[if you want to see all my October movie reviews, just click the “review” category at right]

The horror movie originally scheduled for this slot has been preempted to bring you this scary mutha. Hold onto your hats.

Backstory: I lived in New York from 1976 to 1982. On the whole, it was an intensely unhappy time for me. In respect to the players in that drama who are still living, I’ll keep the curtains closed on the gorier details out here in the blogosphere.

What an strange time to be in New York. I lived in the uber-WASP version of the ‘burbs, and New York City was glittering, dangerous and dirty. I lived with my father who ran with a cinemaphile crowd in those days, so there were lots and lots of trips to the City to see everything. Bergman. Star Wars. Chaplin festivals. I even audited a “Psychology in Cinema” class with dad, and delved into Antonioni and Cassavetes before I even hit high school.

I can remember the reverberations around Woody Allen‘s Interiors as people tried to process .. this .. block of ice after the lovely passion of Annie Hall. I think my dad kept me away from this one, perhaps sensing that I might fall apart, like I did while watching the most feel-bad movie ever, Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. I may be mis-remembering the timeline, as both movies came out the same year. I’ll have to dig into my diaries for the answer, and I’m afraid I am too frail for that at this moment.

If Augusten Burroughs (who programmed Interiors for TCM) talks about how hard the film is to watch, you know we are deep into fucked-family territory. It’s very bitter and dry in a talky 70s way. Charmless and remote. Completely soundtrack-free. Squeeze the heat out of Ordinary People and we’re getting there. Diane Keaton spits out nearly every line of dialog in the same timber I used throughout a majority of my adolescence.

It hits me on a lot of personal levels, as perhaps you are sensing. There’s drinking, angry sisters, even a beach house. How happiness (personified by the incredible Maureen Stapleton) can be a displaced, unwelcome emotion. Living in the presence of a huge, towering absence. The peculiar, cramped-but-echoey houses that only seem to exist on the east coast. And those bad, bad perms.

In 1978, at the age of 14, I was the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist was me.