must read after my death - The Screengrab

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 14-20, 2009

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You look marvelous. I must confess I was touched, as am I every year, when the good people at AMPAS called once again to ask me to host the Oscars. Although they begged and pleaded and cajoled and nearly stooped to bribery, as they always do, I simply could not work the telecast into my very busy schedule. I’m currently touring with my very touching one-man show about going to Yankee Stadium with my dad, watching Mickey Mantle gracefully prancing through the lush green outfield of the House That Ruth Built, sharing the laughs and the tears that only a father and son can truly know. So I don’t have time to do all the research, such as reading Up the Academy: The Screengrab Salutes the All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Truly I wish I could squeeze Phil Nugent’s Oscar Predictions, In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload, Harvey Weinstein Predicts Another Great Oscar Year for Harvey Weinstein, Oscar Prospectus and Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest into my busy schedule. But I cannot.

Nor can I read any of the following:

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death"

That tumult and unhappiness often lurk behind cheery suburban facades is a well-worn cliché, resurrected every few years by Hollywood in a manner that implies revelation. Though already deducible to anyone over the age of ten, American Beauty and its myriad ilk (including this past year’s Revolutionary Road) have now definitively established that – to use a relevant hackneyed saying – books cannot be judged by their covers, since outward appearances mainly reveal what a given subject wishes to project about itself. Yet if this truism is no longer an epiphany capable of shattering one’s sheltered worldview, it nonetheless can, when conveyed on a micro rather than macro scale, be quietly devastating, as evidenced by Morgan Dews’ Must Read After My Death. Revolutionary in neither form nor content, Dews’ documentary is – in a manner similar to Capturing the Friedmans and last year’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father – a non-fiction archival-elements collage, one that wields its trove of home movies, audio recordings, and still photographs to investigate the past, confess sins, and intimately, poetically evoke the banal tragedies of one family’s 1960s Hartford, CT life.