Penoptic

For some reason I'm only tonight watching Center Stage for the very first time. Dear God, how have I lived without something quite this bad in my life? Generally I don't go for the really truly horrible movies. But there's a bit of a scale to these things that it's important to keep in mind. There's the truly bad stuff that just makes you want to gouge your eyes out, of which Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is, to me, the most obvious example. And then there's the kind of horrible that makes you glad you decided not to go into acting, but glad these people didn't so you can sit and point and laugh at them. And Center Stage is the best example of it that I've seen in a while. At least that stars people born in the same decade as me. And now I feel old. I think I'll go watch An Affair To Remember again.

Over the weekend I had brunch with an old family friend. This man and his wife had been my parents' next door neighbors when I was born. I was my parent's first child; this other couple, too, had a child at around the same time I was born, only it was their fourth. Shortly thereafter they moved to the other side of the country and morphed into that ambiguous sort of character of whom your memories are filled entirely by stories relayed and are not at all based in reality, especially when you don't have even a picture to help shape their forms in your mind. These former neighbors of ours stayed this way in my mind, with vague rumblings of 'Young Tommy's playing football at such a school' and so forth, for years. The most significant piece of news that stayed in my mind was that the mother fought breast cancer for more than ten years. So they remained until I applied to a college in their area, 3,000 miles away, and my mother and I decided to go take a tour of the...

I know it's cliched, I know it's the epitome of corny, I know it's so melodramatic that it serves as the basis for two more movies, and who knows how many references within movies (even I don't dare try to calculate that one), but I simply love 'An Affair To Remember.' I love the elegance of Deborah Kerr, who sits and stands so straight--her grandmother used to make her lie on the floor for hours to ensure good posture--yet always seems so comfortable; and of Cary Grant, who manages to look elegant even when he's doing somersaults and cartwheels (if you haven't seen 'Holiday' and 'Monkey Business,' rent them immediately, if only for the acrobatics). The two of them have such excellent chemistry in this film, easily playing off of each other's quick and easy conversation without missing a beat. And I have a soft spot for the back story, too. The writer and director, Leo McCarey, had originally made the film 'Love Affair' with I...

It's amazing how quickly life gets away from you. You set yourself a sack of goals - "This week I will finish reading that book I started two months ago," "I will finally go browsing at Blue Mercury (but not buy anything," "I will call that friend of mine I haven't seen since Christmas," "I will watch that Netflix movie that's been sitting around for a month." All these things you say, and you honestly do intend to follow through with them. But life gets away from you. The daily musts of the world - work, bill paying, groceries, eating those strawberries in the fridge before they go bad - take up so much energy that you forget to complete the goals you set for yourself, whether they be obligations or indulgences. It's sad, but true. I find lately that trying to fit in these things is almost as energy-consuming as getting up in time to catch the bus for work, but generally they seem to have rewards that are just as fulfilling as ea...