Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

Fur Burglars is not for adults. There are no grown-up jokes whooshing over tousled heads. The Lindens do without parody, satire, knowing references to brands. There is no resolution, which is its own satisfaction.

Atrocious parental behavior blackened the showing. In a kids’ movie, adults snap pictures, paint nails, crack cans, yell into Pingers, and thump their kid for displaying enthusiasm. Blathering about the profundity of children’s entertainment, how age-appropriate films are a construct, is the product of an infantilized generation and their apologist critics. Children’s movies are marketing events. It is irresponsible to bring your children to see Banjo the Clown Dog or Crocodile Orthodontists II , unless it is part of your parenting strategy. Viz., if you try to raise an idiot, then maybe your child will rebel against idiocy.

Fur Burglars . Three nondescript and unexcitable women kidnap the pets of the wealthy to ransom. Each kidnapping is rendered with the greatest of care to maximize its entertainment value. We are not told if the women are in need of money, if they’re class warriors, or if they like the kicks that crime affords. These thieves of puggles and Russian Blues have no past, future, or agenda we can determine. The Lindens make few concessions to narrative. This film, by omission, shows how the word why obstructs our cinema, tangles it in strands of causality, removes it from its proper sphere of mysticism. Before the film, they stole pets. After the film, they will continue stealing pets.

Showings of Devin Duckling’s Dire Disaster or Honky Seals pay the bills at the Conspicuous, so I tolerate the Saturday hordes of greedy kids who pillage the snack counter, make unpleasant high-pitched noises, cluster outside the bathrooms complaining of imminent bladder rupture, unable to perceive the restrooms are out of order. I watch the kids in the lobby, trying to determine who will have an exciting life, if there is a secret, a gene, an attitude, if there is anything but money, a high tolerance for pain, birth within an arbitrary and invisible boundary.

Isabel and I agreed on the Lindens. At attention, Pingers forgotten. Our shared filmography. A Short Hello , female private eye kills society son: soon after our meeting, groping on the couch, stoned on hormones. Cerillos by Saturday , railroad town wrangles bandits into repressive private militia: the night her mom had too much cabernet and began to sob on her lawn. Richmond! , a musical about the ruinous hurricane: after the abortion. The Things , sensitive monster is pursued by murderous humans: after her sister was caught bullying a girl on Pinger so badly that the girl refused to leave her house. Jean-Luc and Raoul , best friends become estranged over the loan of a pencil: her aunt’s cancer. In Rabat , a spy causes a war through great ineptitude, then manipulates events at home to cover her tracks: when I discovered she’d taken a credit chip in my name and maxed it out. Double feature with Milagro , hospital tearjerker about an elderly man who decides not to kill himself after realizing the worth of his life, who we learn in the final shot is a generalissimo subjecting his people to brutality and suppression: my retaliation.

Paint-by-numbers Nano Belt noir. Playing in repertory through next Sunday, at the Hub Cinema Archive.

We left after the heiress disappeared. The detective’s charisma wasn’t sufficient to hold us in our seats. Into the arboretum, where people flaunted that they had the resources to maintain two or three large dogs. Never mind the paucity of quality health care outside the Zone, the impossibility of a relatively unbiased education for many of our guests, the enormous costs of carbon reabsorption. A permit for one animal is thousands of dollars. No wonder this society was almost eradicated.

Dr. Lisa said, I became aware in my late adolescence that many days I would have to choose to live. A day when it doesn’t occur to choose is good.

Dr. Lisa said, When I am in the shower after work, I think, did I live today? How did I live? If I felt like I didn’t live very much, I ask myself why not, but there is no answer. How I could live more? I don’t know. There are no metrics. And what people say is not true.

Dr. Lisa said, What people say is not usually truthful.

Dr. Lisa said, I try to help these people with their fixations, maybe because I have my own. My fixations don’t manifest in physical symptoms. They are not special, either, but thoughts about the elasticity of time, the mysteries of matter, and the finitude of trust.

Dr. Lisa said, Without trust, it is difficult to live.

Dr. Lisa said, How can you trust another human being? Knowing their autonomy, like yours, is under the governance of a subjective morality. How many times should you choose to live?

Dr. Lisa said, You think you know a person but you don’t. You will never know another person and this stings. Maybe the self can be known and maybe the journey of knowing the self is heroic or maybe it is venial. To decide it is a worthy venture may be vain.

Dr. Lisa said, I don’t know you. Maybe I think I have a good sense of you, but these senses are wrong. A person cannot be understood. We navigate by our own sense of realness, which cannot be applied to others. We assume others will act how we think they should act. When they do not, we are upset.

Dr. Lisa said, Everyone’s morality is weighted differently, and they are not incremental differences. What is very wrong to me might only be a little bit wrong to you. And one can never know those differences, because people are rarely truthful, they minimize the importance of truth, or they think it is better to tell an expedient lie. To me, lying is disgusting. I do it and I think that the expedient lies I tell are minor but others’ lies are major. How is one to know? There is nothing to measure against.

Dr. Lisa said, Awe is worthless and so is respect for distances.

Dr. Lisa said, Often I have fantasized I will get to stand in front of the throne to ask as many questions as I would like. Until my thirst for information is quenched. And I will stand in front of the throne, which I visualize as a desk, not so different from my own, and I will satisfy my thirst to know everything I have wanted to know about the people I have known, which might take a very long time.

Following us through the trees, a man in a fishing hat. Binoculars around his neck like he was looking for birds. He appeared about fifty, straight back. A suit which was never fashionable. Only the loose flesh at the throat betrayed his age. Why was this man, having passed seventy, still devoting himself to wicked tricks? Perhaps because he thought his age allowed him a measure of protection he hadn’t had when he worked for Millings’s father, snapping pinkies and setting fires. That moronic family spent too much time at the movies. Now I knew his face. Millings wasn’t as sincere as he had claimed in the office, but neither was I.

Although Osvald works as a secretary for an architectural firm, he prefers to call himself a clerk. Leyak, Malthus, Barbas, and Grigori is known for the Hotel Vengeli, one story tall and six blocks long, the Felly Reflective Caverns, hewn from the sandstone beneath Port Anaraes, the undustable Balloon House, and ZFR Financial’s acclaimed bunker. Forty-two of the forty-five Hub stadiums.

I see him at work, as if I am floating over his shoulder. I try to make him spill his coffee onto his lap, but all it does is make him itch his hand. My influence is subtle.