I can’t stop sleeping lately. I don’t want to blame it on depression but rather my sleep schedule getting skewed by the “up at 3:30am” morning shifts at the TV station. But depression probably plays into the mix somewhere… as well as my reluctance to get caught up with the writing I must finish. My good friend Sara moved away last weekend following her (very nice, very intimate) wedding and it sort of reinforced the fact that another one of my local friendgirls will be moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer. I had expressed a few reservations about attending my first wedding post-election, et al… but when I saw Sara in her dress and frippery, looking gorgeous and not even in a makeover scene way, and then glanced at the handicapped parking permit in her purse, such selfish thoughts were swept aside, to be re-ignited some other time when I wasn’t busy being happy for my friend’s happiness.

Even though two of the three girls in my harem (their slur, not mine) will be gone, I did initiate the apartment hunt yesterday morning and afternoon with the third, as well as her friend from Spanish class (and our future third roommate), Ron. Our first stop was at the U’s Melrose complex, which I knew nothing about, and certainly didn’t know as that ghastly-huge new behemoth at the end of the Huron exit from 94 (on the way to Oak Street)… it looks, to my eyes, like the world’s biggest Rice Crispie brick with a party hat on top. If I had known what building the Melrose was, I’d have vetoed a walk in immediately. Instead, we were taken through the facilities by some 22 year old representative, and shown a model room which looked pristine and dorm fresh. I think we all hated it immediately. Upon exiting, Jess was ranting that our tour guide had shot her a quizzical-accusatory look when she stated she was graduating this May. A look that, in her mind, exclaimed “You’re pretty old to be just finishing a Bachelor’s!” I assured her she was taking it too personally, all the while fuming at the complex’s uncanny ability to make me feel about 50 years of age.

We stopped at Shuang Cheng for lunch, and were in the middle of listing all of the household items we already owned, so that we could decide what we still needed. (Somehow, there appear to be at least three VCRs and three DVD players between us, but not a single television set.) I looked over to the chairs by the door and saw a scruffy man sitting and staring at the people sitting in the booth next to us, trying to shoot protoplasmic fireballs with his eyes. We continued to list everything we could think of, and just as Jess was mentally going through her kitchen a third time (and I was searching for another sheet to accommodate the surfeit of cooking utensils she had on hand), I picked up someone’s voice beginning to rise above the din: “… very rude, a very rude thing to do.” I looked over and saw that the grizzly man was beginning to talk from across the room to the woman (now alone, her husband or colleague having left for the bathroom). Though his crescendoing voice indicated he intended for his sermon to be heard by everyone in the restaurant, and not only his target, he didn’t do us all the favor of indicating exactly what she had done to deserve the public abuse. Jess began muttering that she saw the transient pacing back and forth in front of the restaurant for some time before coming in, and had just managed to mention that she saw the couple in the booth walk in while the guy was trying to complete yet another pass in front of the door and that he reacted to their entrance with incredulity, as though they were cutting him off, when the volume of his voice broke through the barrier of politeness with the same effect of a Mach 1 boom. Everyone fell silent and moved food around their plates with their forks while the man wound up for the 2 out, 3 men on, 0-2 pitch: “I am handicapped! I can’t walk correctly! You people can walk and you just continue walking around without even caring, you bastards! You don’t give a shit about us! We are the largest minority population in the country! And you all treat us like shit!” By this time, the manager of the restaurant had taken his requisite station flanking the dude from the front, occasionally interjecting “sir” and meekly motioning to the door with one arm, so that we all felt safe. But he was having none of it, and it was at this point that I began to look directly at him instead of at my food. If he was going to have his say, the least I could do is let him know that I intended to hear him out before unceremoniously rejecting his plea. “You cold-hearted bitch! I can’t walk straight and you don’t give a shit! And it happens every fucking day! Fuck you! Fuck you!” At this point, he’d clearly come to the end of his script, which required him to get kicked out of the restaurant. He seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get much help from the manager, so he sort of twisted his body around as though he was being pushed out the door, and the manager unconvincingly completed the illusion by following him with his arms extended outward, but never getting close enough to actually suffer skin contact with the guy. With a middle-finger flourish and yet another “It happens every fucking day,” the guy made his exit. If I’d have been thinking straight, I would’ve jumped to my feet and started clapping furiously, yelling “Bravo!” and raving about how I wasn’t aware that the lunch special came with a free dinner theater performance. Instead, Jess and I started loudly talking about what a crackpot the dude is, and that he’s been jumping in front of cars and stealing bicycles on campus for years now, so that the woman in the next booth wouldn’t feel upset.

As we continued to look at small houses by Lake Harriet and familiar quads south of Lake and between Lyndale and Hennepin, I willed “and it happens every fucking day” into our brand new lexicon of quips as new roommates.

Also, for the record, I have been punished for my sleep habits of late in that I missed the Oak Street’s screening of The Rules of the Game this afternoon, thinking there would be a 4 o’clock showing when there was only a 1 o’clock. In my clouded anger, I didn’t even rationalize that seeing The Magnificent Ambersons at 5 would’ve been a more than adequate compensation. In the words of Sara, “I’m a dumb.”

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I was just going through some of my old school clippings in preparation for a slightly unorthodox review of the Doogie Howser DVD set (that I don’t guarantee will even get published) and came across two collages I did in second grade in an assignment that required us to plunder the pages of National Geographic. If I say so myself, I was like my class’s precocious Doogie Howser when it came to visual art. I especially like that I more or less ignored the anthropological photos that I remember everyone else in the class ripping up and haphazardly pasting to tagboard and, instead, focused on the plastic art of yester-pop culture’s print advertising.

Driving into the Twilight Zone (1986)
(I believe a few things have fallen off of this piece — I distinctly remember the other puffy fish eye being the car’s tire — but it was probably for the best.)

Shopping at Dusk & Twilight (1986)
(Cute: I’m not even knowledgeable enough yet to know that dusk and twilight mean the same thing.)

Portrait of the Artist at Age 7 (1986)

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# of films I had highlighted intending to see by this point: 13.
# of films I’ve actually seen: 6.
# of times I’ve seen “that guy”: 3.

I can’t seem to rev up to write on Spiritual Voices just like I said I would, nor do I seem inclined to just cut and paste from the damned essay, so here are words on the six films I’ve seen so far.

Armwrestler from Solitude:
I can’t get over how betrayed I felt when it appeared the doc’s protagonist, Heidi Andersson, had been knocked out of the international armwrestling competition when she was felled in her first meeting with the mythic, much-celebrated “Russian” girl. It pointed up just how much the obligatory explanations of the rules of the competition actually add. (Like how every review of Cameron’s Titanic remarked at what a great structural coup it was to begin the film with that computer simulation of the ship’s death.) I was also left in the dark as to the exact specifications of her family (who are cousins, who are brothers, et al) but wasn’t bothered by it at all, since the film’s most overdeveloped quality is its portrait of an extended family all doing their part to contribute to their sense of isolated contentment, be it rolling lefse or winning a world championship.

Kung Fu Hustle:
The bulk of The Tin Drum‘s international release happened in 1980, I’d wager (though I won’t bother looking it up), so that’s another in the film’s nearly endless string of 1980 references, the most obvious and easily most irritating of which is the Shining quote. (As it’s used, it’s about as pointless as reciting “to thine own self be true” at a McDonald’s drive-thru window.) I won’t deny that senses were tickled, and reflexes entertained, but my increasingly freezing blood during the running time had me reminiscing on my lack of patience during Amelie. The 800+ raucously laughing members of the audience weren’t helping matters. I am not much for competition, so I wasn’t much interested in joining their little game to see who could most loudly display what a fucking fun time they were having. I’ll give this director one more chance with Shaolin Soccer.

5×2:
I get the feeling that François Ozon wants his (gay) audience to relish their own mixed sense of values when they realize that what they’d taken as )gay( by-play between the male lead and the }gay{ middle-aged man at the dinner party of the film’s second sequence (also, incidentally, probably the best) is revealed to be sibling affection between brothers. And then, having learned that, remembering (accompanied by scrotal ghost-acupuncture) the calculated naughtiness of the earlier confession to all that he’d taken it up the ass during an orgy. (His wife cries so good upon hearing him re-tell what she’d already seen in person… though we later/earlier see that she is just as fond of the foreplay of infidelity. Ah, Ozon, the built-in benefits of fucking around with chronological structure; you can always count on it to give a spare scenario that sense of pre-ordained construction.)

A Single Girl:
Hot. Revving on at least two more cylinders than certain other movies about the monotony and distraction of your average service industry job (I’m thinking Struggle, seen at last year’s festival, as well I suppose as what I’ve managed to catch of Rosetta), there’s a wonderful use of real time in this film to convey the mandatory, self-imposed emotional volatility necessary to make menial, repetitive tasks worth the pain as the extremely sexy girl of the title spends an hour working the hotel room service roundelay mostly to kill that very hour while waiting to meet her really fucking sexy boyfriend at the cafe down the street. The sequences involving diversely kooky hotel residents crying and fucking and whatnot almost seem like missteps in that regard unless one considers that they, too, are attempting to overcome the cyclical nature of their work days/trips. (I’m more inclined to dismiss the extended epilogue in earnest, though, as a bone-fide misstep.) I’m excited to see some more from this Benôit Jacquot dude.

Kings and Queen:
Plotty almost to the point that it reads as an aesthetic ingredient (and culminating, in that regard, with the patriarch’s fiery posthumous letter to his daughter), I couldn’t really sense where this film was going for nearly the entire duration, and I pretty much loved it. Desplechin’s use of editing and especially music is unbridled and, as my viewing companion noted, you gotta love films that have disparate story threads that you can tell will be unified at some point, but you’re sort of hoping that they won’t until you can’t stand the friction any longer. I imagine Desplechin is a fairly decent fuck. I’m still sort of fragmented overall on how I feel about it, but I don’t think anything else I’ve seen so far in the festival felt so sanguine and unstudied, even as I sensed the discipline sort of slip through Desplechin’s fingers a few scenes into “Act Two.”

3-Iron:
To what fault this spiritual coyness? I can’t deny that, for a director dismissingly referred to as an autodidact in Film Comment, Kim Ki-Duk seems to be playing pretty well by the rules of this sort of terminally blissful romantic longueur. And the muteness of the boy and girl at the center of the film (whose sole function would appear to be to love each other enough to break into people’s homes and “fix” things for strangers… oh great, and now we’re back to Amelie) gave me the itch, big time. But, while zinging a half-mile wide of cheap transcendence, I still found myself inexplicably wrapped up in the film’s almost translucently (possibly accidental) lack of acceptable sexual congress. Only in a film like this could an androgynously emo-cute young man be caught masturbating in someone else’s bed and be not (a) thrashed, not (b) impulsively fucked within an inch of his sanity, but instead (c) mirrored in hushed altruistic efficacy.

Films I have high-lit for future viewing (we’ll see how many I actually get around to watching, and it won’t be all of them, because some of them are screening at the same time as others):
The World, A Tout de Suite, Bitter Dream, Seventh Heaven, Or, Kontroll, White Diamond, The Ninth Day, The School of Flesh, and Clean.

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