1. Hundreds of videotapes lie in the middle of the street. A steamroller methodically drives over them. Signorney Weaver: "Make another pass." 2. Jack Black kicks the light pole, and because his whole body is magnetized his foot sticks. 3. The fan-blade/piano wire contraption used to make the footage look like an old movie.
A whole lot of fun. So much lo-fi creativity in this movie. Gondry doesn't let the story get in the way either.
1. Don's story about Anna Magnani farting. So crass, but I bet Pasolini would have appreciated it. 2. "Yes, I know Charlize Theron. But you know how I feel about her. Vacuous." 3. The simultaneously controlled and anguished drawings Don made while Chris lay dying. The Saturday morning Don spent drawing the corpse after he passed away. Drawing as a means of processing grief.
1. On a TV monitor during the setup for the debate, for a brief moment the two candidates' heads are superimposed. Brilliant. 2. Peter Boyle grabs a chair and backs himself into the elevator, shouting, "Stay back! Stay back!" Like a lion tamer. 3. Great final shot. The empty hotel room, the debris of the campaign. The feeling that he will never again be alone, that he will forever be surrounded by people, the political entourage.
1. She tries on the dress by draping it in front of her, inserting her head in the neck-hole while it's still on the hanger. 2. Julien grabs her bag, tugs on her arm and physically drags her off the train, up the stairs and into a cafe. He quickly orders two beers. 3. Parker Posey with a hangover: dazed expression, a dull but familiar pain, full of grit.
It blew me away. Completely romantic yet completely honest, which makes for some painful viewing. True romance is painful, a fact which most mainstream movies on the subject fail to adequately capture. The characters and situations are so believable, so funny. I don't know the last movie I saw that's felt so real to me--as in, real people up on the screen. People in which I saw parts of myself and parts of people I've known. Perhaps it just hit me in some of my soft spots. Parker Posey is fantastic, and it's great to see Gena Rowlands as her mom (and Peter Bogdanovich as her stepfather!) I highly recommend this movie. And of course now I want to go back to Paris more than ever.
1. The poster for the show "We'll Dance Till The Cows Come Home" on Corky's wall. 2. Fred Willard: "She hasn't cried this much since the day we got married." 3. Bob Balaban conducting the orchestra, hunched over like a scientist manipulating a petri dish.
Yesterday when I got off work I made my way north to the Spice House, where I indulged myself by buying three jars of seasonings: Spicy Cajun, Taco, and Sunny Paris. I really love just spending time in the store and walking around smelling everything. It's intoxicating.
By the time I was finished it was about 5.30. I rang up Andy at work and suggested we go to Las Pinatas for dinner. It was perfect. A half-pitcher of margaritas is just exactly enough for two people. After dinner we hopped a northbound Broadway bus and got off at Barry. I stopped into Intelligentsia and got some beans and then (like we really needed to do this) we went to Reckless. I picked up some used jazz, Serge Chaloff and Stanley Turrentine, at bargain prices and Andy bought the first two seasons of Moonlighting on DVD. Oh boy. Sad to say but I've never seen the show. So I guess I'm about to take the plunge.
We got home a bit after 9 and all of a sudden my body decided it was time to shut down. I got incredibly sleepy. Just lost all will. After listening to a bit of my purchases I went to bed and immediately fell asleep. It was 9.45.
Walking to Las Pinatas I overheard a girl talking on her cell phone. She had obviously just moved here and was talking to a friend back home. This is what she said: "Yeah, it's more spread out than New York ... I'm still not sure about the public transit system but it seems to work ... I haven't started looking for a job yet ... There's so much to do here this summer ... The two months of fall are going to be awesome but then there'll be four months of winter and I'm going to kill myself ... And the people here are so nice! Oh my God!"
“Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”
Andy and I knows exactly what this means. Take last night for an example: 6pm martini + ordering delivery from Art of Pizza + couch = watch a DVD. In this case, Space: 1999.
1. Anne Savage's pronunciation of "tire iron." 2. Three or four travelers slumped over a table on a train car, continuously falling asleep and then trying to wake up. 3. I'm paraphrasing here but Guy Maddin says, "At a certain age the backgrounds in the photos become more important than the people in them."
Today during my lunchbreak I thought I'd get a haircut. I decided to try out this little barbershop across the street from my office building. It's a garden-level place called the Medina Barbershop. I'd never been there before. I walk in and sit down in the chair and it's very comfy. This older gentleman asks me what I'd like, and I tell him I usually get a #2 buzz all the way around. He tells me sure thing and proceeds to cut my hair perfectly, all by eye, without using an electric shaver. We get to talking and yadda yadda he tells me he's Studs Terkel's barber. In fact, Studs had just come in for a haircut the day before. The barber said that he was looking a lot better. He's 96, you know.
1. The graffiti on the walls of the phone booth at The Retreat nightclub. 2. Gloria Grahame stirring up a pitcher of cocktails with what looks like a candy cane. 3. Lee Marvin peels off some bills from his wad and tells Carolyn Jones to go buy herself something pretty.
Joey asked me last night how I felt about Obama's vote. I don't honestly know. Sure, I'm disappointed. But I also believe that he knows what he's doing, and that his decision was probably a tortuous one. I honestly can't help but feel that there are bigger fish to fry. So it doesn't worry me. What makes me feel good is that throughout this whole situation he has not disengaged himself from criticism; has in fact welcomed it and addressed people's gripes directly. I'm not an Obama supporter because I agree with him 100% about every little thing. I'm an Obama supporter because I believe that he has what it takes to get us to move ourselves forward. He's already shown that. And what's more, all through the primaries there were people second-guessing and criticizing his every move. Yet he won the primaries.
So no, I don't agree with his vote. But yes, I stil believe the man knows what he's doing.
On the other hand, McCain didn't even bother to show up.
1. The Cold Turkey Doll says, "I love you. Smoking gives you cancer." 2. Dick Van Dyke wears black socks with his running shoes. Was this as uncool in 1971 as it is in 2008? 3. Jean Stapleton pouring herself a glass of orange juice as she sneezes, over and over again.
I'll say it again: why the hell is this not on DVD yet?
I remember the broken window of my grandfather's garage, the broken lawnmower which hung from the rafters. I remember waiting until 5 to wake up. About 15 years later, remembering the past in a dream I'd just had. Thinking back to that morning. I don't know how old I was. Walking along the quiet street, stopping to study a hamburger wrapper flattened against the edge of a metal pole. A teenager in oversized clothes, killing time with a cigarette on the sidewalk and a gray wreath of mist around his mouth. He looked at me but to this day I don't know if he actually saw me. A forest of lampposts and parking meters ...
Outside my grandparents' house on Emerson, which has since vanished, there was a huge maple. When I was a boy my grandfather dug up one of its seedlings and put it in a coffee can with some soil. We planted it in front of our own house, and it's still there. But we are not. The maple outlasted us. We don't live there anymore.
Time's yellowed hands changed the plastic thermometer on my grandparents' porch into an icon. The thing still told you how hot it was even though its seams had been split years before I even came along. Next to it, tacked into a bit of crumbled mortar between the bricks of the wall, was a gray strip whose purpose was to hold a gas station calendar from 1965. The picture, warped from many seasons' weather, showed a wheat field with a sunrise behind it. The paper had thinned and you could see the previous month's grid on the other side of the page.
In the sitting room was the recliner, my grandfather's throne. On occasion I was allowed to sit in it for brief periods of time. I never saw my grandmother in it though. She sat in a flowery armchair against the wall.
In the closet was a leather jacket, flawless as the day it was purchased from K-Mart in 1983.
Near the garage with the broken lawnmower was a small patch of earth where my grandfather grew strawberries and rhubarb. The last time I ever ate a whole strawberry was when my grandfather pulled one from the ground, rinsed it with water from the hose, twisted off the top and popped it into my mouth. Lining the windowsills of the garage were empty jam jars, collected over the decades, which he would use to collect earthworms before he went fishing.
A particular moment as a boy, holding my little brother's hand. His hand in mind--I felt like a boy. And not a boy. And a boy.
Mom would scold my grandmother about her habit of storing leftover soup in the can in the fridge. Lectures about lead poisoning. To this day, when I think of Campbell's Chicken Noodle I see the interior gray ribs of the can and the bits of chicken left at the bottom. What remained after she'd emptied it into a saucepan. I see also the Cream of Wheat my grandfather made me for breakfast, so early the farm report was on the radio. The hot cereal poured into a large ceramic bowl, gray with two green stripes running parallel around the rim. Cooled down by half & half so that I wouldn't burn my mouth. The large sugarshaker with the flip-top spout. The stray sugar granules dusting the formica tabletop like little stars.
1. He lifts her veil to kiss her, but only lifts it high enough to uncover her lips. 2. She sits down in a chair. He rushes over to her, kneels at her feet and rests his head in her lap. Meanwhile he scoops up the coins that have fallen to the floor. He adjusts the position of his body slightly in order to collect more coins, all the while keeping his head in her lap. 3. When Franz is dragged away at the end, he keeps his face covered with his arm. From shame? Embarrassment?
1. Liza Minnelli, complete with jazz hands: "Girls! Girls! Girls!" 2. Tommy Dorsey taking a trombone solo, his wrist deftly making the changes on his plunger. Wriggling around to get that vibrato. 3. The long corridor of light bulbs. De Niro kicks at them as he's thrown out of the club. After he's been removed, the bouncers go back inside. Broken lightbulbs on the ground.
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