“Don’t you just love it when you come back from the bathroom and find your food waiting for you?” — Mia, Pulp Fiction
My Morning Coffee
I woke up looking forward to my morning coffee even more than I usually do (If that is possible – does a heroin addict look forward to certain fixes more?) because I would drink it in my swag Pulp Fiction coffee cup.
Most mornings I make a double strength coffee in my Aeropress , dilute it with hot water, and put it in a vacuum container (either a thermos or, as today, in a Contigo insulated cup that fits in my bicycle water bottle holder). I like that because I can pour it into a real cup a bit at a time and control the drinking temperature.
So, the question is, did it taste better in the swag cup?
Sure did, I mean this is some serious gourmet shit.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides By the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will Shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children And I will strike down upon thee With great vengeance and furious anger Those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers And you will know my name is the Lord When I lay my vengeance upon thee
—-Eziekiel 25 17, Pulp Fiction
Swag from the Alamo Drafthouse Pulp Fiction Party
Tonight Candy and I had tickets to a Pulp Fiction Party at the Richardson Alamo Drafthouse.
I haven’t seen Pulp Fiction in a theater for a long, long time – it was time to see it again.
There were a few things that made this showing a “Party.” An employee came out in a bathrobe with a coffee mug before the showing and gave an enthusiastic and F-Bomb filled introduction. They had a Jackrabbit Slim twist contest – I was disappointed that no couple showed up dressed as Mia and Vincent. The winner received a genuine Bad Mother Fucker wallet.
Coolest of all, everyone received some swag – A Serious Gourmet Shit coffee mug, a pack of candy cigarettes, and a Zed Keychain (Zed’s Dead, baby). Now I have a place to keep my chopper keys.
“Listen, if somebody gave me the choice right now, of to never see you again or to marry you, alright, I would marry you, alright. And maybe that’s a lot of romantic bullshit, but people have gotten married for a lot less.”
— Jesse, Before Sunrise
Bachman Lake, Dallas, Texas, after sunrise
1995 was not so long ago – what? twenty seven years? That may seem a long time ago to you, but it doesn’t to me.
Even in 1995 it was hard to see odd, independent, or foreign films. It was before streaming, before really diverse rental options, and sort of after the death of repertory cinema. Also, I had two small kids at this time – so I was not able to go out searching for unique cinema.
I was still watching movie review shows at the time (I have since quit, too many spoilers). I remember seeing a review, probably on Siskel and Ebert, of a movie called Before Sunrise starring July Delpy and Ethan Hawke. It sounded unique and interesting and I wanted to see it, but never was able to pull it off. It apparently was a conversation movie – sort of like My Dinner With Andre – except with a young couple meeting and spending one single night (before sunrise) in Europe walking around and talking to each other.
Over the years I read that a sequel was made… and then a sequel to the sequel.
A few days ago I noticed that there was a set of three movies on The Criterion Channel titled The Before Trilogy. It was the Before Sunrise and its two sequels – Before Sunset and Before Midnight. I’m not a big TV bingeing person, but I decided to watch the three movies one day after another. I had to skip one day because I felt like shit and couldn’t even get up the energy to watch a damn movie streaming on The Criterion Channel. I realized that the two sequels were both made exactly nine years apart from each other.
The second movie was better than the first. It was about the stripping away of a person’s facade – and the first movie was about getting around a person’s facade – although the facades were very strong with those two. The second movie was much more complicated with more at stake – mostly because the characters were nine years older and forced to be more serious and introspective and their choices were more important with more at stake.
I’m afraid that I was disappointed in the third film. It was well made – but I felt it was a re-hash of the same sort of arguments every long-term married couple has on a regular basis. Maybe an important subject – but not entertaining to watch. It could be seen as the answer to the more interesting second chapter, but again, not worth the nine years’ wait.
It’s been more than nine years now since Before Midnight was made. There has been talk of a sequel, but the three Linklater and the two stars seem to have run out of ideas.
“I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.” ― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
When you pick a mudbug up – he’ll spread his claws out and try to look as big and as mean as he can. He still looks delicious – no matter how hard he tries.
After my bike ride I took a shower and got ready to go. Candy wanted to go see a movie – Where the Crawdads Sing. She had read the book (I hadn’t, still fighting my way through Zola’s La Terre – need to finish the sucker) and had really liked it. We don’t go to a lot of movie’s anymore and when we do we always go to the Alamo Drafthouse – except for today. Crawdads wasn’t showing at either of the two Alamo theaters on our side of the vast Metroplex, so we went to another theater near where I used to work (when I was still gainfully employed).
The theater was good – the reclining seats were very comfortable. We went to the one o’clock showing – and there were only a handful of folks there.
I actually kinda liked the movie. It had some flaws – the protagonist was a little too polished and glib to be believable as a “Marsh Girl” – I had the ending figured out a good five minutes into the film – but the acting was effective and the scenery gorgeous. It’s hard for me to judge, I’m still suffering from a Everything Everywhere All At Once hangover – every movie pales in the memory of that work of genius.
It’s kind of funny – on Tuesdays the early show was only six dollars to get in – a real bargain. But a popcorn and diet soda were more than twenty bucks.
“If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you?” ― Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master: A Screenplay
Cook throwing dough at Serious Pizza, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
I’m a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. I’ve seen everything – wrote about Phantom Thread – and of course the impossible task of filming Pynchon Inherent Vice. I wanted to see his newest, Licorice Pizza – but never made it to the theater. Still, somehow, I was able to get a digital copy of the film and put it on my Kindle Fire 10.
I have been doing well in getting my ten miles a day of bike riding – so far in July I’m seven miles ahead of my pace. One cheat I do is that I joined the Huffhines Recreational Center (I am old enough for the senior discount – it’s a lot cheaper than a health club) down at the end of my block and they have really nice recumbent bicycles. An hour of stationary riding counts as ten miles in my mind – and I’m sticking to it. If I ride too many days in a row outside my shoulders begin to hurt – so a day on a recumbent is a big help.
Most of the bikes have flat screens and a good selection of channels – but one bike is more old-school without a screen. It’s not very popular – I’ve never seen anyone else using it – but I can prop my Tablet on the bike and watch a movie. So over the last two workout sessions I watched Licorice Pizza.
It wasn’t a great movie – but it was a lot of fun and a perfect way to let the hours go by while I pedaled away. It’s a pastiche, an homage to a certain time, the seventies, which I remember really well.
Waterbeds form an important plot point – and that’s one thing from back in the day that I still miss even now. I had a waterbed for about a decade (or a little more) and never slept better.
Another plot point is the oil embargo and subsequent shortage (lines at gas stations) and that, unfortunately, feels all too familiar right now. I remember 1980 well and the disaster that happened feels like it is happening again. The only difference is that in 1980 I was single and young and all I needed was to buy a couple Ramen Noodle packs and I could get through the day.
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
― Richard P. Feynman
A terrible Blackberry photo of my folding Xootr Swift parked next to a Yuba cargo bike (set up to carry a whole family) outside the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Two different philosophies on urban bicycling.
Jesus! I almost completely forgot!
It was six forty today and I was puttering around the house doing six-forty PM sorts of things when I remembered that over a week ago I had bought a movie ticket for a seven o’clock movie tonight.
An email had arrived touting a “Secret Screening” at the Alamo Drafthouse Richardson. That is where, for a discount ticket of six bucks, you get to see a movie – probably a genre movie from decades past – but you don’t know what movie you are going to see until it starts. I know that sounds nuts – but it is the sort of thing I can’t resist. When I checked the seating – although it was almost two weeks out – there were only single seats left, the others had already sold out. So I bought a ticket and proceeded to forget about it until six forty tonight.
Luckily, the Alamo isn’t very far away (remember – that theater chain won’t let you in after the movie starts) and I through some pants on and jumped in my car. It has been eleven days since I retired and this is the first time I’ve been in my car (I have ridden with other folks) since I stopped working. All other trips have been by bike – and I would have ridden to the Alamo if I had remembered earlier. Luckily, it started right up and shook the summer dust off and made it to the theater with a few minutes to spare. I need to get over being a boomer and learn a decent, reliable system of reminders for my phone.
I ordered a Temptress and sad back to see what movie we were going to be treated to.
It was a film called Prime Cut from 1972. When the name was announced, I didn’t think I had seen it, but when the guy came out and started to talk about it I realized that I had seen it, when it was released, but had not thought about it for, maybe, forty years. Let’s see, in 1972 I was in Nicaragua, so I would have seen it a year later – so I saw it in 1973 – forty-nine years ago. I remembered little bits about it – it was set in Kansas City, my old stomping grounds – and although KC is actually in Missouri, the film takes place in rural Kansas – though it isn’t a very good representation (there is a scene with a combine – a very good scene – an homage to North by Northwest – but the combine does something that combines can’t do – and believe me, I used to drive one of the damn things).
It’s a mob movie set in the wheat fields, a ton of violence and nudity, completely politically incorrect, a movie that could never be made today. It was of its time – a true genre film but with a strange, dark sense of humor. A lot of black comedy in the film.
One thing unusual for a movie of this type is that all three main characters are played by actors that won academy awards (four in total). The anti-hero is played by Lee Marvin, the bad guy by Gene Hackman, and Sissy Spacek – in her first speaking movie roll (four years before Carrie).
The crowd was into it – it’s the kind of people that will pack a theater to see a movie when they don’t know what it will be. They laughed at the anachronisms and sick humor and cheered the ending and again after the credits.
So I guess I had better check the calendar and buy tickets for next month’s Secret Screening. They teased us and said that since it was the 90th Secret Screening it would be a film from the 90’s – not much of a clue.
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ― Lao Tzu
The family on the balcony at the Alamo in the Cedars, Dallas, Texas
Lee texted us on Friday – he and some friends were going to see the newest MCU film, Thor’s Love and Thunder at the Alamo in Lakewood and had two extra tickets. I’m sort of Marvel Superhero’d out – but it was a family thing so I said I’d go and was looking forward to it.
Candy and I drove down there and waited (not for very long, they were on time) and was reminded why – as a family – we will not see movies anywhere other that the Alamo chain of theaters. Lee had the tickets on his phone, so we were waiting in the lobby. This was an early showing – so the place was deserted. A single man walked up to the lobby guardian and asked him, “My family is in watching Maverick and I couldn’t make it on time – can I go in?” The guardian checked, saw it had been 20 minutes and said, “Sorry, I can’t let you in this late.” The Alamo has two rules that make going to the movies tolerable.
No text, phone use, or talking during the movie (they will throw you out).
No getting into the movie after it starts.
The man looked disappointed as he left. I asked the guardian if this happens a lot. “I’m afraid it does. If the movie in only a couple minutes in, I’ll go ahead and say it’s OK – but the film started more than twenty minutes ago.”
The last time I went to a movie not at an Alamo Drafthouse (so long ago, I don’t remember where, when, or what) a bunch of people came in ten minutes after the movie started, stood around in the aisles, talking loudly about what seats (the place was pretty full) they wanted to take and asking people to move to open up spaces so they could sit together.
Never again.
I hadn’t been to the Lake Highlands Alamo before – it’s really nice. They have powered, reclining seats… so comfy. Also, if you go to an Alamo – get there early – they do a great job of putting together little bits of film to get you in the mood. One thing they showed was a Thor Cartoon from the 60’s – I remember seeing that very one when I was a sprout.
So, all this was cool and all – but how was the movie? Uhh, it was Meh. I actually likes Thor Ragnarok – the humor brought by Taika Waititi was a breath of fresh air in the increasingly predictable MCU. I love his style of injecting humor into dead-serious situations (especially Jojo Rabbit). But here is all felt forced and overdone. Not an unentertaining time – but nothing special.
Also, I’m still suffering from withdrawn from Everything Everywhere all at Once (I’m still haunted by my thoughts riding my bike three miles home in the dark after that movie). That was a life-changing film and it isn’t fair to compare any other cinematic experience to that… but it is what it is.
Thor Love and Thunder did put a bit of a bug in my bonnet on the more overblown aspects of the MCU – thinking about the universe and all. Then, later on in the day, I decided, for some reason, to watch Eternals streaming at home.
It was awful.
The movie is about a group of superhuman androids that live, basically forever, protecting humankind from destruction (at least they think they are). There are fascinating concepts – like a superhero that can control minds ending up as a Jim Jones-like cult leader in the Amazon – someone that spends eternity stuck in a pre-pubescent girl’s body, destined never to grow up (her fellow Eternals treat her like a little kid even though she is thousands of years old), – there is a moral quandary between duty and kindness – all these amazing aspects – yet the movie is horribly boring. All the fascinating stuffins are ignored for silly action scenes and interminable stretches of all the Eternals standing around talking about nothing. Why did I bother?
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers
Caterpillar – not so much HDR strangeness.
So… I was lounging around the house, as I am wont to do, feeling a strong lack of ambition and a strangely upset digestive system… so I decided to watch a couple of strange movies. The best scratch to an itch like that is to call up my streaming Criterion Channel. I coursed though the selections, looking for something that looked odd… and there were plenty. So I picked.
The first one was directed by Jon Moritsugu and called Terminal USA.
Here’s the description:
Shot in eyeball-scorching Panavision, TERMINAL USA is underground anarcho-punk auteur Jon Moritsugu’s freak-out magnum opus that shocked America—and prompted a conservative outcry against public funding for the arts—when it was broadcast on television in the midnineties. The director himself plays twins (one a drug-dealing badass, the other a closeted math nerd) in a radically dysfunctional family that completely obliterates the myth of the “model minority.”
I’m sorry, but it wasn’t very good. There is a thin line between weird and bad – but this one landed on the bad side. As I always say – the way to judge a weird film is to think if you care about the characters and care about what happens to them. In this one… I didn’t care. There is something to be said about simple and homemade – but this was beyond amateurish – it wasn’t sophomoric – it wasn’t even freshmanoric.
Since this was a couple hours of my life I won’t get back – I decided to try again – and found a film under an hour long.
This one was directed by Joel Potrykus and had the provocative title Thing from the Factory by the Field.
It’s description:
A band of teenage metalheads get more than they bargained for when they accidentally kill a demon during a satanic ritual.
This one I liked. I can’t say it was good – but it was worth an hour of television streaming. I did care about the kids in the movie – though I don’t really like them. It had an imaginative, unique plot that made up for the wooden acting and ultra-low production values.
When I was a kid, my friends all had these fiberglass bows (my father bought me a laminated wooden one – which was better – but I was jealous of the cool plastic bows) and we would shoot arrows straight up until they disappeared into the sky. Then we would stand as upright and thin as we could – to lessen the chances of getting hit by the invisible, unseen arrows, descending at insane speeds. It was as exciting as it was stupid. The Thing from the Factory by the Field reminded me of this… I hadn’t thought about it for decades.
And the movie had a surprise, jump-scare ending – which is always a good thing for a weird short film.
It began as a holiday. Arthur Howitzer Jr., a college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains, convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun, to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business through the production of a series of travelogue columns to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic magazine … Over the next ten years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed Picnic into The French Dispatch, a factual weekly report on … world politics, the arts – high and low – fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink … He brought the world to Kansas.
—- Narrator, The French Dispatch
The French Dispatch
I had an hour or two free and decided to watch a streaming movie. I have always enjoyed Wes Anderson’s work so I called up The French Dispatch (recently added to HBO max). And it was an enjoyable film.
I didn’t like it as much as Moonrise Kingdom – which I saw in the theaters, but it’s on a par with some of his other more recent work. For me, the judgement of a film like this – one that is obviously very stylized and springs from the unique mind of the director – is if I gave a shit about the characters. I really cared about the folks, especially the young couple, in Moonrise Kingdom. In The French Dispatch… not so much.
Of course, any film I see right now will suffer in comparison to Everything, Everywhere, all at Once – which is still rattling around in my noggin – and I really, really cared about all the characters in that masterpiece.
The movie is a love letter to the New Yorker. A deserving subject, to be sure, but one that is more than a little dry, twee, and removed from the hell of our present lives.
That said, the stories were intriguing, original, surprising, and a lot of fun. It was a fine way to pass the time, but I won’t remember it a year from now. Probably the most enjoyable part is playing “spot the famous actor.” Everybody is in this thing….
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers
The Dallas Eye,
Dallas, Texas
I had a lot of work to get done today, even though it was Saturday, and i completed most of it – or as much of it as I could… so I took a break and watched a Marvel Movie streaming on my TV.
It was the second best movie set in a Multiverse I’ve seen recently. It wasn’t too bad, a bit of gaudy entertainment… but it wasn’t Everything, Everywhere, All At Once – not by a long shot.
As a matter of fact… if it was the second best…. It was also the worst movie set in a Multiverse I’ve seen lately.
Bill Chance 