“The Spectacular Now” is a coming of age tale, based on the bildungsroman by Tim Tharp. It was filmed within thirty-five miles of my own humble domicile and therefore features many scenes which I recognized. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the sets are designed by Jess Royal (as she is credited) the daughter of friends. Her sets are intentionally and wincingly familiar in a humble, lower-middle class sort of way. Great job, Jessica!

This film is about a self-absorbed “good-time-Charlie” sort of high school senior who can never pass up a chance to chug-a-lug a beer (or tip his flask), have sex with his ever-so-popular blonde girlfriend and hang-out and have aimless fun.

While his classmates are preparing for college life and bearing down on maturity, he is un-preparing for the now, which, for him, is becoming not so spectacular. Little twit is dumped by his gal pal and he meets a less traditionally “beautiful” girl, sensitive and soulful.

Disaster looms, right?

Subtly acted and intentionally told in a painful, unglamorous, rumpled, awkward reality, “The Spectacular Now”, isn’t best seen in the now, it plays best in the future after we leave the theater. It burns a bit in our memory and when I say “our” memory, I mean that we may see ourselves as the “life-of-the-party” fool or in the innocent second girlfriend. She suffers collateral damage from his youthful arrogance and vapidity. And he suffers from the consequences of his vacuous acts. The evolution of their experiences should cause us to recall our past “unspectacular nows.”

“The Spectacular Now” earns four-and-a-half bow ties out of five.

 

“Blue Jasmine”, a Woody Allen movie, tells the tale of a woman who had lived “in the now,” but crashed ingloriously in the not-so-spectacular “real now.”

Cate Blanchette electrifies the screen and our souls portraying Jasmine (she changed her real name to shed her less-than-prestigious past for her “spectacular now”). She is the former wife of a Bernie Madoff type guy (played by a smarmy Alec Baldwin) who eventually gets his comeuppance and goes to prison.

She lived a life of mindless, vapid decadence turning a blind eye to her husband’s dishonesty and the pain he caused so many others, including her sister and her ex-husband (most effectively played by Andrew Dice Clay). They live in a blue-collar world, far from “the spectacular now” formerly occupied by Jasmine, with her five-carat diamond ring, $40,000 Hermes Berkin bag and Chanel suit which they helped provide.

This film is about what happens when the there is not an evolution in character but devolution. When pain is afflicted, does one pick up the pieces and go forward, or does one wallow in the “spectacular now” of one’s past, disengaging in the real now and getting lost on one’s way to the future.

When one sees a human tragedy brought about by hubris, one is compelled to stare and wonder and, perhaps, even savor the schadenfreude, even though the unfortunate is not exactly a “freude.” But the wisest of us, thank The Greater Power that be that we find contentment within ourselves, in our humble “now,” perhaps not so spectacular, but comfortable nonetheless.

“Blue Jasmine” earns four-and-a-half bow ties out of five.

 

“The World’s End” is a British comedy about five young lads who lived in their vapid “spectacular now” and when they graduated from their provincial high school, they celebrated by commencing a pub crawl known as the Golden Mile, visiting twelve pubs along the way, indulging in one pint at each along the journey (rather sacrilegiously symbolic of the 12 points of the cross, I note). They do not make it due to the debilitating effects of alcohol. Some twenty-odd years later, the vapid fool of the five (played by the brilliant Simon Pegg), the one who is still 17, the callow youth that never evolved out of his immature “spectacular now,” the delusional one, rounds up the boys to return to their hometown to begin the crawl yet again. However, it seems the hometown’s residents have become automatons of aliens and the boy’s trek means overcoming the effects of the many a pint of beer and the nasty robots bent on absorbing all mankind into the “spectacular now” of the human’s perceived as glorious but actually “vacuous” past “nows.” The struggle for enlightenment for these five involves more than hops, but also a more substantial struggle of self-awareness and the value of their “substantial now.”

The dialog is comedic genius, the silly shenanigans are a pleasure to witness and the moral-of-the-story is as wacky as should be expected from a post-Monty Python British comic tradition. And yet, we learn from this farce that the “spectacular now” of one’s youth is irretrievable and probably was not as invaluable as we had thought and that one should find a more grounded “now” in our future and accept our present as a gift as an opportunity to be spectacular or we shall end up wasted, mumbling to ourselves, lost in our past, aimless, acting like automatons, no longer the life of the party.

“The World’s End” earns four-and-a-half bow ties out of five.