Movies, movies everywhere

and not one damn thing I truly want to see. A few possibilities, minus the ones we’ll never agree on. Let’s see. Top ten at the box office this week…

Michael Jackson’s This Is It: aging drugged-out pedophile rehearses for concert that never happened. From all reports, his nose does not fall off. Nothing to see there.

Ambivalence as a lifestyle: looking good, sort of

First example

I hate that she voted for this war. Hate, hate hatehatehatehatehate… but Obama is looking more and more like a talking head to me. I could be totally wrong – but I don’t see anyone there. So:

I guess. Damn it. I’m staying drunk come November.

Second example

I’m reading that Miss Pettigrew’s Day Off is pretty much a goopy chick flick with a patina of BBC faux-class. Okay. But it also has this:

Ciaran Hinds – one of my super-craggy secret boyfriends. What to do?

Oh, and for the record

George Clooney was robbed. Jesus. Want some eggs with that ham, Mr. Day-Lewis?

One more Cyrano post

Before Broadway went dark, I read some reviews of Kevin Kline’s Cyrano. Most agreed that he was divine, but the supporting cast was weak. Tragic – though it may seem like a one-man show, it’s not. A cloying or bubble-headed Roxane (and I’ve seen both) renders Cyrano’s passion for her both unbelievable and degrading. An empty-headed Christian (and I’ve seen one) doesn’t have quite the same deleterious effect, but he has to be clever enough to deliver a poet’s words and charming enough to hold our sympathy for his inadequacies; after all, he isn’t the villain.

I have a very bad feeling about this:

Because I have an almost pathological passion for this:

What I call “the real Sweeney Todd,” the one with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. Seeing this production on what? HBO? Bravo? as a teenager was a revelation, an epiphany. I did not know that words and music could work together like this.

I had seen every classic film musical ever (though very little opera), probably, thanks to my mom, and I understood vaguely that when characters came back onstage or onscreen their signature tunes followed them; that music could create mood and songs could tell stories and reveal character. But I had never understood before that a melody could be as raw and honest as any soliloquy. I had never truly heard voices and instruments in point and counterpoint, speaking to each other and to me, upping the emotional ante beyond belief. I had never known music was so… necessary. Stephen Sondheim taught me.

So when I see Johnny Depp in previews, essentially talking his way through his role, I get a very bad feeling indeed. Sure, Rex Harrison did it in My Fair Lady and created the Professor Higgins – but he had already proven that it would work in the Broadway production. Anyone who’s ever heard the Julie Andrews cast recording of Camelot (as opposed to the film soundtrack) knows that the “talk/sing” is a risk that doesn’t always pay off. And even when it does, that was Lerner and Loewe, and this is Sondheim.

Damn it.

Piggyback pop culture post: modern actors I actually like

Polly, who has once again demonstrated her essential wisdom and unfailing good taste, has inspired me to look on the bright side of Hollywood. I don’t even know the names of most of the flock of pretty boys running rampant through films in the last ten or fifteen years; our embarrassingly immense DVD collection is at least 95% pre-1970, and probably 70% pre-1955. By temperament and conditioning, I am no expert on younger actors.

Further, I don’t really understand the concept of having a “crush” on an actor; I appreciate male beauty as much as the next woman gay man transgendered whoever, but looks have never been much of a factor in my somewhat eclectic attraction process. Funny, screwed up, compatibly perverse… these are the qualities that push my buttons. I don’t know any of that about a face on a screen; all I know is the character he’s playing.

That said, there are a few actors who consistently play roles I find compelling; characters who, to be blunt, make my girl bits tingle (still, I have no real desire to follow their lives off-screen). Gabriel Byrne comes to mind, as does John Malkovich – Miller’s Crossing and Dangerous Liaisons are two near-perfect films, in my book. But the man who has played more disturbed, perverted, obsessed, incredibly sexually intense crazy people than anyone else, the actor whose films I generally cannot watch with my husband in the same room, is…

Off to see the skeery movie…

… alone as usual, since I am surrounded by wimps and weenies.

Testament to that inner Pollyanna that Pollyanna doesn’t believe I have: I always hope the next one will be truly skeery. Suspenseful, well-written, beautifully shot, not gimmicky, not unnecessarily gory, impeccably acted, with a marvelously unpredictable twist or two that I can’t figure out. Surprisingly moving but not clumsily manipulative, layered but not pretentious.

Wait a minute.

I hope but don’t believe.

Is that what having no inner Pollyanna means?

Screw it. Going to see 1408.