fine whine

Just when I thought that I had this falling asleep after dinner nonsense licked, tonight I just nodded off completely until half an hour ago. Never mind the fact that this is becoming tiresome (ha ha ha) but it's severely cramping my style. I'm beginning to advance the theory that I'm falling asleep because of a lack of desire to stay awake, caused by a lack of interesting stimuli. I haven't brought home any new movies since last weekend, and The parallax view unfortunately caught me when I was genuinely too tired to watch a slower-moving movie like that. But that's crap. I think I'm just tired and rambling on about it for no reason.

So go watch Billy liar and read Lee Child's Jack Reacher books, because they're good and interesting and I don't want to write about them today.

I think I figured out why watching movies (at home) with my wife is frustrating—she doesn't respect them. Tonight we watched The Stepford wives and twenty minutes from the end she gave up completely and went off and did something else. This is after having made fun of it at various points such that I couldn't listen to the dialogue (which for many films is entirely appropriate, just not "classics" like this one). Not only that, but when she came back into the living room and the DVD was done she asked me what had ultimately happened. Instead of explaining I replayed the two relevant scenes, but I think she remained puzzled. At this point I should mention that we watched the 1975 version, as it seems that some sort of remake is in the works.

Hollywood really is eating itself.

Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good film, considerably better than (the same author's) Rosemary's baby though certainly in the same vein. Anyway, not to give anything away or anything like that but to have Jessica disagreeing with me on something like this just shows that she hasn't, in fact, been replaced with a "perfect" copy, and I suppose that's reassuring in some way.

blah blah Donnie Brasco blah great film blah. blah blah Barry Levinson blah blah Avalon blah tedious but touching film blah blah.

But seriously, I've just found out that another college buddy of mine has been laid off. That's not something I really want to think about, as these guys are very good at their jobs (or at least should be) and I see it only as a harbinger of worse things.

Any future we have now will be its future's past.

That line just came to me, bringing with it a rhythm as though detached otherwise intact from a song or chant. Whatever that means. I'd meant to write about The Future for this entry but find myself needing to address the past. Namely, 1997, the year that Donnie Brasco premiered, just before the month of March. I was in High school then, wrapping up what was a pretty decent senior year, complete with angst-y relationships and college decisions. The extent of my exposure to sophisticated film culture was a fanatical devotion to all things Monty Python and the knowledge that a number of movies about The Godfather had been made and I should probably see them. The idea of DVDs had not occurred to me, let alone laserdiscs, and I owned a mere hundred and twenty CDs. And I missed Donnie Brasco completely—had no clue it had come out or anything like that. I probably knew only of The empire strikes back's special edition which also played that weekend. Knowing this really only helps me in my personal quest to determine exactly when the current version of my personality solidified, and it bears no meaning on the rest of you or the rest of this entry.

As I mentioned, I was thinking about the future recently. Wasting two dollars on an old widescreen laserdisc of Demolition man I watched the movie in all its letterboxed glory, and I can't say I was any more excited or disappointed from the last time I watched it, even with the additional visuals. I want to like that movie because the ideas underlying it (at least on the futurist side, not the meatheaded action) are pretty interesting and some even original. What gets me, though, is that all of the doors open themselves. Is energy so abundant that they can spare power to open every door, every time? Clearly we're not dealing with non-renewable resources here; though nobody ever mentions what makes San Angeles tick. Likewise the city in Blade runner and scads of other near future visions. I'd like to think that the future lies in clean nuclear power, but I doubt most filmmakers share my optimism. Is it so rare to find a Gene Roddenberry, who, in the course of creating a virtually completely original periodic table, invented a vastly powerful new power source such that ships hurtling through space would not only have doors that opened themselves but artificial gravity to boot? Lucas tackled the problem pretty feebly by mentioning power converters and widget generators and never showing how they work, though I am sure that in the books or comics the engineering is explained in great detail. I just don't read those books, sorry.

What books I do read are pretty varied. I'm working my way through Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and it thoroughly impresses me. Not since The curious incident of the dog in the night-time have I read a book so convincingly portraying a detective with a disorder, this time Tourette's syndrome. Of course all that I know about Tourette's is that which I've seen on TV, but the tics and compulsions as he presents them certainly have the ring of authenticity if not outright truth. Lethem's Gun, with occasional music was one of the best books I read last year and though this one's subject matter and setting differ, the hooks still pull me in just as much.

And I'd just like to settle the coolest house cat name debate now with Lethem's mention of a feline named Shelf.

As I watch the second season of C.S.I., I can't help but think that those responsible (Bruckheimer, Littman et al.) need to have some people on staff as detail-oriented as Grissom's forensics team. I don't mean to nitpick too much (continuity errors with haircuts and the like) but I would think that when they display a car's registration and then have somebody talk about it on the radio they'd be sure to have them match. I may not know the difference between a 1976 Camaro and a 1978, but I can read and hear just fine.

Niggling details aside, it's a good show. I can't imagine having to wait a week between installments nor even the five minutes for commercials, though, now that I'm used to watching my TV shows on DVD.

Here I am, having watched a number of movies and said nothing about them. Where are my manners? I think I left off with Platoon, which was probably the most conventional Vietnam war movie I've watched in the last month. But I wouldn't watch it again before Full metal jacket, but definitely before tackling Apocalypse now again, redux or not. Following that was one of history's forgotten spoof movies, The big bus of 1976. It's meant to be a rip-roaringly hilarious send-up of the disaster movie genre with its exploding buildings, quaking earths, crashing airplanes and sinking boats. It had a couple jokes, but more of its absurdity came from the lengths those responsible went to make a joke that fell flat. Surviving movies like this makes watching ZAZ spoofs like Airplane! and Top secret! so much better, as they pull it off so much more gracefully. In the middle of the bus's carnage is a fresh-faced Rene Auberjonis as a faith-questioning priest. I couldn't help but recall the last mess of a movie in which Rene played a man of the cloth, Altman's M*A*S*H, which is by far considered to be a better movie despite being an absolute mess. A mess with better characterization and more subtle joking, though.

Continuing the transportation theme was Von Ryan's express with Frank Sinatra and a bunch of recognizable people whose names nobody remembers. That reminded me of Burt Lancaster, the name everybody knows but not the face, who starred in Frankenheimer's The train. I watched that a week or so ago and bring it up primarily because its also a WWII movie about hoodwinking the Germans about a train. Both are decent though neither is a classic. Other than that, the two aren't much the same at all and I'm just going to move onto the next film.

I'm skipping over the previous paragraph to talk about Robert Altman again. On skippy's recommendation I borrowed Gosford park. Like many of the movies I've seen by the "greats" (Scorsese, Altman, Kubrick, et al.) I can recognize it for its technical merits but I cannot fall in love with it. I enjoyed a goodly amount of it, though, and it was fun to try to recognize actors I've seen in few other roles, the Clive Owenses and (Trainspotting's) Kelly MacDonalds here and there. I know that I confused the sisters and the kitchen maids (with each other, not the others). The authenticity is very convincing (though I didn't watch the supplements discussing such) and remains accessible, but in the end I'm not so sure I need to see Altman re-imagine the whodunit. I'd much rather see what he can do within the constraints of the genre, how he can elevate a conventional film out of the box, not put it in another one altogether.

Whatever. I know that it will be funnier the next time around, and then I'll be able to better spot the red herring(s? It's a possible plural) and more of the jokes, but I'm not in a hurry at present. After all I have such "great" films as Scanners, one of David Cronenberg's goriest, to slog through. Somehow the flick just didn't do anything for me. I'm no fan of gore, and to have a film bookended with an exploding head and a gooey, decomposing corpse with mainly filler in between to justify them doesn't turn my crank. I think somebody should put together a reel of his and Paul Verhoeven's exploding heads just to settle the matter once and for all as to who is the master of the blown-up cranium. And then the two of them can go on with making their subversive films that are so much more worth the time.

So that's what I've been watching lately. And I finished reading Houellebecq's Elementary particles; for a book by a Frenchman it cleansed my literary palate of the remnants of "France's greatest philosopher" Bernie Levy's Who killed Danny Pearl?. As far as the book cover is concerned Houellebecq's no philosopher, let alone a great one, but the writing's eons ahead of Levy's for philosophical musings and brutal humanity. Yadda yadda yadda I can blather on all night about books and movies, but instead I want to sit back and watch the rest of the second half of Trainspotting. I don't think Kelly MacDonald's aged a day since then.