Ring Out, Wild Bells, To The Wild Sky--Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring

So I just saw The Bling Ring, and if there is a more terrifying indictment of how America has gone horribly wrong, failed its youth, and willfully thrown itself into the shallow end of the pool, I for one do not have the stomach to face it.

As We Have Done Before: Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

Well,  you never know what's going to lure me back to posting.

This time around, it's to partially appease, partially excorsise an apparition that follows me in some kind of orbit, one as mysterious and elongated as Pluto's; Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

THE TRUTH ISN'T OUT THERE, IT'S IN HERE ( . . . in my heart)!

                    
You know how you sometimes run into someone you've almost forgotten, but not quite?

Maybe you knew them in high school or college, or that year you lived in Chicago, or when you did that semester abroad thing or took a vacation in Lincoln, Nebraska. And you liked them--in fact, you ended up hanging out with them a lot. They were funny and cool, in a way that your other friends, even the funny and cool ones, weren't. You got really interested in them and wanted to hear everything they had to say, and if it sometimes didn't track or got a little overly complicated you didn't care, because their complications were way more fascinating then other people's efforts to keep things simple.

But time passed, and the context you knew them in passed, and you kind of lost touch. You didn't forget them--the names remained fresh and crisp, the faces finely drawn--you just were in different places now and you didn't think about them very much.

And then one day you're fooling around on the internet and some site has a gossip item and you read it and those names are right there and suddenly you remember how much fun they really were, and you have this out of nowhere desire to connect with them again! Right now!

That's how it was with me and the X Files.

Why Neil is Safe From Me

 

I never, never, never want to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson.

"But why?" comes the stunned cry from the Internet. "He's so smart and funny! He loves science in a way that makes other people love it too! He won gold medals in dancing contests! He's got an adorable daughter and georgous wife! He's a fine wine conniseur! HOW COULD YOU NOT WANT TO MEET HIM??"

Odd Socks and Even Ends

So, after that last post, I was going to move on to my plans to read Petrarch and Virgil, but then I realized that makes me sound like a preening windbag. So here's some "been rattling 'round in there for a while" random things and bits instead.




                     DRIVE: Why Didn't it Get More Nominations?



Seriously, why? It got, like, Best Sound Editing. It's not even going to win for that,  I bet. And it should have been nominated for at least Best Screenplay and Best Supporting (for Albert Brooks.)

This movie is the Bomb. It is the Shit. It is Ryan Gosling in a white satin jacket. (Really. It really is that last one. ) It's stuffed with fabulous actors giving the right kind of performances in a genuinely brilliant '80s brainless action film reworked and stripped down into a post-20th century tone poem.

Gosling gives less a performance than a portrait of a man who is living quietly in the wake of what was clearly a psychotic break, who only feels that he exists when he's driving, and having that carefully balanced pyschosis run head on into another human being, or beings; Carey Mulligan's tender and fragile young mother and her little boy, whose absent father is in prison--less for any crime he may have committed and more as the natural end result of spending his bewildered life being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Gosling's character (he's known only as "The Driver" in the credits) somehow becomes a whacked-out Knight Errant for Mulligan's and is dragged, blank-faced, into dealings with  middle aged mobsters who make up for their lowly positions with an excess of grandiosity/bloodthirstiness. Brooks in particular does a great turn as a less-a-kingpin-then-an-old-courtier mobster who marches through acts of astonishing violence with sagging shoulders, weary eyes, and unerring stabbing ability. Ron Perlman (yippee!) is the mobster whose reach exceeds his grasp and discovers that's what hell is for, and Christina Hendricks shows up as a bad guy's gal who missed all her gangster's moll lessons and ended up in cheap boots and cheaper motel room.

This movie is amazing. It takes all the elements of a typical action flick--damaged man, vulnerable woman, cute kid, fast cars, bad guys, guns, money, neon pink credits--and reworks them into a flow of images that move around the main character without touching him, until that woman looks at him with those big, big eyes... there's even a scene at a strip club with boobs all over the place, but believe me, two minutes into that scene and you will forget they exist.

Best Sound Editing, pah! But it frankly should win for that. Check it out:








                         Diet Pepsi: The Drink of the Apocalypse



What? I said this was random.


One thing I've noticed in my illustrious career of taking pizza orders: when some customer or other asks for something odd, bizarre, or just plain weird, this apparently a signal for a huge cluster of future random customers to call up with the exact same weird request.


To wit: Diet Pepsi. We sell Coke products, always have. Nothing against the fine folks at the Pepsi-Cola Corporation, but we sell Coke products. But that hasn't kept at least twelve people, in the last few days, from requesting not only Pepsi, but Diet Pepsi.

Diet Pepsi? What is this, 1975? Who the hell still drinks Diet Pepsi? The Pepsi Generation has to be in their sixties at the very least! Are you calling me from the boardwalk in your Farrah hair and tight white pants, taking a break from rollerskating down the promenade to request this fizzy beverage? Did you just pass the Doublemint twins? Are you about to try on your new mood ring and giant hoop earrings? Because that was the last time Diet Pepsi was relevant in the pop culture landscape, people! The last time anyone cared about it it was setting Michael Jackson's hair on fire! Join the 21st century and go to Starbucks! Leave me alone!










         The Oscars: I'm Never Actually Home to Watch


I don't think I've seen the first hour and a half of the Oscars for the past six years at least. And everyone knows that's the part really worth watching: critiquing hair, dresses, various guys' horrifyingly misguided attempts to be "eye catching" (Guys, stop it. You are men. You wear a tux. A regular, bow tie, well fitted tux. Do not wear a colored shirt. Do not wear creative footwear. Don't do a Robert De Neiro that one time he cut his hair to look like Marilyn Quayle's. When in doubt, pretend to be George Clooney. Nice smile, tux, cute date. See how easy?) Wondering if this is the year that Joan Rivers is finally going to crumble into a pile of dust and silicon. Guessing who's already drunk. Guessing who's meeting who in the ladies' for some cocaine to take the edge off not eating for a week to fit into the designer gowns. It's not like you haven't guessed most of the winners by this point anyway.


And The Artist totally deserves to win, it's amazing. But it would be SO FUCKING COOL for Bridesmaids to win! Best Picture, not just Best Screenplay or whatever Pat the Lady On the Head award they have set aside for Wiig. (Wait, is Bridesmaids nominated for Best Picture? I can't remember. It fucking should be is my point.)

But I'll be at work, as usual, taking orders, hearing muffled cheering in the background and demanding of some random person to tell me who just won Best Whatever. Ah, the glamour of everyday life.


Well, that's it for now--Husband is home and listening to his Queen album and I'm getting distracted. Until next time remember: Drive, Tux, NO DIET PEPSI.