Radio Days

I didn't see the whole movie on Sunday, due to an interruption by dinner and Britney Spears, but I thought I'd post some preliminary thoughts anyways. What a sweet, nostalgic piece - and there's nothing quite like sweet nostalgia to make you feel old. Radio Days is the semi-autobiographical story of Woody Allen's childhood in post-war Brooklyn, and how his memories are flavored by the pop milieu wafting through the radio programs. A VERY young Seth Green plays the young Woody-Allen-character. It's trippy not only because it makes you see a non-existent resemblance between Woody Allen and Seth Green, but there's also something about Seth Green aging so much that makes you suddenly wake up, as if from a dream, to the cognizance of just how dismally dismally short life is. It must have something to do with the way the years are telescoped; you see this tale of a begone era - historic and distant, as mythical as the Minotaur if you were born in the Reagan era, like me - that is described with loving memory as if it were just yesterday. Then you have babyfaced Seth Green (who looks eerily unchanged) living in that begone era, even while you know that it was actually circa 1985 at the time - and all the time you think elapsed while Seth Green was transforming from that babyface to the Robot Chicken guy (1940-20XX in the Radio Days fictional world) is comparatively just a blink of eye (1985-20XX in real life). Then you see vividly how much has happened (to Seth Green and to the rest of the world) in such a fraction of a time, and you're assaulted with the perspective that man's life is but a day. These meager years, which make up the Alpha and Omega of my existence, are just a speck of the human history, which in turn is a speck of the universal history. All these changes which I think are so monumental are next to meaningless. In fact, so many of the great movers and shakers of my inner world (Joey Ramone, Montgomery Clift) have long since gone poof! Truly, man's life is but a day.