"If you look closely, all of nature has it's beauty."

Katherine. Katherine had a dog. His name was Milo. Yes… he was named after Jim Carrey’s acrobatic pet in The Mask. I know. I KNOW! He was still funny at the time!

Katherine’s parents had decided to take the whole family to Disneyworld one summer. They would be gone for a while and little Milo would be left all alone. She asked me if I could house sit for them and make sure Milo was taken care of. I said “Hell no.” I offered to take the tiny black fur ball to my apartment and watch over him there. Although she thought it was a bad idea, she agreed. She gave me a spare key to her house… just in case. Women know stuff.

The first day in my apartment with Milo was the last. When I got home from wherever I was, there was diarrhea all over the floor. After spending a few hours gagging and wiping, I decided that house sitting for Katherine’s family wasn’t such a bad idea… anything to solidify the little guy’s bowel movements and keep me from having to pick it up.

Feeling bored and altogether uncomfortable in my girlfriend’s parent’s house, I decided to call my friend Julio to see if he wanted to come over and watch a movie. I didn’t know if I had permission to bring people over but since it was Katherine who introduced us in the first place and they were very good friends to begin with, I figured it was alright. It was (In case you thought this was a foreshadowing of some worst-case scenario type story like something out of Risky Business or The Hangover.)

David Lynch

Julio was part of, if not the ringleader of, the motley crew of misfits I had met at the University of Puerto Rico. He had already graduated college and was a graphic designer by trade, working at the university itself. He too was a secret movie buff. His choices, however, ran with the more obscure and independent films along with the foreign and bizarre. David Lynch was God and Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah. Our friendship grew as I explained the benefits and social relevance of the big budget blockbusters while he, in turn, explained the intricacies of film as an art form. After countless conversations and a few bewildering movie recommendations that actually made me nauseous, he chose a video that would serve as my subtle transition into contemporary foreign films. The movie was Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.

The premise was simple… Kurosawa would reveal some of his most vivid dreams and nightmares in the form of several short films. He told the tale of his earliest dreams as a little boy and both the beauty and loss of childhood innocence. He tackled his passions as a young man by traveling through the paintings of Van Gogh. He faced his fears of war, death and atomic fallout. He concluded his cinematic journey by exploring the idea of death as a celebration of life. What the hell did I just watch?

When the movie was over and Julio had gone home, I thought about what I had seen. It wasn’t the strange narrative structure that held me... I actually thought it was too slow. It wasn’t the Japanese aesthetic that appealed to me either… It was beautiful but a little over the top for my taste. It was how personal the story was. These were the man’s most intimate thoughts… his deepest dreams and fears put on display. Could movies do that? Was there more to it than good old-fashioned story telling? There was a whole other language being spoken here and it wasn’t Japanese. With the help of subtitles, I could get past the spoken language of most foreign films just fine but they usually bored me. They bored me because I couldn’t understand the cinematic language of the pieces I watched. I was used to simple, straightforward narrative structures with your basic three acts and characters that, while often complex, were easy enough to follow. Why was this one different though? It wouldn’t let me go. I couldn’t understand the “language” but I felt it. How? What about this movie was speaking to me? It obviously had nothing to do with the stories themselves! I mean… what could I possibly have in common with a middle-aged Japanese man telling tales about WWII and Japanese traditions? What?  WHAT? Dammit!

Akira Kurosawa

Time to go to work. Like learning any new language I would have to start from the ground up. They say it’s easier to learn a new language if you have a solid understanding of your first language. I would have to understand the vocabulary of film and how it applied to what I already knew (mainly Hollywood blockbusters) before I could begin understanding the concepts brought on by the rest of the world. I would have to immerse myself in all things foreign as well. Head on. Several million books later and a mind numbing study of film theory and I was a fan. It didn’t make me a better person or a smarter person at that. It just helped me become more in tune to the thing I cherished most. It quadrupled the amount of movies I wanted to watch (not to mention damaging my wallet with all the new videos I wanted to buy) and it gave me a better understanding of the world around me. Let’s face it… If you want to know what people are doing across the world, read the paper or watch the news. If you want to know what people are feeling across the world, study their art.

I gained a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation for the movies I watched no matter where they came from. Dreams had driven me to the actual study of film… a study that went beyond just simply viewing the movie. Like a great sensei, as he was often called by his peers, Kurosawa awoke in me the desire to learn rather than just see. At the end of the day, though, and after countless years of research and a long overdue re-viewing of Dreams, it didn’t take a long to realize what it was I had felt in common with Kurosawa all those years ago...

Like him… I dream and, like his, they are sometimes comforting and other times terrifying but always… always beautiful.