Saturday, September 15, 2007

Now As I Was Saying Before I Was So Rudely Interrupted...

I used to have a blog here but I can't seem to get to it anymore, so I'm starting over again which is just as well since I hadn't written anything over there in months.

Starting over is something I seem to do a lot but I never get anywhere. This time I'm going to try to make things different. I started an expensive but rewarding type of physical therapy yesterday and that's got me feeling good for once and I'm going to try to sustain it this time. It's been been easier to withdraw and slip into depression lately because I recently moved to an area that's only a 15 minute drive from where I used to live but is relatively inaccessible by public transportation. There is a bus route nearby so I can get to work but it only runs between 6:30 and 8:00 in the morning and mostly once an hour between 3:00 and 9:00 in the evening on weekdays. It doesn't run at all on weekends. That severely cramps my style as far as going anywhere outside of work and makes it very hard to get to the two video stores I used to frequent, Video Americain in Takoma Park and Potomac Video in College Park. Plus this house only has basic cable TV with no On Demand so my movie watching is really limited. I did go out to a theatre a few weeks back and saw "This Is England", a nice film about British kids during the Falklands War, but outside of that, thank the Lord for Netflix.
And I've been running into a patch of bad movies there lately. "The Deerslayer" was based on James Fenimore Cooper's stories and had Bela Lugosi playing the Native American Chingachook but that turned out to be an old German silent film chopped up beyond coherency. "The Yesterday Machine" started out like a fun grade-Z science fiction movie about an old Nazi scientist experimenting with time travel but the picture stopped cold in the middle while the scientist gave the clueless hero a "Watch Mr. Wizard" like lecture about the space-time continuum for ten minutes! The 80's TV miniseries "The Wild Palms" turned out to be dated cyperpunk paranoia (Oliver Stone was an executive producer.) that wasn't that interesting. "Hurlyburly" was an "Inside Hollywood" picture with fine actors like Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey and Meg Ryan playing completely unlikable scumbags.
And speaking of scumbags the nadir of it all was "A Hole In My Heart", a Swedish film about a man making porno in his tiny apartment with two screwed up friends while his moody teen Goth son mopes in his bedroom. There can be value in this kind of setup but this particular movie was full of interminable self-hate and ugliness coming to a fitting climax when a man threw up into a woman's mouth...with an angelic choir on the soundtrack. Hopefully I can start making better movie choices in the future.

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