misssssh

1. I am finally seeing Bad Santa. BBThornton is pretty much my little-kid ideal of what it is to be a bad-ass cussing adult. The fat chick thru line is inaccurate as well as dumb--and yes, how dumb am I to take a dumb movie to task over something like that? For anything? Dumb, except...what are they scared of, huh? If you're gonna make fun of fat girls, why not show them, hunh? Are they too scared to be the jerks they are? Or just too scared, period? Hunh? Let's go, you fuckers.

Happy to see a what has to be a wee nod to the ur-text performance for this movie--Walter Matthau in Bad News Bears--with a little bit of Carmen in the boxing scene. Yeah, I said ur-text.

2. I made the most spectacularly middle-American scramble-casserole thing for dinner tonight. It involved ground beef and mashed potatoes and jarred tomato sauce and some other things and it was a wild success.

3. I find natural peanut butter almost not worth the fucking hassle. Even when you stir it up warm for the first time it never emulsifies right and god forbid you try it first cold. Fatty drips down the sides, lumps of solids in the bottom. Enough to make you reach for transfats.

4. Four Weddings and a Funeral is a really badly-made movie with a half-way decent structure underneath. They swoop in with scoring and montages right at moments when you need the action--the scoring sucks, period--bury the good bits, such as they are... Just terrible. And Andie McDowell, whom I don't hate on principle, is the worst thing about it. Her "Is it raining? I hadn't noticed" (delivered soaking wet during romantic denouement to make you go awwwww) is the Single Least Convincing Line in films ever, and the bad over-dubbing doesn't help. It hurts.

5. I rectified a major gap in my film eddication tonight by finally seeing Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, with the Budd Schulberg screenplay and Andy Griffith in his gigunda scenery-chewing tour-de-force masterpiece role. As usual, with movies like this (Sweet Smell of Success, etc.), they seem so perspicacious as to be a little creepy. It was just great. A little overwraught for making the same point now, but that's just style. I wish I had a still of Andy Griffith losing his mind at the end, all scarface and shit. Just...great.

And Patricia Neal...she has that quality she brings to roles, in which she is half wise regret and half about to do something really bad. Those eyes. When I first saw her, in Hud, I felt like I had seen into the future or something. Well, okay, Hud's a whole other ball of kvell, but I really loved Face in the Crowd. I love Budd Schulberg.

6. It is always something you should do, but do read Skip's blog these days. My girl's a genius.

7. Clown hat, curly hair, smiley-face.