Eh

You know, when you're studying respiratory pathology (and/or microbiology) and when you're studying for boards (MORE LIKE BOREDS, AM I RIGHT? Please tip your waitresses and drive home safely. If you must drink and drive and kill, please tell them that you were reading a different blog. In fact, don't mention blogs at all. You were holding this alcohol for a friend in your stomach. The alcohol, that is. Not your friend. I've got a feeling that such behavior could be classified as kidnapping or some such)

Quatto has Stockholm Syndrome (or some sort of Lima Syndrome is going on).

(And, no, I didn't use a period, but that's because I'm not done with this sentence yet) you hear about gray sputum. You might even think to yourself, hey, that makes no sense. I don't think that you'd cough up big gray chunks of phlegm. Rest assured, it can be done, as I discovered this morning. And, hey, now we've talked about sputum. Truly, this is a Novemblog of great import (but not export, because I intend to get all of that sweet tariff money that I can). (And, hey, not to be phlegmatic, but I wasn't too terribly worried about all that- I was mostly happy to be getting it out after all these days.)

So, 150 years ago, General William Tecumseh Sherman began his famous (and possibly infamous) march to the sea, starting with the capture of Atlanta and ending with the capture of Savannah. I'm not actually going to talk about the march, because I really don't know all that much about the march itself aside from the usual history textbook explanations (i.e., "Blah blah total war blah blah remove the Confederates' ability to wage war blah blah"). Winter was coming, et cetera.

If Sherman had died during the campaign, he would have been played by Sean Bean.

Like I said, I'm not going to talk about the march itself. Rather, I'm going to talk (or, double rather, I'm going to try to talk) about a documentary (of sorts) to which I was exposed during my time in France. It's called Sherman's March, or, more fully, it's called Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. Throw Sacha Baron Cohen and some Kazakhstans in there and you've got yourself a potentially winning recipe for a comedy. If you can scrounge up some Peter Sellers, you've got yourself a more than just potentially winning recipe for a comedy (and satire).

This movie, however, had neither. I'll start over. One night, while in France, I went to visit a friend in Paris because that would get me away from Bev, Elmo, and their nightly screaming matches. Much as I would love to hear family telling each other to fuck off and shut the fuck up and other such fuckwords (but in French, you see, so it's much more romantic), I felt like I could make better use of my time and sanity. We grabbed a cheap bottle or two of wine from the store down the street, and he mentioned a movie that he had seen in college that you really needed to be in the right frame of mind to see. Well, we didn't watch it that night. We started, and then we got bored because we weren't in the right state of mind.

A few months later, though, we were in the same position, and we were in a pretty solid state of mind for a terrible, terrible docudramedy. The movie follows one Ross McElwee (who has since gone on to do several other acclaimed documentaries about southern culture (among which, if memory serves, there was one about tobacco farming)), who has just broken up with his girlfriend. He decides that, to clear his head, he's going to buy a camera and film himself recreating Sherman's march to the sea. This is in 1985, so the camera is roughly 50 pounds and requires belts of batteries and film to operate. You get to see this in the mirror in a few shots, and it's pretty ridiculous. As for the march to the sea, well, he fails pretty miserably in that regard.

He starts out the movie at his family's house, and they're trying to set him up with a nice young lady. This becomes a recurring theme. I think that throughout the course of the movie, he ends up shacking up with at least three ladies (to say nothing of how he describes meeting his future wife at the end of the movie), and they are all varying degrees of bizarre.

Shown here is one of said ladies doing... calisthenics? I was never entirely sure what exactly she's doing here.

Basically, the movie consists of an unemployed filmmaker showing how he can still pick up chicks on a backdrop of the South with some pretense of historical significance. There are parts of the movie that stand out, like when he films a good five minutes of him huffing and puffing through a field to get to his mark to say something about Sherman and the march as a whole. It's also bizarre how he tries to nonchalantly describe how each of his relationships ends. In addition to all of this, he (according to IMDB, because I don't really remember this bit too much) has recurring dreams about a nuclear holocaust that he feels compelled to share with the audience. At one point, there's also a subplot where he keeps trying to meet Burt Reynolds. I don't recall whether or not he does, which  I guess is better than strongly remembering that he doesn't. He even calls a set where Reynolds-excuse me, Burt (aw, heck, he'd want to be called Burt, right?)- is filming to try to arrange a meeting.

And, to think, they would have had such adventures. They'd be in a club where there was a special secret password and no girls could join, because they'll just break your heart and then the world will end in nuclear annihilation.

Because the movie is so disjointed, it's really hard to watch unless you have already had enough to drink and are planning to continue for the duration of the movie. At the same time, you have to stay coherent enough to understand and laugh at the absurdity of the situations presented by the filmmaker. The movie doesn't make that too difficult, with quotes and exchanges (with something resembling responses next to them- bear with me. It's 2 in the morning, and I'm very tired. Papa's very sick, Stan.) like:

"I really get turned on about the Civil War. And I know it's been a hundred years, and I still don't think we were wrong. Only in that slavery should not be enforced. It should be a right. If you want to be a slave, be a slave. If you don't, fine." ...What? You... What? I mean, I'm sure that certain subcultures lean towards that sort of viewpoint, and I'm all about autonomy, but wasn't a big part of slavery the LACK of autonomy due to a perceived lack of personhood by the slaveholders?

Ross: The place is like a tomb.
Charleen: No, it's not. It's like pubic hair. Part, part the bushes. Go into the place. Go with it, Ross. It's not like a tomb. That's the trouble with you. You don't know the difference between sex and death.
Ross: Sex and death?
Charleen: Yes, and death. This is life, this isn't dead. When it sits on your face, you can't tell which it is.      Again, what? I don't remember if Charleen is a love interest or if it's his sister, but that is just plain weird for conversation. I don't think context helps this one at all.

There's a lot of talk in reviews of the film about how it's cinema vérité and is a snapshot of real people. Ross (the filmmaker, in case you've forgotten) talks about how he was always ready to film whatever was going on. Nowadays, with camera phones and GoPros and, I dunno, Google Glass, that seems like a somewhat reasonable claim. But when you're using an 80's camera where the tape recorder has to be strapped to your belt, I don't think that you can really claim that people are being honest. They're playing a character that they want to be, and, sure you could argue that that's somewhat more honest in its own twisted way, but we're getting off topic, as I am wont to do.

Despite the frankly weird storytelling and even weirder characters, the movie does somehow work. Somehow, the whole concept about Sherman's march to the sea ends up getting borne out through the narrative. You could certainly argue that this happened because Ross had 25 hours of footage to work with, and he could splice it as he needed. Heck, that's probably what actually happened. I like to think, though, that he went out to make this grand gesture about Sherman's march and how it affected the South and how the landscape has changed in the intervening century (or how little effect the march ultimately had, and whether or not that was Sherman's intent with the march itself). He went to make this magnum opus, and it failed. It failed MISERABLY. He was going to get SO laid doing this, and every singly time, something went haywire and he ends up alone again. And then, throughout this series of personal setbacks and tragedies, he manages to make a linear allegory for Sherman's march that doesn't convey much of what he wanted but DOES convey everything he should have wanted from the film.

So, yeah. Sherman's March. It's a doozy, and maybe it's worth seeing if you want something that's unconventionally weird.