Romance on the High Seas (1948)

Romance on the High Seas was Doris Day's first film, and she is billed fourth. Someone made a mistake; she would become a huge star – much bigger than everyone else who is billed higher than her here. She is incredible in this, and frankly the whole thing is quite fun. Day and Oscar Levant, especially, are hilarious.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Honestly, I hate stuff like Michael Curtiz's The Charge of the Light Brigade. This is one in something like a score of Errol Flynn–Olivia de Havilland pictures. He's handsome; she's boring. But none of that has any effect on this movie, which foregoes the usual swashbuckling version of Flynn in favor of a "noble" British officer fighting the Russians (apparently) in colonial India.

It's just impossible for me to be on the side of these British, who are hanging out in India and trying to protect Victorian interests on the subcontinent. I find it simply inconceivable that I am supposed to root for these men in mufti attempting to "tame" (or whatever other nonsense term they use) a country that isn't theirs in the first place. I don't care how many times the film refers to them as savages or shows them killing women and children. The British do not belong there.

This film's score (by Max Steiner) was nominated for an Oscar, but the music's insistent trumpets and constant use of martial pacing, as well as its reliance on quotation of "Rule Britannia" annoyed me just as much as the rest of Curtiz's movie.

Mostly, I must admit, I just didn't care about any of this. There is a love plot – two brothers love the same woman – but I couldn't be bothered one bit. The film quotes Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" repeatedly by substituting its words for actual action, but the whole time I was just bored. To me it all felt as tired as Tennyson does.

I guess it is also worth saying that this is one of those films that thinks waging war, dying in war, and fighting over pieces of land that the generals themselves acknowledge they think are not worth fighting about are noble, valiant acts. And in this way The Charge of the Light Brigade is truly full of shit. When the film ended, with literally hundreds of men being killed by cannon fire because of an arrogant, foolish decision on the part of Flynn's character, it was driven home again to me just how nonsensical the whole thing was. Hundreds of men dying for a frivolous act of revenge, done to avenge an act that would never have happened in the first place if the English had just stayed on their island.

L.A. Update #2

I've been keeping busier. Last night I went to see Luisa Fernanda at Los Angeles Opera. It was delightful. I hated the set, but I had never seen a zarzuela before, and this was a really cool experience particularly because I got to hear Plácido Domingo sing the lead male role. Boy does that man have a voice!
Being downtown made my heart ache to live in Los Angeles again. There's Southern California and there's Southern California. I realized today that I like living in Tallahassee a lot better than I like living in La Verne (where my folks live). Everyone is so white out here and it all feels so... I don't know how else to describe it except by using the word fake. Everything is a chain store: chain coffee and chain restaurants and chain clothing stores and more chain restaurants. Chain hardware stores and chain movie rental stores. Chain jewelry stores, chain bagel shops and chain auto mechanics. It's a town without a bookstore. At least Tallahassee feels lived in. It's an eerie feeling: like living in a big Hollywood movie where everything is predictable.
But downtown doesn't feel like that at all. It feels different and new and messy and unpredictable. I went to the opera with Derek. We didn't even dress up: jeans and dress shirts. And we had a great time. It's just so nice down there. And the weather! I love Los Angeles.

I finished Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book Epistemology of the Closet which is really brilliant. And I started Foucault's The History of Sexuality Part II: The Use of Pleasure, but I am getting a little bored. I need some fiction in my life, I think. Maybe I will pick up some Noël Coward for a lark.

I've been watching movies too. Melville's Bob le Flambeur (1956) is easily as good as his later masterpieces Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. I am in LOVE with Jean-Pierre Melville. This man makes some brilliant fucking movies. Bob is an über-cool heist film without a heist. And it's an obvious predecessor to what would be called the French New Wave. The French New Wave would have been unthinkable without Bob le Flambeur (or, I think, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, another must-see from the 1950s.) It's a mid-1950s noir, betraying Melville's fascination with all things Yankee, but it's attitudes and self-satisfaction are unmistakeably French. Add this one to your Netflix queue.

Captain Blood is your standard Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The first one, I think. I'd never seen it, and I liked it a lot. There isn't quite enough swordfighting for my taste, but it's totally fun nonetheless and the cinematography is amazing. It also stars Olivia de Havilland, who was in all of those 1930s Errol Flynn pictures with him—before she finally escaped with Gone with the Wind and started racking up Oscars for her shelves.

Everyone's been hailing Once as a new kind of movie musical. It's a really good film, but it isn't really a watershed event in movie musical history or anything like that. Actually, it's not even really a musical so much as it is a movie with a lot of music in it. The movie follows an aspiring musician in Ireland as he records his first album and falls in love. It's filled with songs that he strums out on a guitar. I really liked it, and it has a near-perfect ending, but don't go in expecting it to change your life. It's just a really cool indie.

And Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is no Oldboy. That's all I'm saying.

Headache

I am sad about the headache that I have.  I am meeting D in Claremont in less than an hour though and who knows what fun we'll have!  It's nothing really that spectacular spectacular, but it will be a nice break.

This morning I went to Old Town to see Yankee Doodle Dandy.   Now, I do not consider myself un-American, but flag waving really at any level makes me uncomfortable.  I start to feel a little weird.  I do not understand the whole idea of patriotism.  I don't think my country is better than any other country, and frankly the whole idea of the nation as the main actor in world politics feels very weird.  I don't think that I feel any more connected to someone in Boston than I do to someone in Vancouver.  People from Tucson are to me no stranger than people from London.  I feel strange making a big show of uniting myself to people in Boston and Tucson instead of people in Vancouver or London.  I guess, too, I am not terribly excited about the fact that I live here.  Not that I am miserable in any way.  I love life and all, but I don't honestly feel that this country is any better than anyone else's, and I think it very strange that a lot of people actually believe this.  I am happy to take ownership of people like O'Neill and Albee and Williams and Kushner, but I have just as much respect for people like Lorca and Wilde and Ibsen and Chekhov. 

Maybe, too, it has to do with the fact that I have no desire to come to blows (I almost wrote "fisticuffs"... this comes into my head as if it were normal conversation!) about anything.  I don't believe in violence.  I don't believe in war.  I don't believe it profits people much of anything.  Now, uprisings against dictatorships and elitist classes and horrible motherfuckers like Saddam Hussein, I am all in favor of.  But these are conflicts that come from within as opposed to going somewhere to kill people.  This has kind of gone somewhere I didn't mean it to go... what I think I wanted to say was that, though I appreciate George M. Cohan songs like Give My Regards to Broadway and Yankee Doodle Dandy, that song Over There really creeps me out.  The idea of selling war to the American public is something I am very much opposed to.  Writing a little song so that we can sell war as if it were Fruit Loops is some serious false advertising.

Wahima likes my voice mail message.  Yay. 

Jill comes home tomorrow for a week.  Double Yay.

I don't think Kill Bill, Vol. 2 comes out until 4/16.  Sorry, Wa.

Love yourselves.

My Cousin Got into UCLA

How exciting that my cousin got into UCLA!  I am very proud. 

I am starting to feel productive again.  I get into such funks!  Maybe Kim's Depression survey was right and I am Bi-Polar II (Is that what we were, Wa?)  Anyway, I cut the second third of LLL last night.  By that, I mean Act IV.  Gawd, the last 2 acts are more than half of the play.  I didn't cut Acts I-III too much, because there are too many plot points and too much funny business, but I ct the shit out of Act IV.  (There is a lot of shit, too.)  This play must be the most dated of any of Shakespeare's plays.  It is just joke after joke.  I mean, imagine standup in the late Sixteenth Century and imagine how many times you would laugh. 

That's my point exactly.  But I did do a lot of work.

AND I watched The Lost Weekend by Billy Wilder.  Preachy, preachy.  Yuck.  It wasn't even that interesting a portrait of a drunk.  Just... kids, don't drink.  That's no basis for a film.  I don't know how the book reads, but the movie is over the top.  American's were into that stuff in the 40s, though... Gentleman's Agreement won Best Picture in 48 and Going My Way in 45.  Preach, preach, preach.  The Academy is so weird... an amazing picture like Casablanca can win, and then a picture like Going My Way and then something incredible like The Best Years of Our Lives and then another sermon from the screen like Gentleman's Agreement.  So strange.  Taste comes and goes based on the times, I guess.

I realized yesterday that I spend a lot of time and energy resisting doing what I ought to just do in the first place.  Like yoga.  Seriously, I make myself tired and irritable and maybe even sick simply resisting exercise.  How good for me is that!  This morning I got up and just did it.  What am I waiting for?

Happy Saint Paddy's day!  I'm not really Irish, because I'm not Catholic, but I have the blood, so there.