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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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7:00 p.m. - 2004-07-03
I’m such a movie nut I have my movies mentally categorized into really minute sub-genres. Like for instance: Pretty Lame movies with Damn Pretty Boys who say, “Whooo!” a lot. The Lost Boys and Point Break are stellar examples. New York Romances that DON’T star Billy Crystal or Woody Allen: Crossing Delancy, Kissing Jessica Stein, The Night We Never Met to name a few. I have things divided like this because I get in very specific moods sometimes. I might not know the exact movie I want right away, but if I can identify the yearning I can winnow it down fairly quickly. It’s important to get it right. If I watch the wrong movie or read the wrong book in the wrong mood it’ll put me off that particular work for a long, long time. Sometimes the enchantment never comes back. If I’m distanced from the story I become dissatisfied with it. I pick holes in language and plot. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt with me, I’ve seen some movies upwards of 50 times. Re-read some favorite books at least that often. Things only go sour for me if I choose badly. I still can’t read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn without wincing over how smarmy it is. I thought I’d dose a particularly nasty mood with Betty Smith one time and just ended up going, “If you say ‘Katie Nolan’s shapely, but work reddened hands’ one more time I’m gonna barf.” Ruined it for myself completely. Some things I simply outgrew. Makes me sad some, but I realize this is inevitable. I’m not the same person I was 5, 15, 25 years ago and it only stands to reason that my tastes changed as I got older. American Graffiti was in my top 5 since I first saw it in 1974. I adore movies that play out almost in real time and Graffiti’s dusk to dawn time frame certainly comes close. The music transported me. Nobody cared about oldies back then and the soundtrack was wonderful. And when I was 11 I thought Terry the Toad was the cutest thing ever. I found his clueless buffoonery endearing. I’ll always have a soft spot for American Graffiti, but the memory of it is sweeter than the watching of it these days. Toad aggravates me. He seems whiny and weak. ALL the male characters do, except Paul LeMat’s John Milner. After 20 years of living with Mike, the epitome of silent can-do grit, fluttery dithery whiny men skeeze me out. Perhaps it’s not only Mike’s influence, I used to be pretty handy under the hood myself and am impatient with people who don’t even know where their hood latch is. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SIL called right there. She and kin are back from Texas. Hell Trip as usual. She said it was less than a million degrees so that helped. She got a wasp sting in the face. She said she was lucky, the wasp flew up inside her sunglasses. It got her cheek and not her eye. She laughed and said if it HAD gotten her eye she could have come over to compare lumpy swollen faces with me. Mine is irking me. My face muscles cramp up. In repose my face looks almost normal, something’s wrong, but it’s hard to say what aside from the blood red right eye. But if I move the whole front of my head pulls off to the left. I do my best John Merrick, but the amusement factor is wearing thin. I’m impatient for improvement already. It’s bothersome to take my many pills and eating is a total hassle. I keep forgetting to hold my eyelid shut in the shower and the the spray whips it open and floods my eye with water. Ouchie. I did nothing but rest today. It’s warm, but there is a seductive breeze coming in the windows. I’ve been sitting with my feet up, reading my book, thinking slow thoughts, and nibbling on clementines all day. Lovely. Susan had to beg off until Monday. Kid crisis. No prob. I wasn’t up for a lot of chat anyhow and Susan is a chatterbox supreme. If she cleans as hard and as fast as she talks my house is going to shine. Not that it’s terrible now, the man-zoo (Alex especially) has been trying and have been taking direction pretty well. But it needs girl cleaning. I sound like a sexist swot with my talk of handy men and women’s work, but liking what I like isn’t a crime. And no man in the history of time has ever remembered to take the glop out of the drainbaskets in the kitchen sink. Not once. Not ever. If the ‘man’ in your house does this, he’s an impostor. Check under the hood. You’ll see. Snarking, ~LA
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