I can’t believe I didn’t blog for an entire month. Of course, WHEN WOULD I HAVE HAD THE TIME? Crap, it was a busy month. Between Dickens and work, I had no time. None. Zero. Zilch. I’m still behind on buying Christmas presents.
Christmas itself was great, the extend New Year’s weekend was the shiznit, and now all is calm, all is bright.
I know, I know, I’m behind. It’s actually worse than you know. I’m FOUR movies behind.
Fortunately, these two are pretty simple for me.
Lawrence of Arabia. Nathan may never speak to me again when I admit this, but it’s not my favorite. It’s really, really beautiful in every way, but the last third of it was so damned depressing that I just wanted to chew my hand off. Maybe I’ll write more about this later, but just thinking about it upsets me.
Tom Jones. All I knew about it was that there’s a scene where Tom and some chick are eating dinner, and it’s supposed to be really sexy. Guess what? It was REALLY sexy. We had to rewind and watch that scene twice. Go out and rent this. It’s an enormous amount of fun. It’s silly and very naughty and extremely clever.
We were standing by Stef’s alestand at Dickens yesterday, and as I inhaled the heavenly aroma of hot nuts and popcorn, I realized that I have four days off between now and Christmas. No, make that three. There’s no way I won’t be working on the Monday of Christmas week. AIIIIIIEEEEEEE! I have two, count ‘em, TWO presents bought.
So what did I do today with one of my three precious shopping days? You guessed it. I went to see that movie about the sparkly vampires.
Uh, Dickens workshops start on Saturday, which means that it’s going to be Christmas in about ten minutes. I’m trying not to freak out about my lack of preparedness. Clearly I need gin.
We’ll be with Paddy West again this year, yay! I love these people. They invited us to their annual Hallowe’en Zombie Walk this year, and I can honestly say I’ve never had a better Hallowe’en.
Aren’t I a pretty princess?
Zombie Disney Tourist
Flash back to the weekend of August 15th and 16th. Stunned after learning that our dear friend Jerry had suffered what we believed then to be a stroke the prior week, we cocooned at home and watched five movies: the best picture Oscar winners from 1957 through 1961. Kate, ever on top of these things, promptly posted reviews of the three that we had watched on Saturday the following day, August 16, before we launched into The Apartment and West Side Story. I said I’d write reviews of those, but, being not so disciplined as my lovely wife, here we are two months later. We subsequently watched Lawrence of Arabia, which Kate had never seen on August 23 and Tom Jones on September 8, the best picture winners for 1963 and 1963 respectively, despite the lack of reviews from the slacker husband. I said I’d write those reviews, too. You can see where this is going.
Now it’s October 25, and we’re both dying to watch My Fair Lady, the 1964 winner, but we made a pact that we wouldn’t go on until the reviews were caught up. I could make excuses for why I haven’t gotten around to it sooner, some of them legitimate, but I won’t waste your time. Dear readers, please do not blame this lapse on your Snake Surly hostess, she has been overly patient waiting for me to come through on my pledge. So, with no further ado . . .
The Apartment: The imdb listing for The Apartment categorizes it as romance, comedy and drama and it truly crosses genres by embodying elements of all three. I already knew and loved the work of Billy Wilder from other classics like Some Like It Hot, also co-starring Jack Lemmon, but I was not prepared for the bleak landscape in which this black comedy unfolds. Jack Lemmon plays an insurance man who earns favor and promotions by loaning out his apartment to executives in the company as a discreet location to meet their mistresses. Comedy ensues when the hapless Lemmon can’t even go home to bed when he’s got a terrible cold because the apartment is promised to an executive who won’t take no for an answer. There’s a glimmer of hope for our hero when sparks fly with the quirky and beautiful elevator operator, played by Shirley MacLaine at her hottest. Tragically, she is caught up in a destructive relationship with the married personnel manager, Fred MacMurray, who is one of our hero’s biggest patrons. I was stunned by the Wilder’s genius in pulling this movie together. What seems initially to be a classic romantic comedy one moment and a tragedy the next resolves into a perfectly paced cohesive film with laughter balancing despair. Running underneath is a biting social commentary on the abuses people are willing to suffer to get ahead on the job or to hold on to what they perceive to be love. Watching The Apartment for the first time was one of the great treats of this project.
West Side Story: To be completely honest, I was not looking forward to watching West Side Story. I had never seen the movie, but I had seen enough mediocre community theatre and summer repertory productions to “know” that the story was dated and plodding. That said, I have always loved and appreciated Leonard Bernstein’s music despite not caring for the play itself. And with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, I always thought that it should be a far better show. Well, I am not too proud a man to admit my mistakes. From the beginning of the overture and the credits, I was enthralled. The film version showed me that, like its inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story is a timeless work of genius. Moreover, I think this is one of the best film versions of a musical that I’ve ever seen. So often, filmed dance numbers lose the flavor of the dance with the camera jumping from close up to close up and giving only an occasional sense of what you would have seen in the theater. Here, Jerome Robbins’ brilliant, and perfectly executed, choreography is front and center, translated from the proscenium to the streets of New York, where the Sharks and the Jets make it seem completely natural. Watching West Side Story was a breathtaking experience for me from beginning to end. My sincerest apologies to Messrs. Bernstein, Robbins and Sondheim for any unkind words I have said about West Side Story in the past. I was sadly deluded.
This concludes the reviews for our August 15th and 16th movie marathon. Lawrence of Arabia and Tom Jones will follow shortly.
So it’s been a challenging month and a half. This whole Jerry thing has really messed with my head. I’ve had people I loved die on me, but never anyone who I saw at least once a week. Never anyone who smoothed things over and made thing work and was the glue in my disfunctional little society. It’s been a month and a half, and I still can’t get through the day without missing him.
Northern has been so hard without Jerry. He loved it so much, and he loved us, but though I’ve never really believed in such things before, I can feel him watching us. There are certain songs that we sing where I know absolutely without a doubt that he’s there. I look up at that crazy blue sky through those tall trees with the yellow leaves, and if I concentrate, I can hear his voice. Then I look over my right shoulder and he’s not there and it’s like a sandbag hit me on the head.
Despite this, it’s been without a doubt, the best run of Faire I’ve ever had. Will had to re-write all the shows at the last minute, and because of that, I now have a really cool character whom I adore, and I’m having the time of my life playing her (I mean him) (I mean her), and I suppose I owe it all to you, Jerry.
Since my last fabulous, insightful post, we’ve watched three more Oscar Challenge films. We liked them all, but I don’t feel like reviewing them just yet.
A really good friend of ours died unexpectedly on Wednesday night. I can barely get through the day without melting down, so my fabulous and insightful movie reviews are going to have to wait until I can string three coherent sentences together.
Oh, yeah, and if you’re reading this, Universe? You are cordially invited to suck it.
We haven’t been watching a lot of movies lately, since we were getting ready for our ragin’ housewarming party. It raged, it was great, but we really needed a weekend off. Yesterday morning we decided to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai. When we were done with that, we played the “What do you wanna do, I don’t know, what do you wanna do” game and decided to dive right into Gigi. And then when we were finished with that, clearly the only thing that could be done was to start up Ben-Hur.
All spectacle, all the time, people. But boy, who knew spectacle came in so many flavors?
So The Bridge on the River Kwai. This is one of my dad’s favorites, so I’ve seen it many times. I haven’t sat through the whole thing in over ten years, though, probably because I had this idea that it’s really long and drawn out. Yeah, it’s long (2 and a half hours), but not that long. And there are scenes that stretch out and go on and on and on, but there’s not a second of wasted film. Everything David Lean wants you to see, he shows you, and you have to feel everything for yourself. There’s not a lot of talking, and the action scenes aren’t underscored. The scene near the end where the demolitions team is sneaking in to wire up the bridge is scored with only the rushing of the river and the breathing of the actors, and it’s absolutely riveting.
Everybody on the planet, I’m sure, has seen a clip of the climax where the bridge explodes and the train goes off the cliff, which is mind-blowing, but if you’ve watched the previous two hours and fifteen minutes of setup, you realize this movie isn’t a spectacle at all, it’s not even an epic. It’s an intensely personal story about two men who both have the tragic inability to see anything other than absolutes, which inevitably causes a literal and figurative train wreck.
Gigi, on the other hand, is spectacle, and I know a couple of you are going to gasp in horror here, but I’d never seen this before. And if that offends you, stop now, because I am about to confess something else. (Are you gone?) Okay, I was stunned to decide that I didn’t really like it. Of course I adored Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold, Leslie Caron was enchanting, and duh, how can you go wrong with Cecil Beaton and Lerner and Lowe? But it’s all so…cluttery. The set of Gigi’s grandmother’s apartment with the red wallpaper and the Victorian knick-knacks made me want to gouge my eyeballs out after about an hour. The story seemed to lack focus, and the constant reprises of songs just annoyed me. Worst of all, it was so predictable and obvious. Yack. I am desperately trying not to skip ahead to watch My Fair Lady, to which this hugely pales in comparison.
And now to the surprise hit of the weekend, Ben-Hur. I know I’ve never seen this before in one sitting. Both Nathan and I have always lumped this movie in with all those other Biblical epics, such as the loathsome Ten Commandments. All I really knew about this movie was that there’s an awesome chariot race, and it’s got that guy from the NRA in it, and they play it on the TV at Easter time and it’s got something to do with Jesus, who cures some lepers or something. I was expecting a bloated, over-produced, preachy extravaganza featuring the horrendous over-acting of said Mr. Heston, whom, I was shocked to find out took Best Actor this year. I was prepared to loathe this.
Well, put me in a dress and call me Sally. Ben-Hur isn’t mindless DeMille-esque spectacle! It’s a frakking William Wyler film! It isn’t all about Jesus! And Charlton Heston is fabulous! Who knew? I don’t even know where to start. Okay, let’s start with the scene I’d seen before, the breathakingly exciting chariot race. I was at my parents’ house this Easter and they were half-watching Ben-Hur on their tiny little TV, but when the chariot scene came on, they stopped and watched it, so I had to, too. And I was thinking, yawn, oh, boy, it’s a spectacle, Charlton Heston is in a chariot race with some mustache-twirling bad guy with knives on his wheels just like in the drag race in Grease. But guess what? It’s not a mustache-twirling bad guy. It’s a really, really good person who has made some terrible choices and has gone horribly down the wrong path. But it gets better than that. NONE of the villians, not even Pontius Pilate, KNOWN bad guy, is portrayed as one-dimensionally evil. These Romans have a a job to do, and they’re doing what they have to do because they’re doing what they think is right. It’s fascinating to watch.
I thought this film was going to be all about a story, and it turned out to be about people, and every person in it seemed very real. Everyone made choices, good and bad, some changed their minds, some didn’t. I’m delighted that I changed mine. (And Charlton Heston has a smokin’ bod. I’m just sayin’.)
I’ve been trying to watch all these movies as objectively as possible. I’m attempting not to think about racism, sexism, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, whateverism, but just trying to imagine the mindset of the viewer when when the movie was first released. Sometimes that’s downright impossible to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Around the World in 80 Days a lot, but dammit, I want a story, not a travelogue. The drawn-out scenes of dancing senoritas, bullfights (sorry, that’s just gross), Indian rituals, extended vistas of the American west were all picturesque and stuff, but they did NOTHING to advance the storyline. Yes, the cinematography was impressive, but enough! Throw me a little character development! Aaaiiiee! And my god, the ethnic stereotypes. Horrible.
On the other hand, David Niven is the picture of elegance as Phileas Fogg, that Cantinflas guy was pretty funny, and once I got over the ridiculous makeup, I very much enjoyed Shirley MacLaine’s Princess Aouda. The millions of cameos were fun to spot, and it all was very grand and impressive.
I think maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for a spectacle the night we watched it. I hope I get over that feeling soon, because the next couple of movies are ALL SPECTACLE, ALL THE TIME.
So we went over to Scott and Elizabeth’s this evening for extended cocktail hour. Scott made us some daiquiris and we strolled around their back yard, a huge portion of which has been taken over by their gigantic vegetable garden. (I’m starting to get reeeeeally cranky with all you people and your gigantic non-container gardens.)
Scott always has wonderful things to eat, but he’s been on a dairy products rampage lately (he made me make yogurt, which is fabulous, but of course theirs is way better). Gentle readers, I am not making this up. He made some creme fraiche, which is cool enough, but then he made BUTTER out of it. It was absolutely ridiculous. It was buttery and tangy and creamy and so, so delicious. There was also regular butter, but it paled in comparison.
We were marveling that we hardly ever buy bread anymore (except baguette, which I can’t do yet), we make our own yogurt, cocktail ingredients (Elizabeth got her hands on a boatload of fresh cherries and brandied those suckers), BUTTER FROM CREME FRAICHE THAT YOU MADE, bacon, tomatoes, mayo, you name it. Nathan observed that except for items that are stored in the bathroom, we hardly ever go to the supermarket any more. So it got us wondering.
Could we go a whole month without going into a grocery store for food? We’re thinking of taking up this challenge. Some rules would have to be set. Obviously we could go in for things like Tampax and Kleenex and Windex and other things containing an ‘x’, but all the bread would be baked at home or bought at Acme or Model or wherever. I can get milk and eggs and butter, coffee and pork products at work or at the Oxbow or the Ferry Plaza. I can get limes and lemons and other vital staples from the Oxbow. Distilling is ILLEGAL AND I’D NEVER DO THAT (okay, I would, but I don’t have a still), so going to BevMo for gin would be cool. (Nathan has a CO2 cylinder, so we can make our own soda water, and we already make our own tonic syrup.) I get my cat litter and stupid expensive-ass lamb liver picky motherfucker cat food from the Pet Food Express (or the local feed store) - that seems okay. Anything else? Ideas?
I think we might do this. I’ll keep you posted. We are having a party in a couple of weeks, for which I think we’d need brief project amnesty, but otherwise I have confidence that this could work out. Of course, then I’d be woefully unaware of what those Jon and Kate people are doing, but I don’t actually know who they are anyway so that might not be so bad.
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