San Diego Reader

But I have descended to the trivial, and must catch myself before I descend further to The Amityville Horror or King's Ransom. The bigger matter on my mind this week is my young colleague and friend, Greg Muskewitz, an online critic who first started to turn up at press screenings, along with his voracious appetite for movies, while he was still in high school, and who early last Friday lost his unwinnable fight against bone cancer, almost twenty months after he lost a leg to it. He was twenty-three. Twenty-three....

I think of myself at that age. And I think (to try to measure the magnitude of this from my assigned observation post) of the number of movies I then felt I absolutely had to see before I was through. And I think of how the number of them simultaneously grew and got chipped away over the years, and of how I have now lived long enough (into the age of video and DVD) that the chipping-away has come to outbalance the growth, and of how the remaining number (or any more that may yet be added) are less and less likely to be life-altering experiences. That's partly because any movie that has remained so elusive for so long would probably prove to be not all that momentous, and partly because a life that has run on so long is not as liable to be altered by a mere movie. And I think again of myself at twenty-three....

But I am not talking about myself. Not really. When his oncologist, last December, gave him six more months, he wondered whether, among other things, he could hang around long enough to see the summer blockbuster based on his favorite comic book, Fantastic Four. As it turned out, he could not hang around long enough even to see the May 3rd episode of a favorite TV show, The Gilmore Girls, on which -- a wish fulfilled -- he is scheduled to appear as an extra. Sometimes six months are only four. Toward the end, he sent me, unsolicited, a list of his all-time Top Ten, in reverse order of preference (for added suspense): Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Time Machine (1960), The Sweet Hereafter, Hairspray, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, That Obscure Object of Desire, Last Year at Marienbad, Dr. Strangelove, Manhattan, Lost Highway. He was his own man. He was his own mystery. How would that list have read, twenty or thirty years from now?

If I have done pretty well to chip away at my mountain of movies, I have not done as well with the mountain of mandatory books. They, I might tell myself, would always be there, within easy reach, whenever I could get around to them; and somehow it seemed a comfort to know that I still had a couple of unread Conrads, as an example, waiting in reserve. In the meantime, there was always another Bruce Willis film to get to. And there's my remedial lesson in all this. Maybe it's time to get around to Nostromo while the getting is good.

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