Well, dear readers, last night I ate some sweet gherkins. I tell you, where else on all the Internet can you read such a sentence? Where else on all the Internet can you even find the word gherkin? Oh, I’m sure some smart aleck or smart der brucer will point us to www.sweetgherkin.com, but honestly, I feel confident that nowhere else on all the Internet will you read a sentence that goes, “last night I ate some sweet gherkins.” Whilst I was grocery shopping I happened to come upon a jar of said sweet gherkins, and I realized I hadn’t had a sweet gherkin, or a gherkin of any kind, in over ten years. That is a long time to go without a sweet gherkin, is it not? May I just pause long enough to ask if anyone has a clew as to what the hell I’m talking about? In any case, the sweet gherkins were yummilicious and then I got nauseous because I sat in the Jacuzzi after eating them. One must never sit in a Jacuzzi after eating a sweet gherkin – that is the lesson learned, sweet gherkin-wise. Can you even contemplate the mind that invented the word “gherkin”? I mean, what is that useless “h” doing in there? The word isn’t stupid enough without adding a useless “h”? Oh, well, I hereby proclaim that today is Sweet Gherkin Day here at haineshisway.com. Isn’t that exciting? Isn’t that just too too?
Has anyone noticed that I just wrote a very long paragraph about sweet gherkins? Anyway, I had a very nice start to December yesterday. I had an early morning meeting that went very well – my producer and I discussed the script, which he and his partner basically love. They just want me to do a little cosmetic punching up of a few characters – nothing major and all easy to do. I’ve already begun making notes and will hopefully be able to polish off the polish in a week’s time as soon as I return from the York of New. I then went to the dentist and that went very quickly and painlessly and I’m now right as the rain that falls from above. Speaking of rain, there wasn’t any yesterday – in fact, we had a gloriously glorious day here in Los Angeles, California, USA. After the dentist, I went back to meet with the producer and our conceptual artist, who’ll be doing a poster and creature designs for the film. He already had great ideas and had sketched them out – he’s perfect for this and the producer absolutely loved him. I then went home, made some food, and tried to watch a motion picture entertainment on DVD.
But for now, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below whilst we all say “sweet gherkin” in unison. On the count of three: One, two, three – “sweet gherkin”. Excellent.
The motion picture on DVD I tried to watch was entitled Van Helsing. What a loud and annoying film it is. No sense of storytelling whatsoever, with an action scene thrown in literally every eight minutes like clockwork. I am so bored of CGI – instead of adding magic to the movies, I feel it’s robbed movies of magic, because everything is created in a computer and the audience knows that it’s created in a computer and that they can now do anything – in other words, in days of old they actually had to creatively come up with a way to make Fred Astaire dance on the walls and ceiling, and the audience just sat in the theater, mind-boggled, because one couldn’t comprehend how they did it. Now, they’d just shoot it in front of a blue screen and do everything else in the computer, so there’s no mystery to it. Aside from that, we get the standard music (rip-off of Carmina Burana – what else is new?), the standard action, the standard CGI, the standard awful script, and the by-the-numbers storyboard direction. I know someone here will tell me it’s all just light escapist entertainment, and I will say that may be true but I like my light escapist entertainment to be well-written, well-directed, and entertaining. Maybe the second half becomes brilliant, but so far, one hour in, I don’t have a clew as to who any of these characters are or why they’re behaving the way they do. And therein lies the story of moviemaking today.
What am I, Ebert and Roeper all of a sudden? And wasn’t this supposed to be in the other section? I’m now all discombobulated or, at the very least, discomrichardulated, and all because of The Gherkin Effect.
I also watched a program I TIVOd on Woody Allen’s films, with Woody doing a non-stop interview for over ninety minutes. The problem with the program was that all Woody is doing is describing the movies he made, with no illuminating insights, or very few illuminating insights. That is because the program was “produced, written and directed” by Richard Schickel, who is the world’s worst at this sort of thing. He asks Woody nothing interesting, and doesn’t get him to delve in any way into his psyche or reasons why he does things the way he does. And, in this 2002 program, there is not one shot of Mia Farrow, who starred in heaven-knows-how-many Allen films. Well, there is one shot – a group of people and she has her back to the camera. Worthwhile for a couple of Woody’s one-liners, but almost a total waste of a great opportunity.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must go hither and thither and perhaps even yon, I must write, I must think, I must phone, I must Fed Ex a package to my hotel in New York so I don’t have to carry CDs on the plane, and I must attend a musicale that a friend’s daughter is in. Today’s topic of discussion: As long as we’re talking about sweet gherkins, what our your favorite condiments, what type of pickles and relish and ketchup and mustard and mayo do you prefer? What are your favorite sauces? What do you put on your steak, if anything. Yes, it’s all things condiments today at haineshisway.com. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we? And let’s all eat at least one sweet gherkin on this fine Thursday.