Moonlight

Moonlight, the new film by Barry Jenkins, was written by Jenkins himself, but is based on a play by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, and although it is structured like a good play – there are even clear act breaks – Moonlight looks and moves like a film, and a very good one at that. McCraney is known for telling stories about queer black folks, and Moonlight is no exception, following a young boy who everyone understands is "soft".

Mr. Rhodes

Chiron, the character central to the film, lives with his mother, a crack-user in Miami, and develops a relationship with Juan, a much older man who takes care of him occasionally. This is a simple movie about a very complicated young man who doesn't like to talk or doesn't have the words for the things he's thinking. Little Chiron just sits there, too terrified to talk about what he wants.


Moonlight is also unapologetically an art film. Barry Jenkins is primarily looking to Wong Kar-Wai for inspiration. The film uses music, light, movement, structure, and silence like In the Mood for Love more than anything else, and indeed Moonlight's subject matter – forbidden but real love – makes Wong a perfect model.

Mr. Ali

The acting is beautiful. Naomie Harris is superb, particularly in act one, as Little Chiron's mom. And although Chiron himself is played by three different actors, each doing excellent work, Trevante Rhodes, who plays Chiron as an adult, is an absolute standout. His performance is stunning – rich, layered, and almost unbearably heartbreaking. In fact, the film is nicely bookended by superb performances: Mahershala Ali, who plays Chiron's mentor in the first act of the movie, gives a similarly nuanced and complex performance. Both actors are phenomenal.

I loved this movie... but to my mind it is not quite perfect. The whole thing feels a little too relaxed for my taste. It is a film brimming with sexual tension, but the final act of the film is not as scary as I wanted it to be. Throughout, I think the stakes of the movie are a bit too low. A part of the Wong influence, I think, is that Moonlight is loving and generous with its characters. This means that we watch them from the point of view of kind observers, and the movie is allowed to be more painterly, ever-so-slightly distanced. What the film doesn't do so well is allow us into the terror felt by teenage Chiron. We watch him, and we love him, but the speed of Moonlight, its leisurely pace, doesn't let us get really scared for the boy, and so the film (in both acts two and three) is more relaxed than I wanted it to be.


But my gripes are small. This is one of the best movies of 2016. You've probably already seen it, since it came to Orlando three weeks later than it was released most places. (This is a pretend city.) But if you haven't seen it yet, go. You're gonna love it.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 5 of 14

Frozen

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Original Song: Kristen Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez

Director: Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee

Cast: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, Santino Fontana, Maia Wilson, Alan Tudyk, Ciarán Hinds


This is cute and good for all sorts of reasons. I wasn't quite as crazy about the nominated song "Let It Go" as I was about some of the film's other songs – "Fixer Upper", for example, or my personal favorite "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" – but the song is as wildly popular as the film, and the Academy, I am sure, will love to have Broadway star Idina Menzel belting the hell out of it at the Oscar ceremony on March 2nd. It's going to win, too. In fact, there would appear to be almost no competition for either of the awards for which Frozen is nominated. Although Brave taking this award last year was a big surprise to me, so maybe I just don't have my finger on the pulse of what other adults are looking for when they watch an animated film. In any case, if Frozen does win, it will mean two years of girl-power. And that's something we can all get excited about, particularly because Frozen's version of girl-power, is way, way cooler than Brave's.

Will Win: Animated Feature, Song

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #41 out of 77

The Grandmaster (一代宗師)

2 Nominations

• Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd
• Costume Design: William Chang Suk Ping

Director: Wong Kar-wai

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Jin, Chang Chen, Yuen Woo-Ping, Wang Qingxiang, Le Cung, Song, Hye-kyo, Zhao Benshan, Lau Ga-yung, Lau Shun, Xiaoshenyang

I really love Wong Kar-wai. At least, I used to. This movie made me, more than anything else, want to watch his earlier stuff: especially Days of Being Wild. (I've watched In the Mood for Love more times than I can actually count. It's incredible.) The Grandmaster – or in another translation The Grandmasters – moves in super slow-motion, but it isn't interested in the nuance of feeling or difficult emotional terrain of Wong's other movies. Actually, it might be interested in those things, but it is executed differently; the story is told in a strange sequential order and with an odd way of focusing on what it is doing. I was, quite frankly, a little bored. But I will tell you, this film is shot gorgeously. It most definitely deserved both of these nominations. It won't win either award, but I am glad that the Academy recognized this film for its exceptional artistry. Now, where's my copy of Chungking Express?
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #55 out of 77

Inside Llewyn Davis

2 Nominations

• Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel (Harry Potter and Half-blood Prince, Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles [A Very Long Engagement], Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain [Amélie])
• Sound Mixing

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Max Casella, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, F. Murray Abraham, Jeanine Serralles

I reviewed this film at length here. A lot of people were surprised at how relatively poorly Llewyn did when the nominations came out. I can't say I was too shocked, but I did sort of expect it to get a Best Picture nod. I mean, A Serious Man was nominated for Best Picture! In any case, I think this film will be remembered as a very very good Coen Brothers picture, not the minor Coen Brothers picture it is being called right now. And while we're talking about them: how 'bout them Coens, man? I mean, every time they make a movie it's just really, really good. A Coen Brothers film is an important event. And just try to rank them in your mind. What goes at the top? Miller's Crossing? Blood Simple.? Fargo? Barton Fink? No Country for Old Men? The Hudsucker Proxy? These are superb movies. Anyway, let's all just close our eyes and try not to notice that Inside Llewyn Davis won't be winning any awards this Oscar night. Close your eyes and be grateful that Oscar Isaac will be getting a lot of work in the next three years.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Sound Mixing

My Rating: #19 out of 77

A Dialogue on the Butler

I've been having trouble articulating how I felt about The Butler. I enjoyed some of it, but was mostly frustrated with its oddities. So I asked my friend Carlos to have a conversation with me about the movie, in the hopes that I would be able to get clearer about how I felt about the movie.

Aaron: I've been calling Lee Daniels' movies "messy" for a while, and I know he hasn't made that many (Shadowboxer, Precious, The Paperboy), but that is really what stands out to me about this picture and the others. The tone of the The Butler is constantly shifting. There is a disjointedness about the movie. The characters don't feel somehow "themselves", as though they change who they are from scene to scene. This was especially true for Yaya Alafia (Carol) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (Carter). Now, it may be that good acting saves most of thee characters – makes them feel more the same from scene to scene – but that certainly is not the case with Carol and Carter. The film obviously shifts tone wildly, too.

Carlos: Lee Daniels does a few things really, really well. And the one thing that I think he does consistently is pull out transformative performances from his actors. He does this through what seems to be a highly counter-intuitive method of intentional miscasting. Mo'Nique in Precious. Everybody in The Paperboy. And Oprah in this (who turns out to be the shining star of this movie, but never in a million years would she have been on my cast list). But Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King was cast perfectly. No argument there.

Mr. Gooding as Carter

Aaron: The other thing is that this is really a kind of Forrest Gump romp through USAmerican history, and so the movie is necessarily sort of shallow.

Carlos: I think most of the problems in Lee Daniels's The Butler (do I have to call it that?) stem from the script. I think, at the heart of it, there is a strong story about race and America's rocky relationship with change. It's also hard to deny that it comes at a time where race and civil liberties are at the forefront of many Americans' minds, and that lends the film a lot of power that it may not have had otherwise. That being said, I agree completely with your Forrest Gump analogy. I had the chance to read an earlier draft of the script before the movie was made and I'll say that the same problems that existed in the script existed on screen. So there's your lesson for the day, aspiring screenwriters: you can't just fix your problems in production. More than anything for me it was his over-reliance on voice-over and jarring transitions between time periods that sunk the movie for me. But the picaresque approach to the story really only gave you a shallow view into the racial politics of the star-studded presidential menagerie, often boiling down their racial politics to a single scene. I actually found the son's journey much more interesting than the butler's. But maybe that was the point.

Aaron: It wasn't the point. The film focuses on the father's half of the father-son relationship. And I think that was sort of the problem – David Oyelowo's character was just more interesting. He plays it beautifully, I thought. Totally boyish and then grown and fascinating. I did want to note one scene that looked really great: the dinner sequence in the White House contrasted with the lunch-counter violence. That was a great juxtaposition. And if I thought his character disjointed, I should also say that I loved Cuba Gooding, Jr. in this. He is a confident performer, and I understand that he is constantly asked to play silly clown characters, but I know guys like him. I felt like I knew Carter, and Gooding approaches a guy like that without judgment (unlike an actor like Terrence Howard).

Mr. Oyelowo as The Butler's Son

Carlos: It also looked cheap.  Did it look cheap to you? 

Aaron: It did look cheap! Why did we both think that? Was that because we saw so little of the White House? 

Carlos: I didn't mind not seeing the White House. It was the lighting. Everything had this fuzzy, soft look and I think it was there because Daniels needed to cover up for the fact that whenever possible he was trying not to use age makeup (I sourced this from a couple of interviews) and the age makeup they did use looked terrible. You would think with a 30-million-dollar budget they could make it look spectacular, but that's what you get when you hire every A- to B+ list actor to fill out your presidential pool.

Ms. Fonda & Mr. Rickman as the Reagans

Aaron: As relates to this casting question, I feel strange about it. This is a sort of Hollywood thing, right? This anticipation we get to have and the pleasure we receive from playing Guess which famous movie star will be playing each president and first lady? It draws away from the film as a document of a historical period and makes everything seem slightly more, well, fake, while at the same time it is totally fun to see Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda play the Reagans.

Carlos: It was gimmicky, and it often took me out of the movie, but it was exactly as you say. Totally fun to see Rickman and Fonda as the Reagans. But I think these choices go back to Daniels' reliance on camp. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. And it doesn't always work well with the tone of his movies. The Butler becomes more of a spectacle when you have this star-studded cast filling out minor roles. This is a bit of a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it's distracting. You're wondering if Cusack's nose is Nixonian enough, or if LBJ is indeed Liev Schreiber or someone else, or about just how much the right wing is incensed by Jane Fonda playing the wife of the second coming of Christ. But maybe that's the trick? Because you're being distracted by this spectacle but it pulls your focus away from the holes in the script momentarily.

Aaron: I love that you said that this celebrity-sighting thing is actually about camp. Of course you are correct! I hadn't really thought of that, but you are absolutely right. It's just that the film doesn't really want to be campy. Or that the camp sensibility is married in an uncomfortable way to the kind of sentimental narrative for which people like Zemeckis or Ron Howard are known. The two ways of storytelling really conflict quite strongly, and though I enjoyed the campy parts, they made me feel uneasy because I never quite dropped into the sentimental sections of the film. 

Carlos: Speaking of cheap. Can we talk about the ending? 

Aaron: Haha. Do you mean the way that The Butler behaves as though every single issue for which black people have fought in the U.S. is automatically solved by the election of a black president? It is a curious project of forgetting in a film that would appear to have been all about actively remembering precisely those struggles. I do, of course, agree with the sections with MLK where he talks about black domestics, etc. I think that kind of analysis is helpful and super-smart. But the film wants to be about the United States presidents' struggles with racism, and in the end the film pays more attention to the changes of conscience those white men have than it does to either the black domestic at the film's center or the angry black revolutionary who is his foil. 

Carlos: I think you hit the nail on the head. Remember, this was written by a white guy, Danny Strong (of Game Change and Recount fame), and while Lee Daniels really did his best to punch up "the black experience", it only felt genuine in the scenes taking place in the home. I'm looking at you, get-that-cheap-trifling-bitch-outta-my-house scene. But as it stands, the rest of the movie was like watching 15-minute snippets of Lincoln. You know the president has already made up his mind, things are shitty and need to change, and that there is an entrenched force of racists that refuses to budge. And maybe it's just the cultural lens that I'm viewing the film through, but I did want to see more about what shaped the various presidents' views on race. Instead I got a direct set up "problem" and pay off "how they fixed the problem". It got kinda monotonous. (I actually did a double feature with this and The Grandmaster and they had a lot of similar structural problems, except The Grandmaster was shot beautifully and it had punching, so it was more engaging.)

My biggest issue with the ending – and it was the same issue that I had with the script – was that it needlessly politicized a story that should have been for all of us. Now it's for less than half of us. While I understand the importance of button-ending the movie with the election of Barack Obama to reinforce the "see how far we've come" theme, it irked me. Not that I give a shit what the right wing thinks, but this film could have been (and I am being generous using "could") a great cultural touchstone that turned the mirror back on us to ask us how far we've come, but persists in telling us that we still have a long way to go. 

Aaron: I think the ending does precisely the opposite. Maybe this is my inner black panther speaking, but when we think of having a black president as the end of anything, I feel like it tells us that racial oppression is basically over. Seen in this light, the struggles that the film describes feel, by the end of the movie, as though they have actually ended in real life. I am surprised you saw the film in the opposite way. 

Carlos: I guess I was unclear. What was delivered is exactly what you say. But I wanted the ending to acknowledge that this struggle clearly isn't over yet. The ending, as is, feels like the "white guilt" version. I know that Daniels had to do a heavy amount of cuts right at the end, so I wonder what may be lost in the digital trash bin.

Queen O knockin' it out of the park

Aaron: In any case, the film is uneven at best. I think if it's worth seeing it's for the game of spot-the-celebrity and for Oprah Winfrey, who is her own epic version of spot-the celebrity. She is fabulous in The Butler, but it is also impossible to forget that she is Oprah: she's one of the most well-known women in the world. As it happens, she is also a great actress, and it is fun simply to watch that. 

Carlos: Agreed. Uneven, but ultimately worth seeing if not for the fact that we don't get many big theatrical releases that even attempt to discuss race in any sort of meaningful way. And yes, Oprah was and is the #1 reason to see it. For the camp spectacle of seeing Queen O dressed down and lookin' rough, as much as for her spectacular performance.

Gong Li

Do you know about Gong Li? She was Zhang Yimou's muse in the 1990s when they made Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and Shanghai Triad together. She was also the female lead in Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine. More recently she reunited with Zhang for Curse of the Golden Flower. She was also in the absurd USAmerican film Memoirs of a Geisha, but more importantly, she had a fantastic role in Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. She is a fierce, exciting actress, and I've always been blown away by both her incredible beauty and her onscreen power.

Love her.

Three Movies

...and a fucked up weekend. I received some terrible, terrible news on Saturday, and I will probably write about it on this blog in a day or two. Right now I am in denial and I don't feel like writing about it. So: movies.

Watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time Redux yesterday. I am not sure what Wong re-did with this movie, because I never saw the original—the DVD quality of the original Ashes of Time has always been super sketchy. I know that the new version has a new score with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma, but that is all I really know. A couple thoughts about this movie. It took me a little while to get interested in it. This is partly because the movie is set in a kind of rural, medieval netherworld of a desert in China. This is beautiful, but completely unhinged from reality even though it maintains a premise of realism for a while.

Ashes of Time is beautiful to look at, though, and by the end of it, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I have one more complaint, though, which is that the swordfighting and action sequences are not interesting at all. They are often in slow-motion and they lack tension, as well as a rooting factor.

I did not care for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle. It's famous gay cinema, but its charms were lost on me almost completely. It's sexy, that's for sure, but it never really works. This may be because it is not really clear about what it is trying to do. It may be because Fassbinder is attempting to re-create the feel of Genet's book on film. I am not sure what he is trying to do, though, because whatever he was trying most certainly did not work. Frank Episale, a colleague of mine, has written an interesting essay about Fassbinder's film, which I, quite frankly, found more interesting than Querelle itself. Querelle is definitely no Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

It's a disaster!! I really liked Earthquake. I am a big fan of seventies disaster movies anyway, but I think Earthquake has to be one of the best. Great special effects, interesting (and sometimes very weird) characters, and an uncompromising, very cool ending. I also loved Earthquake's photography. The editing and camerawork build tension very well and the ends without dragging on the story for too long, and—perhaps more importantly—without tying up the loose ends of the disaster the way most disaster films do. A little less all-star than, say, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake stars Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Geneviève Bujold and George Kennedy (is he in every disaster movie?). I am not a Charlton Heston fan, but Bujold is delightful. Definitely worth the rent.

Twenty Forty-six

'Cause I I I I I never never never never never never never never never never never loved somebody the way that I loved you.

Tonight I saw Wong Kar-Wai's film 2046, which is a follow up to my favorite of his films: In the Mood for Love. Both star the beguiling Tony Leung Chui Wai, with whom I might be in love were it not for my devotion to Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro. At any rate, 2046 is, to my mind a bit of a failure for Wong. I don't want to be super critical, but I know that as I watched it, having highly anticipated the film for months, I found myself a little bored. The performances are all top-notch, my favorite being a manipulative and then painful turn by the fabulous Chinese actress Li Gong, and the most showy being a strong, moving portrayal by Zhang Ziyi, an actress to whom I haven't totally warmed, but who gives a really stand-out performance in this film.
The movie itself, though, gets bogged down in a (quite lengthy) fantasy sequence about an android/girl (Faye Wong, who I also love) who doesn't feel completely important to the story, and so strays from the important relationships in the story: those with Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi. The android sequences are so long, that the ending only half-works and instead feels rushed and poetically incomplete. Another problem is that the film doesn't have a uniform look like Wong's films usually have. The film feels disjointed and even episodic at times... even more so than, say, Chung King Express, a film with two completely unrelated stories.

When You're Gone / All the Colors Fade When You're / Gone

Hi guys,
Sorry for being away so long.

Last night I watched Fallen Angels from Wong Kar-Wai. He is so fucking awesome. It's not as good as Chung King Express, but it has similar themes and works fairly well as a follow-up. It does boast the gorgeous Takeshi Kaneshiro, who has some really funny stuff... there's all of this hilarity based on him forcing people to do things like eat ice cream and get their hair washed. Very funny.

We're having audits at work and they're very stressful for everyone there. I mostly don't feel like going in. I have keyed myself up so much at the thought of going back to school...
I should really stop talking about it, but it's all I think about. Probably why I'm not updating the LJ.

Oh yeah, and my parents took me to dinner at the Hotel Bel Air and I had probably the best meal I've ever eaten in my whole life. It cost and arm and a leg, but goddamn was it good! It's so swank and the food is so awesome. You should all go when you have lots of cash to burn.

Oh, and check out this self-titled album by Amos Lee. I am loving it.

Movies

Did I leave the tap running or is the apartment getting more tearful?
I always thought it would cope okay.
Didn't expect it to cry so much.
When people cry they can dry their eyes with tissues.
But when an apartment cries, it takes a lot to mop it up.

-Wong Kar-Wai Chung King Express

Today I watched something I should have seen years ago: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. This film is a fucking masterpiece and don't let anyone tell you different. I was put off by the three-hour-twenty-minute running time but I shouldn't have been. It is nothing short of genius.

I See Loud People

Watched Chung King Express tonight. I FUCKING LOVE WONG KAR-WAI. Plus, this one starred (at least for half of the film) Takeshi Kaneshiro... most gorgeous guy ever. It's okay that he goes away after half of the film because Tony Leung is the star of part two.

I worked late tonight and then I decided to go read a play at CPK. I have been reading some Adam Rapp. I finished his play Stone Cold Dead Serious a couple days ago and it absolutely rocks. So I am reading the next one in this anthology. It's called Faster. It's really fucking good too. Allan, you would love these plays.

I finished my salad and diet pepsi (I'm trying to do better, again) and decided to go buy a copy of As You Like It. Linda is talking to me again about doing Shakespeare in the summer and she brought up AYLI. I have (oops) never read it, so I need to bone up, I guess. I also nearly ran into (literally) Haley Joel Osment, who looks a lot better since the last time I saw him. Read: his face has cleared up.

Actually, let me tell the full story. I'm eating my salad at the bar at CPK because the place is absolutely packed, and about twenty feet from the bar are two tables filled with (I assume) high school students, but they might have been college freshmen. For some reason, most of them are wearing odd outfits. One of them is wearing Mickey Mouse ears and those enormous Mickey Mouse gloves, for example. Another is wearing a paper bag on his head decorated to be a rocking horse head. I swear this happened. Another is in house slippers. When I get up to leave, they are also leaving. I leave the restaurant alone and go around the corner to the elevator which will take me one floor down to the parking structure. I wait for the elevator in solitude for a minute or so when I am joined by a moderately pretty, rather pouty Filipino or Mexican woman. She does not smile at me but waits for the elevator. After another thirty seconds or so we are joined by the twenty teenagers from CPK who are being as loud as anyone has ever been in the history of Earth: talking, joking, laughing--mostly yelling, I feel. When the elevator comes to our floor, about ten people get off the elevator and the kids start to get in before me and Filipino/Mexican chick, so I move into the elevator in their midst and F/M chick follows suit. The kids, however, do not stop filling the elevator and so we all squeeze into the elevator: about twenty-two of us. The kids' volume has in no way lessened during this process or in the ensuing ride down to the parking garage. This one girl in particular is screaming in my ear to her companions that they "are not the only ones in the elevator," and that her comrades ought to be considerate of the strangers in their midst. I begin to chuckle at this. In fact, the whole thing amused me, beginning with the sardine-packed elevator. I thought it was very funny and I was grinning the whole time girl #1 was yelling in my ear about her friends' manners. So when the elevator door opens and I am let out I am still grinning and before I realize I am talking to/looking at Haley Joel Osment, I say with a grin on my face "Little kids" and shake my head. Haley is smiling too and is dressed in a suit coat for some reason or other. I think he joined up with the kids, and now that I think about it, he may have been in their company the whole time without me noticing. He is rather short, after all.

Sometimes I'm on My Game...

What does Fiona Apple say? Sometimes my mind don't shake and shift / But most of the time it does.

I haven't been getting enough sleep. This week is also the toughest week out of the month at work. We have management statements due and this month I have been given an equal share to the other lowly accountants in my office: meaning I have six of them to do. This would all be okay, actually. They just take a long time, really. I mean, they're not especially tough. But lack of sleep and increased pressure led me to be an unhappy camper around 1:00p today. I had lunch around 1:15p and simply decided to give in to the bad mood. I announced to the others that I was indeed in a bad mood and not to fuck with me. They did not heed my warning, but most escaped without me raising my voice. The lazy one was not so lucky. She totally fucked up something I was working on and then didn't tell me until it was way too late and I had to go back and fix this thing (I am blowing it out of proportion, but hey... bad mood.) It really wasn't that bad. I was just pissy... and tired.

I called a bunch of people on the way home: my usual M.O.
Bernardo didn't answer his phone, of course. He was supposed to have sent me the plays I am supposed to choose from last Wednesday. I still have not received them so I don't know what he's doing. He says that this playwriting kid Eric has written something he thinks is really interesting and he wants me to think about that too. I can't think about it, of course, because I haven't read it.
Madison never answers her phone, but I actually left her a message this time.
And I called Kevin. Mostly just to say hi. I saw him at CSUP on Monday and I realized I kind of missed him. So we chatted for a while. He's so weird. I think I'm drawn to him in the way I am drawn to other dorks--kinda like Andrew--he's really passionate about acting, so that is interesting to me, but he's not at all cool like Justin or Wahima or Elizabeth

I came home and turned on Wong Kar-Wai's Chung King Express, but didn't even get halfway through it before I started to fall asleep. So I gave into that too and laid down on my sofa and slept. Bernardo called me back after a while and he seemed very confused that I hadn't received the plays. Hm.

Or better yet / I'll wear shades / on sunless days / and when the sun's out I'll stay in and slumber

Rentals

I'm getting my money's worth out of Netflix once again. Tonight I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild. It rocks. It's not as fucking genius as In the Mood for Love, but it is awesome nonetheless.

Celebrated the parents' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary tonight as well, and I absolutely gorged myself with food. Not a nice image, I understand, but there aren't too many other ways to say it. Dinner was actually quite lovely, except during the obligatory 'political discussion' portion of the evening. I don't bring politics up, y'all. It was Deborah, who asked the pressing question, "Aaron, how do you feel about women in the military?" What the fuck is she talking about? I don't understand these people most of the time when it comes to politics. They just don't think things through, and my mother and sister both think that women should and I quote, "stay at home and raise the children." This kind of shit makes me want to throw a chair through a plate glass window like nothing else.
And then sit and cry for a solid hour.

Mostly, I was calm though.

Knock You Off Your Routine

Because I quit work yesterday and my new job doesn't start until Monday, I had all day to myself. I woke up and watched Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together. I loved his film In the Mood for Love and I thought to myself that I might want to see another of his films. Plus Happy Together is a film about a gay couple. It's okay—not great. But it stars the beautiful Tony Leung Chiu Wai (Hero, In the Mood for Love, Infernal Affairs, Chungking Express). Mainly, the movie made me think of Andrew, or rather, Andrew's physical presence. I miss Andrew's body.

Boo to the renovations they are doing to my two-story Target on Colorado. The clothing department has taken over both floors. You can't find anything anymore. And I do not buy clothes there. I'm far too much of a snob for that. I think I will find a new Target: one where you can still buy paper towels and dental floss and dishwasher detergent and chewing gum.

I went shopping today and spent literally hundreds of dollars on clothes. I need dressy clothes since I am going to have to dress up every single damn day now. No more wearing shirts that say "I'm Not Gay But My Boyfriend Is" or "Morning Wood" to work anymore. I bought dress shoes too. At Nordstrom. They're Kenneth Cole Reaction and they're hot.

I was positively grinning all day today. I am so happy to be away from my old job and on to something new. After the shopping I visited the family and then went to Brea to bid farewell to one of my closest friends. Derek is moving to Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon. This is a part of the autumn and the changes that are happening now that the seasons are shifting. Some of the changes feel good and some of them don't feel so good. But Julie set up this cool scrapbook/photo album/memory book that most of us contributed to and that was the centerpiece of the evening. Julie did a really nice job with it and the stuff that people wrote was really nice.

When You Have Fake Blood on Your Hands...

I ought to read a book.  That picture of The Empty Space has been sitting in that spot on my webpage for too long. 

I finished In the Mood for Love today and I recommend this movie to everyone.  It is so great and is obviously the inspiration for Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.  It stars the very cute Tony Leung Chiu Wai and the alluring Maggie Cheung Man Yuk (both recently of Hero fame).  I cannot believe it took this long for me to see this movie.  It's beautiful.

Drove out to Diamond Bar, visited with my theatre-carpenter friend Michael Jordan who is working on Knott's Scary Farm right now, and then did some work on VAL.  We cast in 2 weeks.  (!)

Then I headed down to Hollywood to see Justin & Elizabeth.  We went to Santa Monica, where, once again, I did not buy anything.  I have been so good of late.  I promised myself that after I get paid for VAL I'll splurge and get myself a chandelier for the dining room.