Perhaps one of the things people find most strange about me (there is so much to chose from) is that I love to watch sad movies. it goes along with reading sad books and sitting in an open window during a heavy rain. Likely strolling through a cemetery fits in here too. I’ve been called dark, melancholy, eccentric. I think all those things are compliments though I am sure they were not meant as such.
I once spent a masochistic weekend with The Road. I started reading the book on Friday night, finished Sunday afternoon in time to see the matinee of the movie. It was a grey and rainy weekend, thank the gods. Had it been sunny I would have felt betrayed.
Yesterday I was listening to All Things Considered on my way home from work. There was a story about an artist I have never heard of who made a movie about another artist I never heard of. Yet Joann Sfar managed to capture my appreciation for the bleak. He said:
“I’m so grateful when a beautiful thing try to teach me nothing,” he offers, almost as a weary provocation of the sort Gainsbourg might have uttered. “And it never occurs. You know sometimes movies seem to be like a medicine. … I wish to be sad and I wish to be lost, and I desperately don’t wish to be taught anything.”
I think Sfar and Gainsbourg are worth getting to know.
Comics Star Joann Sfar, Capturing ‘A Heroic Life’
