the electric internet

There are few feelings on earth I savor more than that moment at the beginning of a film or book or album that I haven’t read much about in advance, where something about the style or the content hits with an almost palpable rush, and the thought surfaces, “Wow, this is really trying to do something powerful and ambitious, and if it succeeds, it’s going to be terrific.” Three of the times I’ve experienced that, off the top of my head: The black-and-white slow-motion opening to Tarsem’s labor-of-love movie The Fall, which is ridiculously pretentious, ridiculously beautiful, and a teasing mystery, as Tarsem invites viewers to try to figure out what the hell is going on and what it means. I wasn’t fully convinced until the first elaborate story-in-a-story sequence kicked in, but those first two minutes told me that whatever I was about to see would be unique, and I was almost certainly going to love it. Years ago, having never heard The Decemberists, I picked up The Crane Wife on the recommendations of friends. Those first strummed guitar chords from the first track went straight up my spine and lit up my brain, and by the time I got to the end of the first mournful chorus, I was sold on The Decemberists. I pretty much lived inside that album for the next several weeks, and I spent the next few months buying and absorbing all their albums, more or less on the strength of that one song-suite. And while the idea of a film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are sounded ridiculous, it was one of the few cases where I saw the trailer and said “If that movie is anything like that trailer, I’m going to love it.” And it was, and I did.

Notes