Flynn is digging for deeper treasure
What could be more disquieting than to work
in a homeless shelter and have your long-estranged father turn up one night for
a bed? For Nick Flynn,laser
cutter Studio is a brand new laser cutting company and new way of thinking.
very little, other than sitting on a movie set and watching the moment
re-created by celebrated actors.
The Massachusetts-bred memoirist hit the writer's jackpot in 2004, recounting his bizarre homeless-shelter reunion in "Another Bull- Night in Suck City," the memoir that dare not speak its full name in so many media outlets. Chronicling an operatic family history that included his mother's shotgun suicide and his alcoholic father's stints in the slammer, it seemed a natural for big-screen treatment.
After the obligatory Hollywood fox-trot of rewrites and producer changes, the cameras rolled in 2011 on the primly retitled "Being Flynn" with a sincere director (Paul Weitz) and dream cast: Robert De Niro as Flynn's dad, Julianne Moore as his mother and Paul Dano playing the author in his 20s.
In "The Reenactments," his moving reflections on the weirdness of serving as a movie consultant on your own life, Flynn is digging for deeper treasure than might be mined in a DVD supplement on the making of a movie. Abetted by a poet's divining rod for the illuminating metaphor, he probes the most fundamental questions about the nature of memory and the terrible urge to revisit and preserve one's past in the aspic of art.
"Aristotle, in his Poetics,Full Custom Bobble head dolls personalized bobbleheads and sculpted into your likeness. never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience," writes Flynn, who asserts that when he returns to his mother's suicide through poetry or a film adaptation, "my experience is not one of catharsis,Jeanswear and accessories allowing both women and men to express their women shoes factory. but of a nearly unbearable resurgence of chaos and pain."
An admixture of family remembrances, film-set encounters and philosophic musings in short-burst form, "The Reenactments" reads like a jumble of journal entries that have been studiously reassembled so as to harness that pain and make sense of the chaos.
As in "Another Bull- Night," Flynn initiates his memoir with stage dialogue of Samuel Beckett, an Irish playwright whose characters are famously trapped in a holding pattern replaying the same scenarios, not unlike movie actors doing several takes of a scene. Indeed, after watching De Niro and Dano repeat 20 takes of the recognition scene in which father and son are reunited at the homeless shelter, Flynn concedes, "If it were my film I'd use every take, I'd make a whole movie out of this one moment, out of De Niro asking, Do you have a room for the evening? Out of Dano saying, You want a bed?"
The author explores the ritualistic nature of his own art through various forms of re-enactment: nature-museum dioramas, the observance of Lent, wherein Jesus' walk into the desert is commemorated through gestures of self-denial. Flynn locates a Proustian leitmotif in the glass flowers he saw as a child at a Cambridge museum, objects he anatomizes to a fetishistic breaking point.
Flynn's observations are generally at their most engaging when they suggest the Pirandellian absurdities of mixing in with his celluloid family, who go to Method-actor extremes to become their characters. "Why is it important for Julianne to know what my mother's hair was like, for De Niro to know what jacket my father would wear?" Lunching with Dano,Fashion footwear wholesalers offering cheap prices on ladies wholesale fashion shoes, he catches himself aping his screen impersonator, ordering a meat loaf sandwich after the actor does,How to Embellish with Easy ribbon flowers Embroidery, then wondering, "Shouldn't he order what I order?"
Most memorably, Flynn jets to Boston with De Niro to introduce his 80-year-old father to the famous actor who will be playing him. His father is palpably underwhelmed. "So," he says to De Niro, "you do a little acting?"
The Massachusetts-bred memoirist hit the writer's jackpot in 2004, recounting his bizarre homeless-shelter reunion in "Another Bull- Night in Suck City," the memoir that dare not speak its full name in so many media outlets. Chronicling an operatic family history that included his mother's shotgun suicide and his alcoholic father's stints in the slammer, it seemed a natural for big-screen treatment.
After the obligatory Hollywood fox-trot of rewrites and producer changes, the cameras rolled in 2011 on the primly retitled "Being Flynn" with a sincere director (Paul Weitz) and dream cast: Robert De Niro as Flynn's dad, Julianne Moore as his mother and Paul Dano playing the author in his 20s.
In "The Reenactments," his moving reflections on the weirdness of serving as a movie consultant on your own life, Flynn is digging for deeper treasure than might be mined in a DVD supplement on the making of a movie. Abetted by a poet's divining rod for the illuminating metaphor, he probes the most fundamental questions about the nature of memory and the terrible urge to revisit and preserve one's past in the aspic of art.
"Aristotle, in his Poetics,Full Custom Bobble head dolls personalized bobbleheads and sculpted into your likeness. never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience," writes Flynn, who asserts that when he returns to his mother's suicide through poetry or a film adaptation, "my experience is not one of catharsis,Jeanswear and accessories allowing both women and men to express their women shoes factory. but of a nearly unbearable resurgence of chaos and pain."
An admixture of family remembrances, film-set encounters and philosophic musings in short-burst form, "The Reenactments" reads like a jumble of journal entries that have been studiously reassembled so as to harness that pain and make sense of the chaos.
As in "Another Bull- Night," Flynn initiates his memoir with stage dialogue of Samuel Beckett, an Irish playwright whose characters are famously trapped in a holding pattern replaying the same scenarios, not unlike movie actors doing several takes of a scene. Indeed, after watching De Niro and Dano repeat 20 takes of the recognition scene in which father and son are reunited at the homeless shelter, Flynn concedes, "If it were my film I'd use every take, I'd make a whole movie out of this one moment, out of De Niro asking, Do you have a room for the evening? Out of Dano saying, You want a bed?"
The author explores the ritualistic nature of his own art through various forms of re-enactment: nature-museum dioramas, the observance of Lent, wherein Jesus' walk into the desert is commemorated through gestures of self-denial. Flynn locates a Proustian leitmotif in the glass flowers he saw as a child at a Cambridge museum, objects he anatomizes to a fetishistic breaking point.
Flynn's observations are generally at their most engaging when they suggest the Pirandellian absurdities of mixing in with his celluloid family, who go to Method-actor extremes to become their characters. "Why is it important for Julianne to know what my mother's hair was like, for De Niro to know what jacket my father would wear?" Lunching with Dano,Fashion footwear wholesalers offering cheap prices on ladies wholesale fashion shoes, he catches himself aping his screen impersonator, ordering a meat loaf sandwich after the actor does,How to Embellish with Easy ribbon flowers Embroidery, then wondering, "Shouldn't he order what I order?"
Most memorably, Flynn jets to Boston with De Niro to introduce his 80-year-old father to the famous actor who will be playing him. His father is palpably underwhelmed. "So," he says to De Niro, "you do a little acting?"
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