Suprisingly Enough...

This evening I saw a very good production of (you'll never believe this) Spoon River Anthology. It was at Pomona College and runs through Sunday. I recommend it, especially if you've seen the show before and hated it.

I got a call from Linda today asking me questions about my show. It made me nervous. I can't even really remember what she needed to know, but this show does not feel very well planned-out. Audition times: that's what she wanted. Weird.

I got some free Tejava and V8 from one of the planes today. Hooray.

I have a lot more to tell you. I feel really on-edge and lazy lately. I feel like I haven't seen a lot of the people I love in a long time. I have also been listening to a lot of really old voices from my past lately and the whole effect is quite jarring.
PLUS I saw four movies this weekend and only one was good... this is normally okay, but the other three were really bad.

The Music Man was wonderful, of course. I absolutely loved it, Robert Preston, Jane Powell and all of its splendor.

Street Smart was AWFUL. God-awful. Terrible, movie-of-the-week level drama with Christopher Reeve in a completely unredeeming role, not that he was ever a good actor to begin with. Morgan Freeman plays against type as a pimp in this, and that's really why I saw it, but Street Smart is probably one of the most racist films I've ever seen in my life. It has no respect or empathy for the Black people in its urban settings and doesn't give a shit about any of them. I loathed this movie.

The Devil and Daniel Webster is a moralizing Faustian tale of bullshit set on a New Hampshire (I think) farm. It's a 1941 film from William Dieterle, whose direction is sturdy. The script is a load of crap, though, and most of the performances are pretty fucking dreary.

Last but not least, Good Bye Dragon Inn is a weird weird film. I just wish it had been more interesting. It's about the movies, I guess, but damn it's dry. The director (Lai Ming-Tsiang) has stuffed the film full of these two-minute still-life shots that don't seem to do anything at all. Strange. I kind of half-liked it, but I recommend it to no one at all.