Bookends (3)

I just finished reading A Conspiracy of Kings, the fourth book in a terrific series by Megan Whalen Turner.  The books are set in several small, fictional Mediterranean countries populated by kings, queens, temples, gods, spies, soldiers and conspirators.  And thieves.  Eugenides is the central character, a talented thief who is usually busy hiding his true intentions from everybody, including the reader.  (He reminds me of another favorite character of mine, Francis Crawford of Lymond from the series by Dorothy Dunnett.)  The first book, The Thief, was a Newbery Honor book, but it’s the second book, The Queen of Attolia, that’s my favorite.  It’s the perfect mix of romance and adventure.  Unfortunately,  A Conspiracy of Kings, the fourth and latest, is a real disappointment.  The first part of the book is very good, but then it becomes a slog through political strategy and diplomacy, referring a whole bunch of  funny-sounding countries without a map included to sort them out.  Frankly, I got bored and lost.  Eugenides was there, briefly, in the middle, but he was cool and distant, so near and yet so far away.  The focus was on a character not seen since The Thief, and he was interesting, but the book gave us too much strategy and not enough character interaction.  It was also one of those books with wide margins and double spacing—a very short book with a full-length price tag, without even a map to help you find your way.

A friend insisted I read the new teen novel The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson.  My friend said it reminded her of the way Twilight made her feel, without the vampires.  It was really enjoyable, for a book about grief and loss, because it’s also about first love and cute, perfect boys.  The story is about a teenage girl whose older sister has died suddenly.  Lennie leaves poems everywhere to express her grief, written on scraps of paper, bathroom walls, tree trunks, and library books.  Her quirky family also finds odd but endearing ways to mourn.  Then Lennie finds herself torn between two boys: the adorable new boy in town with the dazzling smile who brings the light back into her world, and her dead sister’s boyfriend who understands and shares her grief and darkness.  It’s an interesting story, moving and sexy, even though the boys are too perfect to be entirely believable.  Here’s my favorite sentence from the book:  “The next morning, a showered and betoweled Gram is fixing breakfast ashes. Big is sweeping the rafters for dead moths to put under the pyramids, and I am trying not to make out with my spoon, when there’s a knock at the door.” (page 62) 

I’ve been reading lots of books by John Connolly recently.  The first one I read was his last one published, and I chanced upon it while looking through the new arrivals section of my library.  It’s called The Gates, and it is really delightful.  It’s about a boy and his dog in an English village who battle demons escaping from the gates of hell in a neighbor’s basement.  I know that sounds horrific, but think  Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Shaun of the Dead, and you’ll get a better idea of how much fun this book is.  Hoping for more of the same, I went back to read Connolly’s earlier works.  His first book, Every Dead Thing, couldn’t be more different from The Gates.  I’m not saying it was a bad book, but I’m pretty sure it had the highest body count of any book I’ve ever read.  Now, that’s not counting books where there’s a plague or a natural disaster or the Apocalypse.  I’m talking page by page, person by person, methodical slaughter.  After the first hundred pages, I decided to disengage from all the characters but the main fellow, since it wasn’t likely anybody else would survive the book.  Will I read more Connolly?  Sure, but with all the lights on and the door locked.

Remembering My Parents

July is when I think about my parents the most.  They were both born in July of the same year.  They also both died in July— my mother 25 years ago, and my father just last year.  I’m still coming to terms with my father’s passing, and I still miss my mother.  I’m sure I always will. 

Since my focus here is entertainment, I’ve been thinking about what entertained my parents.  The list of what they didn’t enjoy seems longer than what they did.  Neither of them were readers, and my father in particular hated fiction.  He told me he didn’t understand why anybody would waste their time reading about made-up lives, so his books were encylopedias and a set of “the great books.”  They weren’t theatre goers, even though they came to all of the plays that I worked on as a theatre major, out of a sense of duty more than interest.  They took us to family movies when we were growing up, but I don’t recall them seeing many movies on their own.  We watched plenty of television, but I was the only one glued to the set.  I often felt like I was being raised by an entirely different species.

My father loved classical music and opera.  He would come home from work, go into his bedroom to get away from the sound of the television, and blast his opera at full volume.  Sometimes the neighbors complained.  I often did.  I like classical music now that I’m an adult, and I like the spectacle of opera when I see it live, but I didn’t inherit his passion for it.

My mother loved Days of Our Lives.  Every day she’d have to tell me what happened on “her story.”  She started watching the soap in 1972, during one of the most traumatic times of her life.  I can understand, looking back, how losing herself in that TV world would be a welcome break from her own.  Mom also belonged to a “craft-of-the-month” club.  Every month she would get a pre-fabricated craft with all the necessary parts and detailed instructions.  They required so much time and effort, and I marveled at her patience doing them.  She would sit at the table for hours, holding two pieces of wood together while the glue dried.  She rarely kept anything for herself, so our relatives received a confusing array of papier-mache vases, framed pictures of Model-Ts formed from tiny metal parts, and cutesy holiday centerpieces.  My mother’s favorite entertainment, by far, was people-watching.  All we had to do was take her to a place with lots of people and sit her down. 

Both my parents came from blue collar backgrounds.  My mother had a couple years of college, and my father graduated with a degree in architecture.  They wanted the best for their kids, like any good parents, and that included introducing my brother and me to the arts.  I took dancing lessons; we both took music, drama and art classes.  It was all well and good, until I decided to make theatre my profession.  My father had strong objections, since he wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer.  To this day, I don’t understand why parents freak out when their kids decide to become musicians or artists.  Don’t give me a guitar or a paintbrush, or take me to the theatre, if you don’t want me to love it!

My career in theatre fizzled before it ever really started, and it was partly because of my mother’s death and my father’s reaction to it.  I fell in love with theatre the very first time I was taken to a show, a production of Oklahoma when I was about five.  When my mother got ill, I started to use theatre as an escape from all the problems at home.  When you use something you love to avoid something terrible in your life, it becomes tainted, always associated with whatever you were trying to escape from. 

When you lose a parent when you’re a teenager, you also lose the chance to atone for being a rotten, selfish adolescent.  You can spend your life trying to become a person they would have liked, or you can forgive yourself.  I wasted a lot of time on the former, and I’m still working on the latter.

Happy Birthday, Mom and Pop, and God bless you both.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.  ~Oscar Wilde

Sight and Sound

Don’t laugh.  I’m going to attempt a music review.  It’s probably an exercise in humiliation, since nobody in their right mind would take music advice from me.  I can’t sing at all, and I had to drop out of flute lessons in fifth grade when I couldn’t grasp the concept of “notes.”  It only got worse.  In college I was on sound crew for a production of Iphigenia, where I played pre-recorded tapes of bass lines while the composer played keyboards live.  I never once knew what was live and what was memorex.  So, music remains a foreign language to me, but I know what I like.  I just don’t know if it’s good.

Two weeks ago I got three CDs by Enation, an indie band fronted by actor Jonathan Jackson.  It’s probably a mistake to base your music selections on whether the musician is a good actor, but sometimes you get lucky.  (Okay, bad joke.  Jackson plays Lucky on General Hospital.)  I’ve listened to my CDs many times, and I love a couple of the songs, I like most of the rest, and I dislike none of them.  Well, there is this one thing…but I’m getting to that.  First things first.

These are the albums, in the order of their original release:

Enation: Soul & Story

Soul & Story:  This album is very mellow, mostly acoustic folk, and deeply personal.  Jonathan Jackson wrote all ten songs, and one of them is about his daughter (She’s My Little Girl), and one is for his son (A Letter to My Son). 

Enation: World in Flight

World in Flight:  This is my favorite of the three, and it’s much more of a rock album than the other two.  All ten tracks are again written by Jackson, with his brother Richard Lee credited with co-writing lyrics on two songs.  Two tracks here are favorites: Permission to Dream and Everything is Possible.

Enation: The Future Is A Memory

The Future is Memory: Live from the Northwest is a live album, but the songs that repeat from World in Flight are different enough from the studio versions to make it worth having.  It’s fun to hear Jackson sing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne.  I love the last song, The Coming Dawn.

I don’t know about all the other band members in Enation, but the Jackson brothers have deeply held Christian beliefs, and their faith is reflected in their song lyrics.  I don’t have a problem with that.  I listen to quite a few contemporary Christian groups and singer/songwriters.  I just have a problem with one line in one song, and it’s not a religious reference.  It’s from A Letter to My Son, and it goes “A home without a father is a home without a gun.”  Now, I hate guns.  I equate guns with violence, and unfortunately, some people have grown up with violent fathers.  To me, a home without a gun is a very good thing.  In the context of the lyrics, which are words of advice from a father to his young son, I assume a gun is being used as a metaphor for a protector.  I still find it disturbing, but I’m not going to stop listening to the music just because I don’t agree with this one reference. 

It seems to me that Enation has a bit of an identity crisis about the kind of music they play.  Somebody who’s only heard a couple of their albums might be confused at one of their concerts.  Their albums are much mellower and less electric than the live performances that they’ve posted online at Ustream and on their YouTube channel.  Still, I haven’t been to an actual concert yet, so I should probably reserve judgement.  It’s too bad I can’t get down to Los Angeles this weekend for Enation’s acoustic concert, since I have trouble at rock concerts these days. Really loud music causes me actual physical pain, and earplugs don’t help. 

It’s been amusing trying to follow Enation on all the online social networks available these days.  Lines get crossed, misunderstandings happen, and certain information is either out-of-date or just wrong.  Now, this isn’t criticism.  I find it a form of entertainment.  For example, a couple of days ago, a flier was posted on Jonathan Jackson’s facebook fan page that seems to say that this weekend’s LA concert is going to be broadcast live on Ustream.  But wait, could this actually be a reference to the live concert from two weeks ago?  There’s nothing on the Enation facebook fan page or website to clarify the information, and the tweets from the band don’t mention it either way.  Yet.  I’m watching and waiting.

Update: Enation tweeted that the LA concert is not going to be broadcast online.  I hate twitter, but it can be useful at times.

*************

This is a completely different subject, but it’s too exciting not to write about.  I got new eyeglasses today.  I can see!  My old glasses were so scratched that it was like viewing the world through a fog bank.  Now colors pop and everything is sharp again.  The scariest thing is looking at my hands.  When did they get so old?  Naturally, I’ve avoided looking in the mirror. 

 I ordered these new glasses from an online store for the first time.  It was terrifying, but it was so cheap that I couldn’t resist.  I used Zenni Optical because they are located in the Bay Area.  The total cost—with high index lenses, non-reflective coating, frames, clip-on polarized sunglasses, case, an extra fee for the strong prescription, tax, and shipping—came to $53.80.  I think that’s terrific.  The order took exactly two weeks.  The glasses are fine, but the frames do need some adjusting, so I will have to take them to a walk-in optician and hope it won’t cost too much to get them fitted to my face.

Hello, world!

Langdon, Capra & Brownlow

A great debate rages over the sad career of Harry Langdon.  He was a silent film comedian who became very popular under the direction of Frank Capra in a trio of films, then split with Capra and sank into obscurity.  Was Capra responsible for his success?  Did Langdon get overconfident and ruin his own career?  Sometimes you want to ponder what really happened and what might have been, and sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy a funny movie.  Saturday at the Castro Theatre, I just wanted to watch The Strong Man and have a laugh. 

Harry Langdon

The Strong Man was the second film made by Capra and Langdon, and it’s my favorite of the three.  The San Francisco Silent Film Festival hasn’t shown enough comedies in the last couple of years, so I see whichever ones they schedule and keep asking for more.  The real reason I chose to see this film, though, was because silent film historian Kevin Brownlow was giving the introduction, as well as accepting an award from the Festival.  Kevin Brownlow wrote The Parade’s Gone By, which is one of the best histories of the silent era.  He met so many of those involved in making the films, before they passed away, and in the course of recording history he became part of it, too.  He was largely responsible for the restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, which was shown in 1980-81 to such acclaim that even I heard about it, and I was a clueless teenager back then. 

Kevin Brownlow is now in his early seventies, and he’s soft-spoken and charming.  His introduction to The Strong Man was excellent, of course, and the film was pristine.  It was made from the original negative, and only the very first scene had a few of the stains and scratches one sees on old films.  The rest of the print was sharp and clear, and the contrast was just the way I’d set it, if I had the remote control in my hand.   The grey shading was wonderfully subtle, especially on Langdon’s face, remarkable when you consider the thick makeup he wore. 

I have two favorite scenes in The Strong Man.  The first is when little Langdon has to carry a tall woman up a big staircase.  She has pretended to faint, and she’s so clearly bigger than Langdon, that every step up—and slide back down—is genuinely fraught with peril.   My other favorite is when Langdon is forced onstage in front of a rowdy and potentially violent audience in place of the drunk strong man, where it’s obviously a case of entertain or die.  He blinks shyly out at the crowd and tries a little soft-shoe.  He tries to pick up a weight.  A little dance.  Another weight.  Another shuffle.  The scene builds from this into a chaotic climax that literally brings down the walls.  When you watch these scenes, it becomes pretty obvious that both Langdon and Capra knew what they were doing.

After the movie, I went up to the theatre mezzanine to meet Kevin Brownlow and get an autograph.  It was such thrill!  I also met William A. Wellman Jr, whose father directed Wings, the first film to win a Best Picture Oscar.  He autographed a Wings poster for me, and I added his books about his father to my reading list.  I also discovered that a new biography of Richard Barthelmess was published last year.  He’s one of my favorite silent era actors.  Naturally, I added that book to my wish list, too. 

I wanted to go to a couple of the films being shown on Sunday, the final day of the festival, but I just couldn’t manage it.  I will just have to wait for the announcement of when the winter film festival will be held. Last year it was held right before Christmas, which was a really bad date for most people.  I’m hoping for a better choice this winter.  And more comedies!

Update: Here’s a great blog post about the rest of the festival.

Metropolis Restored

Soon after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered in Berlin in 1927, the studio that produced it came under new management.  The 2 ½ hour film was recut, both by the Germans and again by US distributor Paramount, and the excised footage was presumed lost, although small bits would turn up every now and again to torment film lovers.  Then Fernando Peña, a young cinephile in Argentina, heard a story from his mentor about a 2 ½ hour version of Metropolis in a private collection.  This poor fellow spent twenty years battling bureaucratic red tape trying to get access to this can of film. Finally, the collection arrived at the Museo del Cine, and in 2008, Peña’s ex-wife became the museum director.  It took Peña and Félix-Didier ten minutes to find the can and determine that it was the original uncut version, in a badly scratched 16mm format, brought to Argentina before the film was cut down.  It then took them months to convince the world that they had the real thing.  Now the film has been restored and recut, and I was in the audience for one of the very first screenings, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on July 16th.

Fernando Peña and Paula Félix-Didier were interviewed onstage before the film began.  They were both charming and funny, and this was going to be Peña’s first viewing of the restored film. When asked about his future plans, Peña said, “Well, it’s all downhill from here.” 

The Alloy Orchestra did a fantastic job accompanying the film.  It wasn’t just music but all sorts of incredible sound effects, particularly when the mob was destroying the machines.  (Kino will be releasing the DVD version with the Alloy Orchestra doing the alternate score.)

I was concerned that I wouldn’t recognize the newly restored footage, but it turned out that was not an issue.  The lost footage was badly scratched and in 16mm format, so those pieces had a narrow black border all around the edges, and the scratches were still very visible.  It became clear that very few entire scenes were cut, but instead it was reaction shots, alternative perspectives within the same scene, and quite a bit of two particular characters:  The Thin Man and Josaphat.  Also, a lot of the missing footage lengthened and heightened the escape of Freder, Maria, and the children from the flooding Worker City.

Brigitte Helm as the two very different Marias.

This was my first experience seeing Metropolis on a big screen, and it really became clear how iconic Brigitte Helm is as Maria.  Her face is still mesmerizing.  As the evil Machine Man version of Maria, she was brilliant and hedonistic and so different from the saintly Maria.  Helm said making Metropolis was “the worst experience I ever had.”  You can certainly see why, since she’s battered and tossed and soaked throughout the film.  The poor woman must have been covered in bruises.

The 1400 seat Castro Theatre was sold out for this screening, and it was a very enthusiastic audience.  I just wish we’d been treated with more consideration.  I love the SF Silent Film Festival, and I hate to criticize the staff, but we were left standing outside in line until 8:15pm, when the film was supposed to begin.  It was quite cold, which I know must be hard to believe for anyone who hasn’t endured a San Francisco summer.  The line was wrapped completely around the block, and nobody came out to offer any explanations for the delay.  When we finally got inside, the line to the women’s bathroom almost reached the screen along the side aisle.  The program didn’t begin until 9pm, the movie itself starting at 9:15.  The poor young guy I stood in line with was wearing only a tee shirt, and he must have missed his last midnight BART train to the East Bay.  Still, no explanation was offered, just a not-so-funny joke from the host onstage, who said the world had waited over seventy years to see the whole Metropolis, so what was another forty minutes.  Ask that kid stranded in San Francisco in a tee shirt what that forty minutes meant to him!

A Silent Scream

Today kicks off the 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre.  It will be my third summer attending, and it’s one of the highlights of my year. 

Like most people, I was ignorant of the power and beauty of silent film, until I had a very strange dream in 2006.  It was a chaotic tumble of images, and when I woke up, I had a name pounding in my head like a pulse.  It was insistent.  (I don’t usually hear voices in my head, I swear!)

Louise Brooks

The name was Louise Brooks.  I wasn’t certain I knew who she was, so I looked her up and discovered she was a silent film star who wrote a well-respected book called Lulu in Hollywood.  I went to my neighborhood used bookstore (remember those?) to find it, but they didn’t have a copy, so I bought Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns instead.  The Silent Clowns is a wonderful book about the great silent comedians, focusing on Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.  I read it cover to cover.  Then I rented my first Buster Keaton film, The Cameraman, and that was it.  I was in love.  Not just with the comedian himself but the whole era of film.   It probably helped that I had a bout of flu soon after that allowed me to watch every single Buster Keaton silent film and short in the course of a week.  There’s nothing like total immersion.

Many people today have never seen a silent film.  Certainly there aren’t many who have seen one in a movie palace with live music.  Even those of us fortunate enough to attend the SF Silent Film Festival, which is the closest we get to the original experience, are missing an important element.  The original films were made on silver nitrate film stock.  Silver nitrate  film shimmers beautifully when projected, which is where the term “the silver screen” comes from.  Unfortunately, it is also highly inflammable, and it emits toxic fumes when it’s deteriorating.  It is so dangerous that it’s now actually illegal to project silver nitrate film without a special projector and viewing room.  Only those with access to film archives get to watch them anymore.  Oh, how I’d love to be one of those privileged few!  The films that have been restored and shown to the public have been transferred to safety film, which is just that–safe–but it’s not the same.   

There are so many misconceptions about silent films.  Nowadays people dismiss them as primitive, artless, badly acted, jerky and unwatchable.  While it’s easy to find films poorly produced on cheap DVDs that validate this dismissal, a little effort will reveal an artistry, freshness and level of creativity that makes one envious of early film audiences.  Some of the most beautiful films were created in 1928, just as sound was being introduced. 

 Theatres and studios were making the big transition to sound by 1929.  Ironically, the very first film audiences had no interest in sound, since it was the miracle of moving images that fascinated them.  Sound would have been developed for film much sooner, but early experiments were dropped until the novelty of moving images wore off.  Silent film audiences became extremely sophisticated and had no trouble lip reading.  They complained loudly, or laughed knowingly, when the actors mouthed lines that didn’t match the intertitles. 

Projection speed (the number of frames per second) is the reason so many silent films look wrong today when they’re not shown correctly.  When filmmaking was in it’s infancy, nothing was standard.  Different companies produced film stock that was different widths, with different numbers and shapes of sprockets.  The movie cameras were hand cranked, with different kinds of scenes cranked at different speeds for different effects.  The movie projectors didn’t have standard projection speeds.  Unscrupulous movie theatre owners would show films extra fast to allow more showings for greater profit.  ( They’d probably still be doing it today if they could get away with it!)  For years it was believed that all silent films should be projected at 28 frames per second, but that rule of thumb is too fast for some and too slow for others.  Cue sheets were sent out with films to the cinemas, and the musicians playing along  also provided sound effects.  Special scores were written for prestige films, as well as songs, and the movie palaces in big cities were accompanied by full orchestras.  Just imagine it!

Buster Keaton

The comedies of Buster Keaton are a brilliant introduction to silent film.  Keaton’s work remains fresh and even postmodern, and he’s called the most silent of the comedians, because his comedy needs the fewest intertitles.  It’s probably a mistake to begin with the dramas, since they are the ones that come across as melodramatic to modern audiences.  After some exposure to them, you get used to the heightened emotion and gestures, and they are genuinely moving.  Here’s a list of some of my favorite silent films:

• The General and The Navigator (okay, just about any Buster Keaton silent)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc
• Tol’able David
• The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd’s comic tribute to Tol’able David)
• Metropolis (look for the newly restored version due out soon)
• Diary of a Lost Girl
• Sunrise
• The Thief of Bagdad
• Sparrows and Daddy Long Legs (for two sides of Mary Pickford)
• The Crowd
• Modern Times (Chaplin, made in the 30s, because he was stubborn)

Oh, and read Lulu in Hollywood.  Louise Brooks insists.

For more information, visit www.silentera.com (silent film history and criticism) and www.pandorasbox.com (Louise Brooks Society).

Lucky Spencer Grows Up

I’ve been watching old clips of Lucky Spencer on YouTube.  He’s a character on General Hospital, if you haven’t been paying attention.  I put together this collage of just some of his different looks through the years, as played by Jonathan Jackson.  Well, I don’t actually know if the photo in the water is from General Hospital, and if you’re really paying attention, you’ll see I slipped in one image of Jackson as Kyle Reese on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Just because I felt like it.

Lucky Spencer as played by Jonathan Jackson.

I don’t have anything profound to add.  I just wanted to show off my mad photoshop skills.  (No copyright infringement intended.)

All Thumbs

This post is gonna be weird.  You’ve been warned.  

I notice things.  Little things.  Like how the bandage and wound on Colin Firth’s forehead in A Single Man kept changing size and position.  It drove me nuts.  Anyway, I watch hands, too.  Three people I like have interesting thumbs.  Here they are: 

Anderson Cooper: If you look at Cooper’s hands, you’ll see he’s got really long, skinny thumbs. I think it’s because his palm isn’t very fleshy. I couldn’t find a very good photo, but here’s a  couple 0f fuzzy ones.  They really don’t do his thumbs justice. 

Anderson Cooper's thumb

This reminds me, I once met a girl at a party who was born without thumbs.  Doctors moved one of her other fingers to the thumb position on each hand.  She was really cool about it and didn’t seem to mind telling me about the procedure.  Fascinating. 

The best photo I could find of Jackson's thumbs.

Jonathan Jackson:  He has hyperextended thumbs, also known as hitchhiker’s thumb.  Here’s a link to an excellent photo of what this looks like.  (Not a photo of Jackson’s thumb, but another guitar player.)  I have one of these myself, on my right hand. You have to be really careful when you have this kind of thumb.  A couple of times, years ago, I pressed down too hard on a stapler, and my thumb bent back so far at the joint that it touched the back of my hand.  Yeah, it was really painful, and I could feel the muscles and tendons stretch all the way up my forearm. 

My moderate hitchhiker's thumb.

Hrithik Roshan:  In India, extra fingers are considered lucky, so usually they aren’t removed.  Roshan is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars.  He’s got a double thumb.  In his early film roles he attempted to hide it, but now he’s quite willing to show it off. 

Hrithik Roshan's double thumb

So, today’s motto is THUMBS UP! 

 

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Yesterday was one of those days when nothing worked for me.  We’ve all had them, I suppose.  It started the first thing in the morning when I was surfing my morning lineup of sites.  I was on zap2it.com checking out the Emmy nominations that were just announced.  I was delighted by some, like Jim Parsons for The Big Bang Theory and Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton for Friday Night Lights.  Naturally, I was disappointed that certain names were missing from the list, like Zach Gilford for Friday Night Lights and FNL for best drama series.  I’m happy about Alan Cumming’s nomination, but his name was spelled “Cummin” in the list.  Being the annoying person that I am, I typed the correction into the comments section.  The site’s obscenity filter changed my correction to “C******” and then blocked me from further comments.  Poor Alan C******!  Imagine having an innocent name that can’t bypass site filters.  Not that Mr C himself is innocent; nobody could mistake that. Anyway, I wonder how long I’ll be blocked…

The afternoon came, and I sat down to watch General Hospital.  It was a pretty good episode, with some humor added to the mix after a tense week.  Lucky Spencer was looking good in blue.  Then the last ten minutes of the show were preempted for breaking news about the Oakland BART police shooting trial.  Well, it’s been a big story and the news was important, since a verdict had been reached and it was about to be announced, but still.  Couldn’t it have waited ten minutes? 

I spent part of the evening attempting to watch Enation’s online concert on Ustream.  You guessed it.  Technical problems.  Not with the band—they were fine.  I guess my DSL isn’t fast enough, because the image was mostly frozen, and the sound came and went.  To the right of the screen was a live chat scrolling along, and it moved more than the band on my computer.  It took me most of the concert before I managed to login to the chat, and then my computer froze.  I was sitting there feeling critical of the chatterers for their spelling errors, then discovered that I couldn’t even manage to spell “hello” correctly in the chat window.  I gave up.  I’m going to try to go back to Ustream later and watch the archived video, but I don’t have much confidence that it will be any better on my setup.

While I was writing this post just now, my computer glitched and I almost lost this whole entry.  Fitting, isn’t it?

Summer Heat

While most of the US is roasting in triple digits, good old San Francisco is cool and overcast.  My google toolbar says it’s 55 degrees (fahrenheit) at the moment.  We may get swallowed up by an earthquake at any moment, but I’m still grateful to be here!  Still, I don’t mind a little summer warmth, so here is my first annual list of Guys Who Are Heating Up Summer 2010 (in no particular order).

Alex O'Loughlin

Alex O’Loughlin:  I love this Australian actor, and I sure hope his third CBS series will stick around.  The reboot of Hawaii Five-0 begins in fall, and the trailers look promising.  This summer, both his cancelled CBS series have been airing, Moonlight (vampire in LA) and Three Rivers (transplant hospital).  I’d watch this guy in old reruns over stupid reality shows any day.  I didn’t see The Back-Up Plan in the theatres, so I’m waiting for the DVD release on August 24th. 

Matthew Goode:  Today A Single Man was released on DVD, and I was at the redbox at 8:20am to rent my copy.  I will be happily watching it tonight, as a reward for a full day of errands.  It’s awfully tough sitting here and not watching it right-this-very-minute.  I know Goode’s role in the film is small, but I just love him and Colin Firth (who probably deserves his own place on this list!), and I understand from friends that I will adore Nicholas Hoult after seeing this movie.

Zac Efron:  This cutie’s movie, Charlie St Cloud, opens at the end of this month.  Efron looks great in the trailers.  I read the book this film is based on, and it’s sweet and predictable and unchallenging, so the movie should allow me to sit back and enjoy the sights. 

Taylor Lautner:  See my last post for my impressions of Eclipse, but Lautner is the reason I bothered to see the movie, and he didn’t disappoint. 

Jonathan Jackson:  Not a lot is happening with his character, Lucky Spencer, on ABC’s General Hospital, but that gives me a chance to catch up on his character’s background.  As I said in a recent post, I just started watching GH and listening to Jackson’s band.  I’m responding to his GH character’s sensitivity, not to mention his delicate good looks.

 Joseph Gordon-Levitt:  Inception is opening soon, and I’m delighted to see this guy in a big film.  Well, I’m delighted to see him anywhere.  I’m a little worried about his haircut in Inception, but I know I can count on his performance being excellent.  He has never disappointed me. 

Russell Brand:  I’ve read My Booky Wook, and I love Brand’s unique way with language.  He cracks me up, too.  This is a guy who doesn’t have many filters, and he’s excellent at pushing boundaries too far.  I’m watching him with fascination wondering when he’s going to alienate everyone.  He reminds me of Pee Wee Herman, a twisted character created for a certain adult audience who became a mainstream hit, was given a real children’s show (which I never understood!) and then…well, you know the rest.  I’m not saying I want Russell Brand to blow it, I’m just not sure he can resist it.

So, who’s on your list?

Twilight: Eclipse

I saw The Twilight Saga: Eclipse today.  I’m not going to write a formal review, since there are plenty of those online already.  This will just be my very personal opinion with random observations.  It seems silly to warn anybody about plot spoilers, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say this contains movie spoilers. 

I’d better state where I’m coming from first.  I read the Twilight trilogy after the first three books came out, before any movies were made, and before Breaking Dawn was released.  I am not a Twilight Mom, because I have no kids.  I’m certainly no teenager, either!  And I’m not a Twi-hard.  I guess you could say I’m a Twi-feather-light (or how about a Twi-light-weight?).   I certainly caught the addiction while reading the first book, but I didn’t love the sequels and I pretty much hate Breaking Dawn.  I didn’t like the first movie, except for Bella’s dad and Jacob.  I tolerated the second movie because of Jacob, especially with all those shirtless scenes.  (Yeah, I’m old but I’m still breathing.)

How do I explain my attraction to Twilight?  I tell everyone who’ll listen, especially those who are seriously considering reading the books for the first time out of curiosity, that the first books is a drug.  It’s a potent drug that causes an endorphin rush in your brain, the one you get when you’re falling in love.  I don’t know how or why exactly the book works so well, since it’s not particularly well written.  All I can say is that it works, and it keeps on working.  The endorphin rush will happen again when you re-read the book.  I think it’s a real shame that it is so effective, because so many fans keep re-reading it, when there are so many other good books to read.  The endorphin rush doesn’t happen when you read the sequels, but you read them anyway hoping for another fix.

Eclipse left me more satisfied than the first two movies, but I didn’t love it.  I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t like Robert Pattinson, and I really like Taylor Lautner.  When I read the books, I was on Team Edward.  When I watch the movies, I’m on Team Jacob.  It’s just too damn confusing. 

Okay, so here’s some random impressions:

I thought the engagement ring was ugly.  My friend thought the ring looked like a vampire’s sparkling skin, which is the best excuse I’ve heard for such a strange design.

I was surprised by how much I liked the young actor playing Riley, Xavier Samuel.  I will be adding him to my “watch list.”

Daddy Swan was delightful again.  Loved him.

My favorite line was from Jacob to Edward: “…I’m hotter than you.”

I cracked up when they showed the Cullens at the beginning of the climactic battle scene, all standing in a row frozen, looking exactly like action figure dolls.  Talk about a shameless merchandising ploy!

All the stuff about Sam the wolf’s love triangle was odd and underdeveloped.  I recognized that it was being used as a parallel to the main love triangle and setting things up for Breaking Dawn with the imprinting business, but it was unsatisfying.

I feel sooo sorry for Elizabeth Reaser.  She’s waited through three movies to do something, and she had one line.  She’s a really good actress who could have been doing much more interesting work instead of standing around as a background extra in these films.

I love Dakota Fanning.  I don’t understand why during her crucial scenes in the clearing after the battle, she’s got a bright white light behind her when everybody else just has trees. 

So, now we wait until November 2011 for part one of Breaking Dawn, which I may just have to skip.  This whole business of splitting movies into two parts is ridiculous.  (Imagine if they’d done that with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)  We don’t mind a longer movie, and we all know it’s just about making more money at the box office.

One Thing Leads to Another

The San Francisco Frameline Film Festival was held this year June 17-27th, showing LGBT films from around the world.  It’s the oldest LGBT film festival, and this year they had an Andy Warhol retrospective and many films from South America.  This was my second year as a volunteer.   I like to staff the hospitality table, where volunteers and staff greet the filmmakers.  It’s great fun, and as a volunteer you get a movie voucher for every shift you work.  Unfortunately, I’m still recovering from this malingering virus that’s been going around, so I had to cut back on my shifts and missed seeing most of the films on my personal list.  I did get to see the opening night film, a BBC production called The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, about a Yorkshire woman from the early 1800s who left coded diaries about her various romances with other women.  It was based on a true story, and it was sure different from Pride & Prejudice! 

I didn’t get to see the closing night feature, a film called Howl about Allen Ginsberg, starring James Franco.  Franco came to the screening, so I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to check him out.  I’m not obsessed with Franco like I am with a few dozen other actors, but he’s certainly on a roll right now.  The Film Festival showing came just before Franco’s return as a guest star on General Hospital.  Now, I can follow a couple of other soaps (I grew up with a mother obsessed with Days of Our Lives), but I’ve never watched General Hospital regularly enough to follow the storylines.  In spite of that, I started tuning into GH this last week to see Franco.  A few trips over to soapnet and wikipedia helped me to understand key plot points.  A friend who used to watch filled me in on more background character info.  This same friend loved Jonathan Jackson as Lucky Spencer (back in the 90s), so I started paying particular attention to him.  Next thing you know, we’re watching Jonathan Jackson in Tuck Everlasting and On The Edge, and I’m spending hours on YouTube watching GH clips of Lucky from 1993.  And this is how one of my obsessions begins. 

And it won’t end until I’ve watched every video, rented every DVD, checked out every website and fansite, linked up on twitter and facebook…it’s exhausting, but at least with the internet everything is faster.  Before the internet, DVDs, and even VCRs, it used to take me ages to work through one of my actor obsessions.  I would search through the TV guide looking for movies that were airing (yes, kids, there actually used to be movies shown on regular, non-cable TV!) and take endless trips to the library searching through periodical indexes and microfiche machines looking for information.  As a teenager I kept a card file of my favorite actors and all their roles—my very own low tech imdb.  Now with everything at my fingertips on the internet, I can zip through an actor’s entire body of work  in days and weeks instead of months, so then I have to move on to somebody else.

So at the moment it’s Jonathan Jackson.  He’s a musician as well as an actor, so a couple of his CDs should arrive in the mail this week.  His band is called Enation, and I like the brief clips I’ve listened to online.  I have no idea if I’ll actually like a whole song.  My taste in music is obscure, eclectic and weird.  Most people wouldn’t even call it taste.  It was a risk ordering the Enation CDs, but I love ordering music from CD Baby, and their summer sale is awesome (selected CDs, three or more, five dollars each).  The best part about ordering from CD Baby is the email you get when they ship your order.  I would describe it, but I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.  Just order from them and see, if you haven’t already. 

Enation is doing a free online concert this Thursday, and here’s the poster:

Enation internet concert

I’ll be checking it out.  Hopefully my CDs will have arrived by then so I’ll already be familiar with some of the songs. 

Well, I’ve got to go back to YouTube now.  I’m up to early 1994, and little Lucky Spencer is in the hospital trying to avoid a mob hit.  Tomorrow I will tune into the current episode of GH to see who survived the car bomb.  It’s such a full life.