(This is cross posted)

Is it the sunglasses? is it the blind thing? I don’t know, but Ben Affleck was very sexy in this movie.

It was darker than I expected from a comic strip movie. Superman has always delivered his criminals into the hands of justice, and they always went to jail.

Batman sent them off to the institute for the Criminally insane.

But Daredevil just kills ’em.

He probably shouldn’t do that. That’s what I was thinking as I watched it.

And the character started thinking it too, after a while. It ended up being one of the motivating forces in the plot.

While I wouldn’t call it a work of cinematic genius, I really enjoyed it. I’d watch it again.

Especially to see Affleck in that red leather suit again.

Got this DVD out of the library recently. It’s on the AFI list of recommended movies.

I’m not a fan of Westerns. They are such GUY movies. Usually there is no woman in the movie that acts in any way resembling what I might do.
Or even what any female I know might do.

But I thought I would give it a try.

I am pleased to say that this Western was not that kind of movie. There are some kick-ass females in it!

One, played by Grace Kelly, was a really strong female. She was the sugar one, but she had some real backbone.

You know the kind of woman in a movie who just can’t seem to do ANYTHING? During the fight scene, her hero will get his gun kicked away from him, and it will land right at the woman’s feet.

AND SHE WILL JUST STARE AT IT!

Stupid female.

But this chicky was not like that. She had some strong convictions. She did stuff. She even grabs the gun at the end.

The other female was the spice. She was actress Katy Jurado, and a latina. BEAUTIFUL, and in total control. She is the one I would want to be, much as I admired Little Bo-Peep Grace Kelly. She had everybody in the palm of her hand, doing what she had to do, and doing it better than anybody else.

The story was good, very suspenseful. I like that the story hinged on the relationships between the characters.

I might even buy this one!

I went to see the Hours. I’d read the book before seeing the movie. What that means is that I ought to have remembered kleenex.

But of course I didn’t.

I think that reading the book spoiled a certain amount of surprise at what was going to happen. But then, reading Mrs. Dalloway prior to reading The Hours had kind of spoiled some of the surprise.

It didn’t matter, though. The movie was very true to the spirit of the book. The same feeling I had while reading the book, the feeling of being set adrift to revel in the details of the moment, were in the movie.

I could not help noticing all the small facts of decoration for the women. Their jewelry, their hair. Their clothes, yes their clothes. And the textures of their homes.

I don’t know if it is something innately feminine or not, but many many women take great pleasure in the little pretty details of their dress and decorations. The Hours was so much about women.

Being about women, it is of course, about all of us. We all come from a woman, after all.

The title refers to the moment. The Hours, the hours that go by and the hours that stay. Life is nothing more than the hours that you inhabit. Not the days, because an entire day is far too full to live at once.

The story in this movie takes a single day in the life of three separate women and traces how it unwinds. The story shows the experiences they have and the choices they make. It celebrates the fullness of life, in a beautifully honest way, revealing how terrifying, glorious and precious life is.

Obviously, I loved it. I especially loved it because it was not sweet or happy. It was just true. I hope it wins some recognition.

Sunday, I finally made myself do something I had been wanting to do for what seems to be months.

I went to see a movie at the Vista Theater.

I’d seen the theater in my many excursions and it is beautiful. A single theater on the corner of Sunset and Prospect, with a huge brick red facade with a huge white scrollwork all over the front. I mentioned it to someone and she said, “Oh the Vista! That’s a great theater!”

So I was even more eager to go.

There was another local theater the Los Feliz 3. But people didn’t say the same sort of nice things about it. And it didn’t have scroll work!

Little did I know, the scrollwork was just the beginning!

The interior was beautifully decorated in Egyptian art. Men with towels around their waists did two-dimensional activities around the back walls of the snack bar. Inside the theater, though, was amazingly spectacular.

The bright red curtains (when was the last timeI saw real curtains in a theater?) were topped with hissy snakes. The corners were ornately molded with more snakes and other creatures.

Around the sides were gold-painted disembodied heads, regal in blue headresses. Under each was its own light. Lit from beneath, the heads were especially eerie. When the lights went down for the movie, the lights did not go entirely out for the heads. They glowed in the darkness.

But the seating was quite luxurious. The rows were very far apart. While I was sitting, I could stretch my long leg forward, point my toe, and still not touch the seat in front of me.

It was nice to have that much space. It occurred to me that I could have brought a tavle in with me, if I had wanted to.

The Vista is my new favorite local theater. Anyone making a trip to LA and wanting to see a movie in Hollywood ™ ought to go.

I felt like it was worth the eight bucks. And for me, that is saying a lot.

Checked out “Long Day’s Journey into Night” from the library. There were a lot of different drama recordings to choose from, but I picked that one because it had a reputation of being really good. Eugene O’Neill is a reknowned playwright, and this play gets mentioned all over the place in anthologies, etc.

I thought it was something I should experience.

So. I listened to it. I was looking forward to posting about a brilliant play, and giving my opinion of it.

It is not a fun play. I really didn’t know what to expect, but it was not a comedy.

The whole story revolves around the mother in the family, who has a drug addiction. But as the play progresses, you find out that everybody is some kind of addict.

Their interactions are filled with justifications followed by wallowing in self-loathing. Then they are all so full of regrets and warning for everyone else.

Typical junkie behavior. I find it repulsive. I find it irritating, annoying and icky. So why would a whole drama showcasing junkiness be such a hit?

I can only think that, when the play came out, not many people had experience with junkies, and so they were fascinated.

I’ve had experience with junkies. My former father-in-law was an addict. It was quite exhausting, to keep up with his whereabouts and moods. Everyone in the family had to be massively elastic and jumpy to keep up with whatever he was going to do next.

And the astounding feats of justification and self-recrimination that his wife and son did. I never knew him as anything but an addict, so I was free to categorize him. They knew what he had been before, and were always judging his current behaviour as how close or far it was from his “real” self.

Crazy.

And now, one of my dearest friends just discovered her fiancee is a crackhead. She was describing how he reacted when she discovered him, and the lengths he had gone to hide the habit and lie to her.

I remembered my father-in-law. I remembered “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Self-deception. The easy way out…Thinking “It’s not really a lie…I will have quit the stuff before she finds out about it”

Then just a little more. And the NEED for it.

There are more people that can relate to this play than perhaps I realize.

Maybe it’s a mirror, too. It makes me wonder what I’m lying to myself about. It’s so so easy.

Some people, and I have the impression that it is mostly men, are terrified to go to the doctor. Maybe it is the doctor’s hurried and supremely self-confident and superior way of tossing off diagnoses and prescriptions that make people dislike seeing them. It explains the gender difference, too. Most women are used to being condescended to, at least a little.

Of course, things have changed so much. The last hundred years or so have taken medicine so far.

But so much has changed so little.

“The Doctor’s Dillemma” by Bernard Shaw satirizes the medical profession brilliantly. Shaw groups the brilliant doctors of his late victorian era and has them talk about their methods and their practices in such a way as to make any sick person set off in search of a witch doctor.

That’s not the only point to the story, though. There is a dilemma for the doctor, after all. A lovely young woman comes to him for help; she wants him to cure her husband of tuberculosis. He is quite dismissive at first, but is charmed by her and agrees to see the man.

With time, he becomes more and more impressed with the young woman–at the same time he discovers her artist husband is a liar and a cheat.

Is he worth saving? For his wife’s sake? For his art’s sake?

The play is very interesting, dealing with serious subjects, but with a lot of humor.

Writing takes time. It takes a certain time of brain space, too. I have been really busy with work. I wish that work would back off a little…I would rather be reading and thinking and writing than doing all this JOB stuff.

But the job stuff pays the bills.

I had a chance to listen to PYGMALION by Shaw. That was a great play! All kinds of good stuff, about class tension and social climbing and the place of women and the importance of manners in society.

On the back of the package, it says “PYGMALION inspired the award-winning film and stage productions of Lerner and Loewe’s musical, MY FAIR LADY.”

I went and got MY FAIR LADY so that I could compare the two. I like musicals.

But you know, this was pretty different than the play. The musical added songs which are very nice. But the story itself is such a practical story…I mean, it is about getting this work done–Higgins has to teach Eliza how to speak.

In PYGMALION, Eliza learned very fast and had a quick ear.
In MY FAIR LADY, Eliza couldn’t hear the sounds at all until Professor Higgins essentially tortured her for not saying it right. I thought that change to be rather implausible, he didn’t even TRY to explain how sounds are formed. Then, after he’s starved her and been cranky to her all day, she gets it and they dance around singing “The Rain in Spain.” Then, he demands that she stay up and study some more.

And she goes all googly and sings “I could have danced all night.”
WHAT?! the implication is that she is in love with Professor Higgins.
I fail to see the attraction. He hasn’t done anything nice for her, and he’s done a lot of mean things.

It doesn’t make sense to me.

In PYGMALION, Shaw treats marriage as a much more practical exercise. In fact, one of the lines that are in common show his point of view, “In tottenham court, I was above this. I sold flowers, not myself.”

That line seems incongruous in the musical. The musical has all kinds of massively sappy moments of LOOOOOVVVEEE!!! Freddie is head over heels, and Eliza is exstatic over Higgins, and Higgins has grown accustomed to her face.

It doesn’t hang together quite as well.

I think the play was much more complimentary to Eliza, giving her talents that are to her credit. But the musical makes her a patsy, whose only major selling point is how pretty she is.

It’s too bad.

I managed to find some quiet moments to listen to LA Theater Works’ ” The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” Neil Simon is a funny guy. But you all know that.

This one wasn’t full of symbolism and deeper meaning. It reminded me of a black-and-white slapstick sitcom. It was funny.

He published it in the 70s, and the many references to Valium make it seem pretty dated. Valium is not the trendy drug that it used to be.

I especially liked the gasps by Richard Dreyfuss…I think it must take practice to gasp that well.