The Anderson Tapes (1972)

Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes is a satire of the surveillance state, perhaps more in conversation with Lumet’s own 1976 satire of television, Network, than with its more obvious companions, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Brian De Palma's Blowout (1981). 

Coppola’s version of the surveillance state, for example, is one of terror and darkness, a descent into madness brought on by the panopticon. Lumet’s version is much, much lighter. He sees all of this collecting of audio and video as so much wasted manpower, so much squandered money, and so much ill-spent time. Six people in a room talking about a video tape and trying to gain information about what's happening between a 90-year-old man and his son when nothing at all is happening! Lumet’s movie thinks the police state is absurd—like Kafka but comic. 

I think this comic quality is relatively hard to see from the perspective of 2025—and so Lumet's film feels weird from this vantage. We are used to thinking of surveillance as an evil, malicious, signifier of unstoppable state power. (The key 2025 example is, I suppose, Edgar Wright's The Running Man.) In The Anderson Tapes, though, all this recording is petty and stupid, and the agencies aren’t talking to one another, and no one knows anything about anything, even though everything is being recorded. The key to this is the truly insane sequence where the cops jump from roof to roof in act three, and the hilarious scene a bit later in which they try to talk to one another on walkie-talkies but can’t get a signal. The robbery is, of course, uncovered by a HAM radio—not any of the new surveillance devices from the 70s. In fact, even that discovery is nearly hampered by the bureaucracy at the telephone switchboard. (If you doubt my argument here look again at the film’s finale, in which all the agencies are obliged to erase their recordings.) 

All of this is to say that The Anderson Tapes works as a thriller (I watched it as part of a Criterion Channel series called 70s Thrillers), but it’s more of a scathing satire than it is anything else: a mockery of the 1970s surveillance state and the grotesque waste it involves.

The Deadly Affair (1967)

Decided to watch another British spy movie scored by Quincy Jones, since I liked A Dandy in Aspic so much and the Criterion Channel had a whole selection of movies scored by Jones. The Deadly Affair was directed by Sidney Lumet from a novel by John le Carré and starred James Mason, Maximilian Schell (great as always), and Simone Signoret.

The Deadly Affair got a bit of a slow start, but it ended up being quite good. I won't spoil the mystery by talking about it, but this is definitely a film worth watching. The main takeaway here is that Simone Signoret – and we already knew this, so I guess it was no surprise – is a genius. She gives an incredible performance. She's sensitive and hard at the same time, vulnerable and vicious, brokenhearted and steel. It's really a perfect portrayal. She has four scenes, and she's just terrific.

Also, for some reason there is an extended sequence at the theatre, where we watch the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of none other than Edward II directed by Sir Peter Hall. We are, of course, treated to the sequence in which the young king is sodomized by a red-hot poker. I rolled my eyes. The show, for the record, looks awful. The set is really hideous. Why this is in the film is beyond me, but it is there all the same.

Why So Serious?

Joker is pretty good at what it wants to do. Joaquin Phoenix's performance is chilling and very scary, and the movie itself is quite scary too. The thing is, though: I didn't really enjoy this very much at all. Even the third act triumphant revenge sequences were joyless to me. The first act is so relentless in its beatdowns of this poor man. It's one-note, almost (dare I say it) comedic (although it never really is this), in the pain it delivers at this man's doorstep.

I don't, for the record, think the movie is irresponsibly violent or anything like that. Joker is fairly careful about its violence. Consider, for example, the sequence in the non-girlfriend's apartment. The film actually works to make us afraid for the young woman and her daughter. We will for nothing to happen to them. We hope he doesn't hurt them. I felt this same way with his diminutive coworker who comes to visit and witnesses him killing the other guy they work with. Please don't kill this guy, I thought. And of course he doesn't.

It's clear in these moments that Joker is a sentimental movie in its own way. It doesn't wish death and destruction on everyone, or at least not quite everyone. Little people and mothers with young children are spared this film's wrath. The rest of the universe, however – as we find out at the end of the movie – can simply burn, and society itself should be utterly destroyed. But save the children and the co-workers who smile at you.

If only any of this had been pleasurable. But the relentless of the first act of Todd Phillips' film set me up, as a viewer, only for more of the same. For me, Joker never really let up from this tone, and I had trouble enjoying any of the film after act one, even if I knew we were sort of supposed to take pleasure in the finale. I found the whole thing off-putting.  It's just not any fun.

Oh! One more thing that I can't get out of my head. When the three guys come to beat him up in the subway – the guys he kills, I mean – they're singing a song from Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music: Isn't it rich / Are we a pair / Me here at last on the ground / You in midair. They even seem to know the second verse. Now, these are supposed to be young businessmen who work for Thomas Wayne, and given that this film is supposed to take place in a version of 1976 (I infer this from the numerous references to Lumet & Chayefsky's Network and Scorsese & Schrader's Taxi Driver throughout the film) and Sondheim's musical premiered in 1973, I suppose it's possible that these young businessmen might have committed "Send in the Clowns" to memory, but I find this improbable. Perhaps it is simply much more likely that the joker is psychotic and that the scenario the film shows us, in which he kills the three men, is just as fictional as the sequence two scenes later when he kisses his neighbor. My point is that we can't even trust what we see in the movie. What I guess I hope this means, after all, is that this joker is misinterpreting the ugliness and brutality of the world around him and that it just ain't all that bad. Either way, the joker's read on the world is not a perspective I have the ability to enjoy. I need a few more jokes.

Update. My friend George reminds me that "Send in the Clowns" was actually a pop-crossover hit. Witness this appearance by Judy Collins on The Muppet Show in 1973:

Some Thoughts on Violence and Ethics in the 2012 Awards Season

Even all these years after his first, vicious movie, Quentin Tarantino's brand of violence still has the power to shock. His new film Django Unchained, which is an overly long re-writing of the history of the American South, has an inordinate amount of violence. Tarantino's films are known for their violence, of course, but to my mind, the nuance of Tarantino's representations makes them worth talking about and worth analyzing. Tarantino doesn't make shoot-em-up pictures. He doesn't make action films. The violence in his films does not look like that in the films of Martin McDonagh or Eli Roth or Michael Bay or Martin Scorsese or David Cronenberg. (Each of these directors has his own way of using violence that is interesting in its own right. I only mention them to give us all a little perspective on QT.)

Much of the violence in QT's films is fun to watch and is meant to be fun to watch. It can also be quite satisfying. Django, like Inglourious Basterds before it, is a revenge film: a kind of complex post-Jacobean revenge-comedy where the audience positively glories in the revenge taken by QT's protagonists. (I marveled at this in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, as the body count mounted and mounted, while at no point did I feel as though The Bride should stop killing people.) By the end of Django Unchained, when Jamie Foxx's Django finally has his revenge on all of the people who have wronged him – by which I mean basically any and every white Southerner – I was having a complete and total blast watching him blow all of these slave-owning motherfuckers to smithereens.

This violence at the end of the film is positively cartoony. QT films it like an homage to Sam Peckinpah, but his version of Peckinpah involves bodies exploding and emptying their liquid-filled contents everywhere, walls covered in blood, multiple gunshot wounds to every body part imaginable, and at the end: a crimson, bloody mess. It's funny. It's not to be taken with total seriousness, and there's even a moment when a single gunshot blows a woman six feet in a completely preposterous direction like something out of an episode of Wile E. Coyote. This is violence for the sake of pleasure. Django's revenge on the white slaveowners is simultaneously QT's revenge on the entire institution of American slavery (as Shosanna Dreyfus's revenge on Hans Landa is simultaneously QT's (delicious) revenge against Adolf Hitler). Revenge is sweet, and these acts of vengeance are shared with the audience: we also get to feel as though we have had revenge on Hitler, on American slavery, on the genocide of European Jews.

This is nonsense, of course: a total fantasy that allows audiences to feel really great about all that they've done to combat racism/slavery/oppression/history. Rooting for Jamie Foxx seems like it is the same thing as fighting racism. (I was at a screening populated by about 95% white people and I couldn't help but notice how much all of those white people were loving watching other white people get killed.) Vis-à-vis race I find Django sort of questionable and easy. Still, I loved its unabashed hatred of racism, its powerful black central characters, and most importantly its attention to the violence of slavery itself.

For while the violence committed against white people by Django and Dr. King Shultz (Dr. King?!) is treated in a chiefly cartoon manner, QT treats the violence committed against black people by white people during American slavery as absolutely horrific: like the attempted genocide it truly was. The audience watches, horrified, as dogs rip apart a middle-aged man. Django's wife Broomhilda is brutally whipped and subjected to other tortures. The camera shies away from none of this. Instead, QT asks his audience to sit with this violence, to pay attention to what happened. This is not The Help. Django Unchained presents the racist violence of slavery in an incredibly graphic fashion: the audience at the screening I attended squirmed and covered its eyes; the tension and sorrow in the theatre were palpable.

In other words, all violence onscreen is not created equal, as you probably already knew, but QT's ability to switch back and forth between certain techniques for representing violence strikes me as ethically responsible. For my money, Tarantino approaches screen violence with care, sensitivity, and a very clear political agenda.

Samuel L. Jackson, by the way, steals the entire film. Just let that be known. He has the wittiest, funniest dialogue, and he says motherfucker about ten thousand times. I was delighted.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Zero Dark Thirty – Kathryn Bigelow's film about the CIA's hunt to find and kill Osama bin Laden over the period of ten years following 11 September 2001 – also involves a good deal of violence. Like her previous film The Hurt Locker (which I loved), this violence is always presented in a realistic, almost banal fashion. It is a part of Bigelow's project to present violence as ubiquitous in the areas where USAmerican soldiers are stationed. These young people's bodies exist in a state of constant risk and ever-present tension; Bigelow's way of representing violence, therefore, tends to bombard the viewer with so much violence, that violence itself begins to feel normal. This is a reality on the ground for both civilians and military personnel in these regions invaded by the United States military.

There are at least three scenes of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, as well. These Bigelow handles expertly. The USAmericans who torture their unarmed prisoners are shown in an evenhanded manner: it is apparent that they feel that what they are doing is justified and necessary. But Bigelow's way of representing the victims of these tortures makes clear that what we are watching are acts of violation: excessive, reprehensible, and totally ineffective as tools for gathering actionable intelligence.

Zero Dark Thirty is a character study, really, a kind of window into the mind of someone who tracks down difficult-to-find enemies of the United States. Jessica Chastain's central performance is marvelous: at once steely and terrified and angrier than Howard Beale in Network. She will be winning the Best Actress Oscar come February. Make no mistake about it.

Still, though I liked it very much, I didn't love Zero Dark Thirty like I loved The Hurt Locker. There are sequences that look lifted directly from HBO's The Wire, and if ZDT is clear about torture as something wrong, the film asks no questions about USAmerican presence in Pakistan or Afghanistan or its black sites in other locations in the world. Not that the film needs to be more philosophical about the reasons for United States war efforts in the Middle East, but I would have liked it better had it taken USAmerican involvement in the Middle East a little less for granted.

Jason and the Argonauts

Argo is really good.

I'm going to assume that you're all planning on seeing this movie anyway, right? I mean, the trailer is excellent, and this is the same guy who directed The Town two years ago. At the very least, Argo delivers on all of the things that you know you are going to get from Affleck: the pacing is absolutely excellent. He knows when to build tension, when to let the audience in on a bit of irony, when to relieve a series of fast-paced sequences with something more contemplative, and he is expert at relieving tension with a good joke. He did this in both of his previous movies, and it works here just as well.

The story is a great one. Utterly preposterous and also based on a true story. The story is, in fact, so good that the film doesn't need to give its audience the usual twists and feints that we are so used to seeing in the movies these days. Instead, Affleck tells it in a straightforward manner, throwing up only a few obstacles at the end, but even these seem less important than the inevitability of the story itself.

For me, though, this film is all about its incredible supporting players. The supporting cast in Argo is just the best. Affleck is wonderful in the central role, a lovely anchor to the film, but what makes this film work from start to finish is the great performances that an entire series of undersung supporting players in Hollywood give in small roles. Clea DuVall, Bryan Cranston, Tate Donovan, Chris Messina, Farshad Farahat, and Željko Ivanek, were my personal favorites, but there is excellent work all around.

John Goodman and Alan Arkin are mostly here for laughs. They get almost all the good lines, and their respective deliveries of these gems are easily worth Argo's price of admission.

I do think that Affleck's sentimental side tends to kick in as he tries to end his films. I felt frustrated with the oh-so-romantic ending to The Town, and I felt just as frustrated with the pat ending of Argo. These kinds of endings feel easy, almost obligatory, as though the brain of everyone working on the film stopped working in the film's last five minutes and everyone turned into Steven Spielberg circa 1982.

One more note about nostalgia. Sometimes I complain when films sentimentalize an earlier period in movie history. Argo does this blatantly. There's this great sequence where people quote Sidney Lumet's Network and then someone onscreen references it explicitly. The entire idea for Argo comes from Don Taylor's Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and Affleck ends the film with a shot of miniature versions of the Star Wars characters. Even more (and I laughed out loud when I saw this), the logo that Affleck uses for the distributor's credit at the very beginning of Argo is Warner Bros' logo from the late 1970s. It's a great in-joke that immediately set the tone for the picture. This Warner Bros image, too, is not a nostalgic one per se. In fact, let me be kind and say that it isn't exactly the best logo Warner has ever had. Affleck isn't romanticizing the 1970s so much as he is revisiting them, warts and all.

I want to say just one more thing, and that is that I am told there is Oscar buzz about Argo, and while I think that is good news for Affleck's career (he deserves it), and good for the movie in general. I really hope that no one starts acting like Argo is the frontrunner for Best Picture. I don't think the movie's got the legs for that. And it doesn't need them. Behaving as though this movie should win Best Picture is asking more than ought to be asked of Argo. It's a very strong tongue-in-cheek spy movie that happens to be a true story.
Let's all just sit back and enjoy it. It's a good movie.

Pacino

I have heard many people say that their favorite actor from the 1970s is Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro. There's also Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemmon and Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman and Warren Beatty. I like all these guys, but my favorite - that's my story and I'm sticking to it - is Al Pacino and has been for ages.

It's easy to say that he yells a lot in his performances these days. Fine. He has a lot to yell about. But, let's just go back a moment: Serpico and The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II and Dog Day Afternoon and ...And Justice for All. are really just the beginning of a career for a man who has continued to produced excellent, surprising performances for the three decades since ...And Justice for All. The man continues to choose difficult roles and is choosing, more often than not, excellent material as well. It seems unfair to compare Angels in America or The Merchant of Venice to, say, Meet the Fockers and Everybody's Fine, but... well, I just made the comparison. My point is that I think Pacino has continued to challenge himself and add to his own work with engrossing and powerful performances even though he is over seventy years old. It's a fine body of work, and I hope the fine performances keep coming.

Love him.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

I love love loved this movie. It is dark and moody and has that classic 1970s anti-hero feel with a protagonist that is totally at a loss for direction. (I am thinking of movies like The Conversation and The French Connection and Serpico – anyone reading this blog could probably name another five quite easily – the kind of movie George Clooney and Tony Gilroy tried successfully to revisit with Michael Clayton). In Save the Tiger, Lemmon is absolutely superb. His performance is astounding. I was blown away. And, frankly, I was blown away by John G. Avildsen. I've always had a hard heart toward him because the average Rocky won the Best Picture Oscar over Network, probably the best film of the decade; as it turns out, though, Avildsen is a real talent: he directs this hard-hitting, bleak picture without pulling any punches. Save the Tiger is fantastic.

Train Movies: Part 1

I don't know what got into me, but I watched Unstoppable, last year's Tony Scott film, and I liked it so much that I thought perhaps I would rent a couple of other train movies. I mean, there are quite a few famous ones – Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express comes immediately to mind – but, as I don't really re-watch movies, I thought I would check out a couple that I hadn't seen.

The thing that is great about Unstoppable is that it is, basically, a thrill a minute. The acting is passable, the storyline is highly improbable, and the whole thing has this very serious tone. It was also obviously written by the typical Hollywood writer who can't think of a more interesting villain than a big-business hatchet man whose main motive is "corporate greed" in the abstract. But I thought the whole thing was just so exciting. I mean, a train is barreling through Pennsylvania at like eighty-five miles an hour running into shit or nearly running into shit. I had a great time.

I watched Runaway Train, the Andrei Konchalovsky film with Jon Voight and Eric Roberts because I had thought that Unstoppable was based on this 1985 flick. Not so, it turns out. Runaway Train is a much smarter, much more 1970s-style film with an anti-hero in the Gene Hackman vein (I'm thinking of The Conversation and The French Connection). Runaway Train is about a prison breakout in Alaska. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts break out of the prison, sneak through the sewer system and get out to a trainyard somehow. After they get on the train, the drama really starts. This one doesn't have the suspenseful big-movie qualities that Unstoppable does, but it is not a film about trains crashing into shit like Unstoppable is.

Instead, Runaway Train is a film with an interesting ethical center, a movie interested in ethical conundrums and the essential humanity of the incarcerated. I was really into it, and since Runaway Train takes place on a train going ninety-five miles an hour, it's hard for it not to be suspenseful. Runaway Train also has an absolutely great ending, and you know how I love a great ending.

More train films to come. I'm just getting warmed up.

I Got Work Done Too; I Promise.

Three movies so far this weekend. (I may get in another one tomorrow, too.) In reverse order of how good they are:

I didn't really understand Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I mean, I get it; I'm just not sure why I'm supposed to care. Devil is a mess, too, and for lots of reasons. My friend Rick remarked that the movie didn't know if it was a Greek tragedy or some kind of neo-noir. I thought it was going for the former, but the film just doesn't work out that way. It's got all of the elements, too, except for characters that are in any way redemptive or even likable. I lie. I really liked Marisa Tomei, but though she is easily the most interesting thing in the movie, her function in the film is baffling and her presence becomes almost gratuitous. I will give it this, Devil is never really boring. But it's never really interesting either.

I make sure to see Kim Ki-duk's movies when they're released in this country, ever since he made the extraordinary Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ...and Spring three years ago. Time (Shi Gan) is the thirteenth film from the prolific director and it's fascinating if difficult. The movie is about a woman who is so incredibly jealous of her boyfriend and terrified that he'll fall in love with someone else, leaves him abruptly telling no one where she's going, has plastic surgery to change her face, and then meets him again and gets him to fall in love with her all over again. It sounds really fucked up, and I assure you that it really is. It's a very pretty film, and there are some lovely poetic moments. The thing is, to want to do something like I just described, a woman would have to be totally fucking crazy. The main character in Time is obviously completely nuts. And you know there has to be something wrong with a boy (however cute he is) who is in love with a nutcase like this girl. I found myself muttering "this bitch is so crazy" throughout half the film.
Still, it's very interesting, and the philosophical questions Kim is interested in are baffling, weird conundrums that make you think hard. The questions, eventually, are more interesting than the film, though.

And then there's the Coen Brothers' new movie No Country for Old Men, which I've moved to my top slot for the year. It's a fabulous, violent, at times hysterically funny movie. It has a brilliant central performance by Tommy Lee Jones with some exceptional work all around: Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald, Woody Harrelson. I enjoyed the Hell out of it. It's a blast to watch and a total thrill ride. Absolutely not to be missed. I am seeing it again as soon as I can.

Ooo Corruption!

I've been in a let's-watch-some-people-blow-some-shit-up kind of mood. The B-movie love started with Sunshine, which, as I believe I've already mentioned, is awesome.

And then, of course, the third movie in the Jason Bourne franchise was just released. Now, as you might recall, I really liked the second movie, The Bourne Supremacy, and though I still cannot figure out what the fuck the titles in this series of movies mean, I also really liked The Bourne Ultimatum. Matt Damon is totally serious and very cool, and Paul Greengrass sure knows how to make an action picture. (You might also recall that I rated his United 93 as my #2 movie from last year.) Ultimatum delivers on all the promises of Supremacy. The fights are awesome, especially an extended hand-to-hand battle with Joey Ansah that happens late in the movie. The Bourne Ultimatum also boasts about a hundred cameos of well-known actors (the first two movies did this too). Daniel Brühl shows up for a single scene (in the first good movie he's been in since Good Bye, Lenin!) and Paddy Considine gets a couple of cool scenes. The best thing about Ultimatum, though, is that it never really lets up. The movie starts in medias res and just keeps going at the rapid pace it sets at the beginning. It's a thrill-a-minute film with a great car chase, some awesome fight sequences and beautiful locations. Definitely worth checking out.

Also, the villain in this movie is, as seems to be common in action movies nowadays, the United States Government. Filmmakers find it very easy to cast our government as the source of evil and criminality. This obviously has to do with the American people's mounting distrust of the president, the Congress and all top levels of government. I mention it because another film I recently saw, Antoine Fuqua's Shooter has a similar theme. Now, I haven't seen a Fuqua movie since Training Day, but it seems like the man has still got a lot of talent. Shooter is a strictly straightforward tale of good guys/bad guys, guns, bombs, explosions, torture, revenge, etc. But it does what it promises well enough. The good guys are likable (you know I love Mark Wahlberg, and I don't know anyone who doesn't love Michael Peña) and the villains all wear suits and make decisions from ivory Washington D.C. towers. The hero of Shooter doesn't quite have the amazing survival skills of Jason Bourne, but he comes kind of close. He makes homemade pipe bombs and tear gas from stuff he got at WalMart and he is able to perform minor surgery on himself after getting shot in the arm and in the side. True to Antoine Fuqua form, of course, there are lots and lots of dead bodies. I should have counted how many, but I probably would have lost track. It's a little out of control.

One exceptionally cool thing about Shooter is a scene with Ned Beatty on top of a mountain. It's an obvious nod to my favorite film of all time—Network—a clever update to Ned Beatty's very famous monologue in that film, where he says "There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians.There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West." In Shooter Ned says "There are no Shiites; there are no Sunnis. There are no Republicans; there are no Democrats." Kudos to whatever genius thought that a nice echo of Paddy Chayefsky's cynicism fit nicely in a 2007 action movie with Mark Wahlberg. It put a giant grin on my face.

Revisiting/Introducing

I rewatched Network tonight. Ryan had never seen it so we decided to sit down with our gin and tonics and give it a look-see. Sweet god that is a good movie. I don't think there's anything like it in all of cinema.

P.S. I did yoga today. I think if I exercise in the afternoon instead of taking a nap that it's really beneficial. I try to exercise in the mornings, but it just doesn't work. I don't even want to be alive in the mornings, much less move my body into downward dog. But in the afternoons, it's rather invigorating. I'll keep you updated.

Please...

Feel free to ease on down the road.

Just watched The Wiz. Good times.

I have no car right now because I dropped off the rental this evening and I'm not picking up my vehicle until the morning.

There was drama at work when i was gone, I guess. I really have no idea what happened, but evidently the one at work who I think is lazy made a "formal complaint" about me to our immediate supervisor. Who knows what it's about, but the three bosses I have who are above my immediate supervisor all seemed just fine with me today, so I guess no one told them about said "formal complaint." I can't help but worry about it, I suppose, if only because it means that I (or a perception of me) caused uneasiness in my place of employment.

I didn't hear about all of this until noon when I asked one of the co-workers why the lazy one wasn't speaking to me. This girl didn't speak to me all morning. After I heard about the "formal complaint" I made it my business to be extra-nice to her: inquisitive, asking her for help when I didn't need it, asking about her hair, etc. (y'all know the drill). After I did that for about an hour, this girl was fine and dandy: making jokes, telling me I was funny, asking me about my vacation, etc. So we'll see how it goes down tomorrow.

Goddamn I hate drama... unless it's somebody else's.

The Land That Time Forgot

[British Accent:] "Are you married?"

"No."

"Are you a lesbian?"

Yesterday, this quote from Four Weddings and a Funeral came to me just as I was pulling in to my parking space in our garage.  I was laughing quite heartily to myself, that is until I met Margarita, who is on the HOA board, in the parking garage.  Instead of ceasing my laughter, I naturally told her what I was so amused about.  She remembered the quote too, and we both had a good laugh about it.  Then she says, "I guess we get inquisitive like that when we get old."  I'm thinking, "how true."

Yesterday morning, the board hosted a potluck brunch where the owners could come and discuss revamping the garden areas in our building.  It's basically overgrown with these elephant-ear plants that soak up water as though we live in the Amazonian rainforest.  Its resemblance to the set of Jurassic Park is uncanny.  I had no time to bake, and since I still have no idea what a potluck brunch is, I found a box of Jiffy cornbread in my cupboard, added eggs and milk, baked it for 20 minutes, lined a bowl with a towel, and took corn muffins as my date to the brunch.  I felt cheap, but they were all gone when I left, so they must have been good.

Dean (HOA board president) still lives with that absolutely gorgeous Asian guy who I saw him with before.  The Asian guy is definitely a 'mo, but I'm actually not sure about Dean anymore.  I thought they were a couple, but maybe they're not.  Who knows, anymore with people.  I just need to find out of it's a two-bedroom unit or only a one-bedroom.  If it only has one bedroom we'll all know what's going on. (Okay, just me.)

I got my dumb ass signed up for some committee to work on a design for the garden area.  But I want to be involved, I guess.  Otherwise, idiots will have a say.  If I'm on the committees, I can veto the idiots.  Not too many people went to this meeting.  Jim the treasurer went; he's decided we can be friends now that he knows I work in education.  Sonny & Rosie went, of course, and Robert Delgadillo (my friend).  And far too may old men were there as well.  Octagenarians with no teeth should not go to these meetings.  They just hold shit up.  We can send them the minutes.  Do we really have to listen to them natter on about cracks in their flooring?  I don't care about that shit.  We were there for a meeting about the common garden areas.  Oh well.  When he was talking, I opened a brochure on water-conserving California-native plants, so I wasn't really listening anyway.

Last night I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which I recommend to anyone who is fascinated by punctuation.  It's a great book.  I am on a reading kick again.  I think I will do some more this week.  I also watched the first two hours of the 1962 Sidney Lumet film of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.  After two hours I went to bed.  One can only take so much O'Neill before one wants to kill one's self, and this three hour-long descent into Hell has no intermission like it would in a theatre.  Hepburn is great, and I liked Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell, but England can have Ralph Richardson back.  I hate his acting style and always have.  So much posturing and boredom.  Blech.

My coffee's cold.  I'm off to the grocery.

I'm not gonna leave ya.  There's no way I will.  And I am telling you that I'm not going.  You're the best man I'll ever know.  There's no way I can ever ever go.  No no no no way.  No no no no way I'm livin' without you.  I'm not livin' without you, not livin' without you.  I don't wanna be freee.  I'm stayin', I'm stayin', and you, and you, and you: your'e gonna love me.  You're gonna love me.  Yes.  Love me.  Love me.  Love me.  Love me.  Love me.  You're gonna loooooooooooooooooove.  Me.

Rain, Rain, go away...

My it is wet here.
I wish I could explain why I'm listening to the theme from Love Story right now, but I cannot. 

My roommate is so very polite.  He offered to take turns vacuuming.  Maybe my last roommate was just a bastard, which is why I appreciate very small things like this offer.  No more Love Story. I am moving on to something with more pep.

Tonight Wahima and I visited our favorite cheap-ass haunt: The Old Spaghetti Factory, where, amazingly enough we can have dinner for $10 apiece.  After this we talked for long times about Cloud 9.  I am feeling very conflicted about my good friend directing this show.  Perhaps this is because I am not directing a show.

It is weird, because I have been working on some kind of show since Fall of 2002 when I was in Othello... I mean, Othello, Gross Indecency, Closer, Hamlet, Fantasticks, ICFB, Crucible, Sin... it has been madness: unending madness: on which I evidently thrive.  Having free time is wonderful, but there is something lacking: work.  It is for this reason that i began to study theatre: to feed my desire to create.  Going to work at the accounting firm every day pays the bills, and it's a fine thing to do, a satisfactory way of making a living, but without anything else to create, to work on, to fucking DO, I don't know... I get kinda bored.  Plus, it seems like everyone I know is always busy working on some other show.  It's not like I'm not reading, because of course I am reading.  More than I have since fricking Othello.  I am watching movies too, but I feel like I ought to be directing something, or at least contributing artistically to some sort of endeavor.  I volunteered to help Wahima out, of course, but I don't know...

I guess I just feel lazy or useless or something... who knows.

Tonight I watched what my grandmother always said was one of her favorite film performances of all time.  Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker.  I don't know what I was expecting, really, but man oh man, what a film!  It is early Sidney Lumet... not sure I know if this is true, but it is 1965, and the Sidney Lumet I know is the Lumet of Network and The Verdict, which are 70s movies.  Considering my affinity for Network, it is odd that I hadn't looked up this flick before.  Steiger is great in the movie, and the movie itself is a spare, unflinching tragedy in the Greek sense.  A sort of post-holocaust The Best Years of Our Lives with none of the happy ending stuff.  It's super-intense and incorporates that 1960s European influenced way of working: mood-heavy, sad, and an "every single day" sense to all of it.  It was totally powerful and I see why my grandmother liked it.

I finished my Nicky Silver kick today too.  The last play I read was Fat Men in Skirts, which is funny at times, but mostly undirectable.  Maybe I will re-read Raised in Captivity.  Pterodactyls could work too.  Not sure.

Rain. 

The Oscars will be here soon and I have done so little planning.  I have a fucking party to throw.  I really ought to get on it.

I am so tired lately.