Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Romance and Cigarettes
An alarm has been set to remind me to buy tickets for Romance and Cigarettes, with the optimistic idea that I won’t be working too late on a Friday or Saturday night. As my Film Forum newsletter says in their awesome all-caps lo-tec email fashion: it’s “JOHN TURTURRO’S BAWDY, HILARIOUS MOVIE MUSICAL STARRING JAMES GANDOLFINI, SUSAN SARANDON, AND KATE WINSLET.”
Dear Film Forum, let me re-program your emails, please?
Roger Ebert called it, “A comedy suffused with melancholy. A slice of life crossed with magical realism.” I think I can dig it.
When that newsletter hit my inbox I thought, holy crap, is it Wednesday again already? I’ve been measuring time by the chipping of my black manicure.
I’ve read a ton of books recently, particularly of the magical realism kind. Riding the train and reading is my main sport these days. Susan thrust Haruki Murakami‘s Wind Up Bird Chronicles at me. It was exactly what I needed, I loved it, and followed it up with Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood. Norwegian Wood is his more “realistic” one, with no passing through the walls of deep wells, but in its realism felt just as surreal as any condition of loneliness, romance or mental struggle might. I need to read more Murakami.
Finally I read Death by Chick Lit by Lynn Harris, which at first I hated, probably because at first, it felt like it wasn’t written for me and it was the wrong time for me to read it. But then I liked it, dug the satire, and it all worked out in the end. I had a moment of less personal or emotional self-knowledge during a scene in which she’s talking to her “cute computer nerd husband” and he tells her how to hack a login… and i recognized his instructions as a SQL injection attack. And also that it wouldn’t have really worked.
I bought Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters for a friend while I was visiting DC, but didn’t see her again as planned so I kept the book and read it myself. I knew it was about lesbian stage performers at the turn of the last century, but I honestly didn’t know what Tipping the Velvet meant. I thought it had something to do with pulling back the curtain on stage. That’s not what it means. heh.
kthxbai
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