wonderland5

you MUST rent this

This is the latest movie directed by my personal hero, Julie Taymor.  She started her career making puppets (but not just any puppets--the really cool Lion King on Broadway puppets are her creation) but she has now transformed herself into a movie director (she directed Frida)  This is easily one of the coolest looking movies I have ever seen.  Well worth the two hours even if you don't like the Beatles (who doesn't like the Beatles??) 

looking forward

We are starting to get anxious for spring to arrive.

We are tired of winter coats and hats and static in our hair.  Tired of hustling from house to car to store and back. 

We are looking forward to lovely, balmy spring, with her good smells and bright colors and warm warm air.  We are looking forward to that most of all.

Mike and I had a night out on Friday: the first in a while ( we thank granny and poppy sincerely for the opportunity!)

We had been wanting to see this movie for some time and I have to say that it did not disappoint. It was beautifully shot and deceptively simple.  I am still thinking about it two days later, the symbolism and the costumes and the crazy baby eating monster with eyes in it's hands. Yes, it was graphic and creepy at times, two things that I am not usually psyched for in a movie. Despite that I truly loved it, even though I had my eyes covered about 25 percent of the time (which did make reading the subtitles a wee bit difficult.)

I will be rooting for it to win best foreign film next Sunday night.

shall we play a game?

Those of us of a certain (ahem) age remember Matthew Broderick from long before the producers and even before Ferris Bueller.  Some of us have not forgotten the 1983 MB classic  War Games (also featuring Ally Sheedy pre-brat pack and the ubiquitous 80's character actor Dabney Coleman.)

Mike and I have been netflixing a number of movies and tv shows from the late seventies and early eighties--mostly things that neither of us have seen since The Movie Channel was the hottest game on cable. It has been fun and entertaining (and a little bit creepy in the case of Fantasy Island.) As for War Games, Mike admits to riding his bike to the theater to see it on the big screen, something I am sure that I did not do, since it did not star John Cusack or feature singing or dancing in any way.

Anyway, we watched War Games this evening and laughed together over the floppy-ness of the floppy disks and the Tab product placements.  We learned a valuable lesson from the movie's lesson on the pointlessness of the cold war and hugged with relief when global thermonuclear war was averted.

After the viewing, sitting on the porch enjoying some fresh mountain air, we got to talking about how quaint the cold war seems now.  Now that we have HOT wars, real wars--not computer simulations or drills where you go out into the hallway of your grade school to kneel down and cover your head with your hands.  Now we are becoming acclimated to something a little different in the world order.  yikes.

Although I'd like to report that this conversation led to a thoughtful analysis of the weightier issues, but alas I cannot.  Instead, the conversation turned to the personal, as conversations like this often do.  Mike suggested that we post a "defcon" rating system on the frig to monitor how close each of us feels to having a fight with the other at any point in time.  From this we moved to an analysis of which axis of evil each of us might represent with our fighting styles.  Our decisions?  Mike is a bit like North Korea--secretive, sketchy, you never know what he is building up in his arsenal.  We decided that despite recent unfortunate choices ( that I hope I would never ever make the likes of) I am more like Israel--I fight a lot, often get defensive but the whole thing is right out there, I am not trying to pretend that I am not fighting.  Sometimes I escalate things way too quickly and then am not sure how to diffuse the whole thing.

Not to make light of a truly serious situation, really.  And this is silly perhaps but it's just an interesting thing to think about.  What about you--what axis of evil are you??

more later

Memoirs of a Geisha

I watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night and I have to say that I really enjoyed it.  I am usually less than impressed with the films made from books that I have liked, but I thought they did a good job putting it on the screen. 

It is a really gorgeous film and the costumes are amazing.  They reminded me of something that I thought was really engrossing about the book--the discussion of the making of kimonos, the traditional garb of Japan, including the geisha.   The most elaborate of these were hand dyed, hand- painted, elaborately embroidered and absolutely incredible.  I did a little research on them today and found out that there were many phases in the development of the kimono and they are highly symbolic and represented the wearers marital status and place in society.

The kimonos that you see with the long rectangular sleeves were only worn by unmarried women.  Most were made of silk and were traditionally made of eight panels sewn together into a long rectangle.  Geisha were never to entertain wearing the same kimono twice.

The kimono was only one part of a many part outfit, all of which had to be worn in a certain way and some of which required the help of another to properly put on.

more later...

Grey Gardens

Mike went out with his boyfriends tonight so I had the chance to cozy up with Big Edie and Little Edie, the mother-daughter duo profiled in the 1975 cult-hit documentary "Grey Gardens".  I have been hearing about this film for years and I have to say that the hype that it is uber-camp is misleading.  This is not a fun or funny movie at all, in my opinion.  It shows these women living in truly desperate circumstances, locked into a co-dependent relationship which highlights each woman's particular brand of mental illness and their shared fantastical view of reality.  I found it compelling and sad and it left me wondering about how these women got into this situation.

As I was watching, I found myself studying the house within which the Edies live out their entire existence.  A classic East Hampton clapboard house, it must at one point have been truly gorgeous (and according to Town & Country June 2003 it is a showplace once again after a complete gutting and many years of renovation.)  A few scenes were shot in the foyer and dining room--I was really struck not by the extreme filth (supposedly the film makers had to wear flea collars around their ankles to keep from being bitten by the thousands of fleas that infested the home) but by the shade of french blue that the walls were painted.

This color has really been grabbing me lately.  I think that in the past I considered it pretty old-school but now it seems to have come full circle and become fresh again and classic rather than old-fashioned.  Perhaps I will repaint my bathroom in this shade. I would love to use it in a broader sense but it really doesn't go with the whole mod color scheme that our current house calls for and I don't think Mike is really willing to move to satisfy my desire to be surrounded by french blue.

Is it wrong of me to leave this movie thinking mostly about the color of the foyer?  Shouldn't I be typing an earnest missive about, say, why our culture alternately shuns and glorifies mental illness?  or perhaps a questioning of whether this movie would have been made had these women NOT been the aunt and cousin of Jackie O., formerly wealthy and beautiful and now poverty stricken and wearing turtlenecks tied around their sagging bosoms? (of course it wouldn't have--we love to see the once mighty fallen.)

What can I say?  I am what I am , as we all are. 

more later...