A good musical should make you believe that there really is a world where people spontaneously burst into song
So, apparently there was lots of good TV on over the holiday break. Some book adaptations, perhaps? Maybe a sexed-up period drama? Alas, I missed it all. Instead, I was watching Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, his semi-autobiographical film about divorce. Because what better way to capture the festive spirit than watching a couple scream at one another? Except, that’s not really what I did, either, because when I say, “I watched Marriage Story”, what I actually mean is, I’ve been rewatching the same three minutes on
Netflix, as if I were caught in a never-ending temporal loop.
Now that movies are increasingly released almost straight to streaming, going to the cinema feels almost as quaint as buying a book in hardback. And while Martin Scorsese might bemoan this development, on the bright side, it does means my fellow obsessives can indulge in our most compulsive behaviour, rewinding and rewatching scenes, as much as we like. And in this particular case, I rewound it about, ooh, 10 kajillion times, because it was Adam Driver singing Being Alive, from Stephen Sondheim’s Company.