's more or less the norm.

—Wes Anderson

Even smart kids stick their fingers in electrical sockets sometimes.

There's this thing about Wes Anderson's movies. They often seem to be set in a world that's at least a step or two removed from ordinary reality—with heightened artifice, sometimes stagey dialogue, fanciful "facts," even stop-motion crayon ponyfish—but they can be as hard-hitting with the emotional truths of their characters as any more naturalistic film,

Anderson's formalist whimsy is an acquired taste for some people, and that's fine. I'm a big proponent of liking what you like and not judging other people's tastes. I do find, though, that many critiques of his movies are disingenuous at best, and often based on suppositions that simply aren't true when you take a closer look at the films.

And when it comes to criticizing Moonrise Kingdom?*

I'd be careful if I were you. One of these days, somebody's gonna get pushed too far.

Moonrise Kingdom is a delight. It's the story of first love between two troubled kids, of grand gestures to break free of a world that seems to be against them, and of the adult ensemble that fears for their future and does their best to guide them in spite of—or more likely because of—their own many failings.

The basic outline is this: Set in the fall of 1965 (and flashing back to the summer of the preceding year) Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop meet and decide to go on the run together, alarming the adults of their small island community. There's a search involving a posse of Khaki Scouts, a capture, an escape, and a showdown featuring a couple of lightning strikes. There's also a pair of lefty scissors. Here's the whole Moonrise Kingdom story circle:

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