It's the journalistic motion
Once and only once, I bought a VHS movie over eBay. I can't tell you how happy I am to see that movie turn up in last week's Tribune.
Oftentimes our relationship to a character actor is a matter of where we are in our lives at the time of introduction. In director Joan Micklin Silver's "Between the Lines" (1977), which is hard to find but worth the trouble, Goldblum played the lazy, generally stoned music writer of an alternative Boston weekly threatened by corporate takeover. (If they only knew.)
I saw that movie on a date in high school, and it's sort of remarkable that this loosely plotted, bittersweet ensemble piece even played a theater in Racine, Wis. That film probably had a lot to do with solidifying my romantic impression of journalism and its discontents and slackers and dreamers.
The movie is "an unabashedly Hollywoodian paean to journalism and the free drink," says Time Out. "We'll rate it as the number-one film in the subgenre Films About Alternative Newsweeklies," says Baltimore's City Paper. The journos — shock — date each other. What distinguishes it "is the gently perceptive way it captures the emotional confusions of its characters," says the Times. "They are young, talented, ambitious people who once had the great good fortune to be enthusiastically committed and to have had professional lives that were the same as their private lives." The movie also features Southside Johnny music and for some reason has a subplot about bootlegging his releases.
It's basically my life's story had I lived the '70s. Or how I wish it were. Here's a scene that could basically happen, for better or worse… now.
