This is an odd week, this week in between Christmas and the New Year. I would have liked to treat it just like a normal week, but can’t quite manage, since Kipp is home from kindergarten on vacation. So, I’m taking it easy, and just taking the days as they come, trying to enjoy this time with my little boy (even though he only wants to play with the neighbor boys.) We, like the rest of the world, have been saddened by the devastation wrought by the tsunamis. Tomorrow I am going to explain to Kipp what has happened, encourage him to reach into his piggy bank, and let him help me choose which relief organizations we will be making donations to. There’s quite a list.
Kipp is on vacation, I am on vacation—from normal routine, and that is why I managed to watch yet another movie: the copy of Before Sunset, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, that my aunt Bonnie Buns gave me for Christmas. I was just the right age to enjoy the first movie, and now am just the right age to appreciate the second. To borrow from Emily Dickinson, I understand these characters who, over the course of a decade, have gone from “dwelling in possibility” to “pitching their tents in a world not right.”
At the end of Sunset, as the movie fades intriguingly to black, Celine and Jesse find themselves on the brink of life-altering decisions—as well as on the brink of a far more interesting movie, since whatever they choose will shove them across the true threshold of adulthood. And they will realize that instead of just pitching and repitching their tents endlessly in a world not right, they’re going to have to set about making the world right.
Now this is an odd little review, and one reason I don’t have a job as film critic, because not only am I reviewing a film not yet made, but I am also failing to mention to this great “connection” of theirs. It is mandatory. All reviews must comment on their “connection.”
Alright, then.
The reviewers I have read can’t seem to come to a consensus as to whether these two, and the connection they share, are ordinary or extraordinary. I have to cast my vote for extraordinary, because, while the experience of magically, intensely and briefly connecting with someone may be common enough, their reaction to the experience is not common: they produce art. Jesse wrote a novel; Celine composed a waltz. The quality of the art doesn’t matter as much as the fact that the art was inspired in the first place.
What matters is that the connection seemed to extraordinary to them.
But it’s extraordinarily fragile, I’m afraid. Their art will endure far longer than any extraordinary connection having to sustain itself in ordinary living. This isn’t to say that I feel completely cynical about their chance for a future—I have great faith in the ordinary, as you know. But finding that faith is a long process, not without some pain and anguish. They had better just call the next movie “Before the Dawn of the Next Century.”
Oh, and Linklater is out. He’s done a great job up until now, but I’m afraid he is fresh out of sunrises and sunsets. Time to call in Ingmar Bergman.
12:21:49 AM 
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