Just thoughts on a film today, as I am sadly still rather disorganized from my cross-country move
The movie is called New Year’s Eve (2011). It is an ensemble piece with a lot of famous actors. I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but it appears to be a series of vignettes about the holiday in New York City. The 20th-century writer Jerzy Kosinski liked the vignette form, but it can seem overly fragmented.
New Year’s is an interesting holiday because it is non-religious, but it also involves resolutions to improve your life. When I was a reporter at the end of 1999 during the worries about Y2K technological breakdowns, a Russian government official on a conference call joked that Russian people and even their reporters had better things to do on that day than worry about tech failure.
He turned out to be right.
Also, “New Year’s Day” by U2 is one of my favorite pop songs. Bono has a good sense of political (even military) conflict and personal depression or intensity. There’s a good video for it with the band riding horses through a snow-filled forest carrying white flags.