mixums

Jon Favrohhhhhhhhh
Are you gonna be big or-r small
Big or-r small / it doesn't matter atall
Just make up your mind
Before we fall behind...
Jon Favreau...

Does anybody else's heart *thrill* to the sight of Bette Davis' spectator pumps stepping onto the gangplank in Now, Voyager? Yes, I thought so.

One Jacques Pepin = Many Food Networks and all that's in them. Although who would ever guess his writing would have the same effect? I keep going back to his description of the roast cook at Plaza Athenee cooking chicken like bits of MFKFisher.

I wish Alice Medrich would get back on TV. (speakin of tv + fud)

Star Jones in her deflated state slumps on the View sofa like one of those horrid creepy dolls on the anti-marijuana commercials. I mean, I couldn't stand the woman when she was (alive, I was gonna say)--not thin--but she's become sort of alarming, now. An enervated version of Anna Nichole Smith doing drooly I'm-thin-now-mommy St. Vitus dances. There's something more alarming in those than we're willing to admit, I swear. Kind of canary-like.

Right at this moment I'm listening to Yvonne deCarlo sing "I'm Still Here" (slowly getting to know all of Follies, I am); it sounds weird because I'm used to the Millicent Martin version; before that I had to unhook the Shirley MacLaine version in my head (that's the bastardized version I was warbling in our break room yesterday). It's very good to mix up your versions of favorite songs before you get too attached. (Or recordings, or whatever. I still feel weird if I don't hear a LP skipping sound at this particular point in West Side Story...) Otherwise, nothing sounds right but the first one you learned to like.

Raymond Chandler swing = not over (The High Window).

Random Hearts basically has to be seen to be believed (writing about good/bad movies harder than it sounds). Harrison Ford has one expression through the entire film (Furrowed Brow) except three times: 1) smiling meeting KST's daughter 2) the 'sex' scene (gets all angry-lookin) 3) the end (smiling again). The rest of the time he, like everyone, seems to think the're in another film--he, perhaps, is in...well, I don't know what he's in, because when his wife was killed in The Fugitive he could act, and in this film he cannot. There is a minor character who's lit and shot (and acts) as if she's Ford's girlfriend, but she's just a plotpoint--baffling. Everything hits just the wrong note. KST is horrid, monotonous. The way the film is put together it's as if Harrison Ford is (bizarrely) trying to harrass KST into loving him from the moment their spouses die; the score is trying to make you think it's The Fabulous Baker Boys, atmospheric in all the wrong ways; there is an interminable "ad" for The Tides hotel in Miami built into the plot that seems really out of place and glamoroussy; Dennis Haysert? is wasted in the world's most bizarre subplot that I guess is supposed to make us think Harrison Ford is all butch and Sipowicz, man, as is his little earring, but he is so LuGUBrious, so relentless SOGGY, serious, stupid, his voice sounds parodic. It feels shiny and TV-like in its production qualities, too--very un-cinematic. His character rarely carries anything, even luggage while he's traveling--he just stalks through the film actorlyly. To top it all off, the "charming" pop-up-video tidbit AMC airs before they show the movie is that Harrison Ford swore to never make a film again with Sydney Pollack after he saw it. That's how they *start* the film. Enjoy the movie! Heheheheh.

All I know is I'm now committed to seeing it every time it's on TV. It's that badgood. Goodbad. Just hilarious. Like all goodbads, there is a germ of a good movie in it--it's a good, melodramatic plot, that could have made a grand old potboiler.

Why can't Pollack direct particularly good movies? He's one of my fav actors. Sabrina did the same thing to Harrison Ford--pounded him out scallopini thin until he's this joyless, rumbling lump. But hey - The Way We Were. And The Interpreter looked good, I though. I ain't an OutofAfrica person, tho. Maybe it's just that he's such a *good* actor. He co-wrote the high school play in South Bend, IN, with my aunt, according to family lore--I need to ask one of them about that someday (er, probably the aunt).