As I officially begin my sixth day of Spring break, I can no longer in good conscience make any more excuses to myself for avoiding my blog. There's white space on my calendar, and I've gotten a good night's sleep or two for the first time in many weeks. Sure there's email that still needs to be responded to, but I have time between now and Monday to reply to the 135 or so messages, clean up other work-related loose ends, and still have time for some blogging and other fun activities.
Rather than try to reconstruct the most salient events that have occurred since my last posting, I'll simply skip to the events of the past week since there are far fewer of them to recall. On Saturday, we had dinner with friends (Chuck & Gayle & Bob & Barbara) at Fajita Coast and then entertained them at home with dessert and a film on the "big screen." At Bob's recommendation, I'd checked out a copy of "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)," from the library earlier in the day. We watched the 1994 Australian film featuring three major macho actors (Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving, and Terence Stamp) playing two drag queens and a transsexual. Together, they blaze a cathartic trail through the Australian outback on their way to a gig at a remote location. There's great music throughout, and the film culminates with an incredibly flamboyant rendition of the ABBA classic, "Mama Mia," which induced me to add to the Netflix queue, "ABBA: The Movie (1977)," an early film by Swedish director, Lasse Hallstrom ("Chocolat," "Cider House Rules," etc.). I watched the film this morning, and it really captures the phenomenon that was ABBA in its/their heyday.
Although I've also watched quite a few other films so far during the break, I took time off on Tuesday to get a bunch of chores taken care of. At 8:30, I got a haircut. At 9:15 I met Stuart at the neighboring Starbucks for coffee and a conversation about finances. At 11:00, it was off to Precision Tune for a 72,000-mile checkup. By 1pm I was at the Long Branch library returning and picking up new DVDs, and at about 20 after, I was north of White Oak getting my emissions system inspected. At 2pm, I was at Radial Tires on Brookeville Road buying four new tires, and while they were being installed, I walked to Snider's Supermarket and back to pick up some groceries. By 4pm, I was home again watching various supplementary material from the "Priscilla" DVD.
And while I'm on the subject of DVDs and movies, let me jot down before I forget some of the other material I've watched lately. First, there's Lon Chaney's "The Penalty (1920)" where he plays a cripple whose legs were surgically removed as a boy by a doctor in his zeal to save his life. There's also "The Lovely Bones (2009,") directed by Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings" "King Kong", etc.), which I hadn't read (but Evelyn did) and is apparently a faithful rendition of the book. I also watched the final three episodes of the first season of the 2005-2007 Showtime series, "Masters of Horror," all of which can claim gruesomely memorable moments but are pretty forgettable from a story and acting standpoint. Also on the horror front (or, more specifically, the zombie front), I watched the low-budget films "White Zombie" (1932) with Bela Lugosi (I'd seen it recently before, and it wasn't quite so bad upon a second viewing), "King of the Zombies" (1941) featuring Mantan Moreland, which was pretty awful, and "Valley of the Zombies" (1946), which though it sported neither valleys nor zombies was enjoyable nonetheless, thanks largely to the menacing performance of Ian Keith. I also watched the Nazi-zombies-on-the-beach thriller, "Shock Waves" (1977) with John Carradine and Peter Cushing as well as the through-the-eyes-of-zombies comedy (sort-of), "Aah, Zombies" (2007, aka "Wasting Away"). I can't believe how many zombie-related films there are, and I can't believe how much time I've spent watching them--and that doesn't include the time I've spent listening to the University of Alabama podcast titled "Zombies in Film" (much of which was done via my iPod while exercising in the gym.) There's no doubt a reason why I've developed this recent interest in zombies in the arts (I've also begun reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), but I'm sure, but I'm not particularly anxious to figure it out.
Next on the agenda was a film whose resurrection is of an entirely different sort: G. W. Pabst's silent classic, "Pandora's Box (1929)," starring one of the most beautiful actresses to ever grace the screen, Louise Brooks. I also watched two documentaries on her short, tempestuous career, and one can only wonder what her legacy might have been had she and Hollywood not so illy parted ways.
The most recent film I saw was at AFI earlier this evening. It was a press screening of actor turned David Schwimmer's "Trust," which explores the chilling effect of online predation on an upper-middle class American family. Parents Clive Owen and Catherine Keener are at a loss to prevent the situation or to put things right in its aftermath. Owen as the devastated dad has too short a fuse for my tastes (e.g., a scene in which he beats up a photographing fan on the basketball court), and the film is a bit too on the nose in parts (especially the very last shot), but the grounded performances of Keener and Liana Liberato, who plays Annie, their damaged daughter, provide heart-rending performances that give the film an intimacy that is both hard to watch and harder not to. The after-film discussion with Schwimmer and several others actively involved in online predator-prevention efforts was both illuminating and disconcerting. Anyone at any age can be fooled, and we should tread just as carefully online as we do in the material world.
Thursday, 3/24/2011
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