We had gone to Leicester Square to see a movie; the Prince Charles Cinema, the London cross between the Alamo Drafthouse and a dollar theatre, was showing once, and we’d both heard good things, but missed its theatrical run in the States. One of the good things about most movies opening months late here is that there are occasional second chances to see things on the big screen. If I had ever intended to watch that Robin Williams where he somehow ends up the President of the United States by accident in a theatrical setting, I’d have had the opportunity last November. You never know what’s going to open here- it can take months or longer for American films to make it to the screen here. gone baby gone still hasn’t opened in the UK because a kidnapping case had captured the nation’s attention last year, and they thought it would be in bad taste to release the picture when poor little Maddy was still missing.

But our bus was delayed, so we still missed once. Instead we caught a sneak preview of be kind rewind.

It turned out to be a good day, all told. The movie started a few hours after once was supposed to, so we had a bit of time to kill. Conveniently, our theatre was next to the National Portrait Gallery, so we took all of that in. Sometimes London can still blow my mind, realizing how major this city is. In Chicago, you can go to the Art Institute and bump into some Picasso pieces, and nighthawks at the diner and american gothic, but just rounding the corner at one of the museums here while you wait to see a movie with Jack Black, you’ll find yourself face-to-face with a Leonardo Da Vinci piece.

I’m not some serious art buff who really, like, understands this stuff, but it’s still impressive. I had never seen any of the ninja turtle artists’ work up-close, and then in the hour we killed before be kind rewind, I got a Donatello, a Raphael, and a Leonardo. Man, we’d have kicked Shredder’s ass.

(Jesus, Dan, this is why no one takes you seriously. Talk about, I dunno, how it made you feel.)

Well, this is low-brow, too, but one thing I noticed, approaching pre-Renaissance art as a novice, is that most of the stuff from before 1500 or so was all very flat, one-dimensional and dull. I mentioned to Kat that it reminded me a little bit of pre-Kirby comics art, like a Superman book from the 1940’s. Before Jack Kirby, the approach to the comics page was to draw everything more or less flat- when Superman flies, you draw a guy in a cape flying; when he crashes through a wall, you draw a wall and Superman crashing through it. Kirby changed that- he understood that you could tell a more interesting story if, say, someone was punching Superman, you drew it from the perspective of the other guy’s fist. The difference is significant, moved the artform lightyears beyond where it had been. When I was a kid, I never understood why everyone talked about Kirby like he was so great, because his art was always kind of stiff, compared to what came after him. What I didn’t get is that he made that possible.

When I explained all of this to Kat, who has actually taken art history classes, she got really excited. that’s why the renaissance is so exciting, she explained, it’s when they introduced perspective. And so we crossed into another section of the gallery, and suddenly it was a couple hundred years later, and the quantum leap in technique was measurable. Giotto di Bondone’s last supper has a lot in common with the Superman page up there, and Raphael’s Il Spasimo is sort of a spiritual ancestor of Kirby’s work.

All of which is probably very boring to people disinterested in either art or comics, or to people who understand enough about both for this to not be a revelation. But for me- man, it blew my mind.

be kind rewind, meanwhile, hit me in a really different way, but it was really powerful. I’m not always entirely on-board with Michel Gondry- I think science of sleep is boring and kind unwatchable, except for how neat it looks visually, and eternal sunshine of the spotless mind was clever, but if you don’t miss an ex, it’s not all that moving. dave chappelle’s block party and be kind rewind, though, are about the power of art, the power of community, and how these things have the potential to change the world when brought together. It’s a topic that touches a nerve for me.

I’m always jealous of collaborative artists, and those who work in a collaborative medium. I’ve learned that I’m mostly at my best when what I’m doing is between myself and a blank page, and it makes the idea of community one I think a lot about as a result. Kat thought that the movie was about applied drama, the concept she’s studying in her MA program, and I thought that it was about house shows, making music in a basement and letting everyone in the room sing along. Because both of those things are about making something small, something that isn’t intended for big stages and big screens, both to the people who are able to see and hear and watch, they’re even more moving. Because there’s an ownership involved- it becomes a part of yourself, and then you see that reflected in the art you take in. It’s something that I think may end up being a big part of the future of art and entertainment.

I’m not going to go on in grand detail right now about the shifting entertainment industry, the power of the Internet and bittorrent technology- everyone knows that the music industry is in its death throes, and that film may well be next. What I’m reminded of by the ideas in be kind rewind, or the songs my friends sing, is that this will be okay. It’s entirely possible that the past seventy years or so will be seen as an aberrant time in the history of art- this weird period when a few corporate entities controlled the means of production and distribution, and everything before and after was based in smaller communities. There were rock stars in centuries past, remember- Da Vinci and Shakespeare and the rest- and they’ll exist in the future, too. But it may not be the dominant paradigm, and it’s easy to think of what the art that comes from the smaller (and that’s not really the word I want, but I’m not sure what is) works will mean to people when you think about a picture like be kind rewind. It meant a lot to me, and I get the feeling that, however the entertainment industry’s various crises shake out, an artist like Gondry will always be a rock star.

Finally, I’ve got more to say on the subject of community in week four of the thirtying over at takingtigermountain.com.