Well, dear readers, let me just get right to it, oh, yes, let me just get right to it. Last night, I watched a motion picture on the Flix of Net entitled I Care a Lot. Before we even get to the film, have you ever heard a worse or stupider title for a film. Whatever happened to good movie titles. I Care a Lot is sadly typical of the way they title movies today. And if that’s the best they can come up with, how good can the resulting film be? And there you have it, because the resulting film, a Netflix acquisition, is every bit as bad as the title. It begins with an interesting premise and some very badly written voiceover. The premise is that there’s this awful con woman person who is finding elderly people and having them put into assisted living homes and becoming their guardian, a very real scam that really does happen. After getting them in the home, the horrible woman sells their assets and uses the money to pay herself. She’s in cahoots with a doctor. Then one day, the doctor throws here a “cherry” patient – wealthy, no family, lives alone in a beautiful, paid for house. The con woman is played by Rosamund Pike and the “cherry” patient is Dianne Weist. And that’s where you think the movie will go – that she’s messing with the wrong elderly person. Weist is wonderful but unfortunately that’s NOT where the film goes and Weist disappears from the movie completely halfway through (only to return at the end). Peter Dinklage plays a shady Russian mafia character connected to Weist, who, when he finds out Pike has already stolen some diamonds from a safety deposit box, has her kidnapped and threatens to kill her. He tries but is unsuccessful. At this point, the film is so ludicrous you just want to, yes, hurl your shoe at the TV. It then becomes obvious that the writer/director means this to be a black comedy thriller – it fails completely at that. If he’d done what he should have and made the story about Dianne Weist outsmarting this awful woman, that would have been very satisfying. Instead, we get the awful woman and then an awful man and really who gives a flying Wallenda about either one of them? Are we somehow supposed to root for the awful woman because the awful man is trying to off her? Or that she gets the better of him? She’s PREYING on innocent elderly people and that makes her a predator and monster. I suppose Pike is fine, but she’s done this kind of role before. Weist is really the only reason to watch this piece of dog snot.
But the second motion picture I watched was absolutely fascinating in almost every way, I mean REALLY fascinating. I saw this when it came out in 2011 and who would have ever guessed how much of it would come true in 2020. The movie? Contagion, about a virus and the resulting pandemic. Yep, you heard that right. The cause of the virus? A bat, just like 2020. One of the terms used for the pandemic? Social distancing, which was not a term back then. Runs on supermarkets? Check. People spreading it like wildfire? Check? So much of it is right on the money that when it does veer into other territory – riots and stuff like that – it seems contrived. The way the vaccination is developed is so similar. In the film there’s a lottery by birthdate and obviously that’s not the way it went down, and the vaccine is given through the nose for some reason. Anyway, it was very weird watching it, I must say, and it actually works better now than it did then. Good cast, well directed and written.
And now, I am sitting here like so much fish, listening to a marvelous Vaughan Williams’ fourth symphony conducted by you-know-who Mitropoulos. Fiery and fierce it is, too. And I just finally got the flyer for the June 3 Kritzerland show, so here’s that.
Yesterday was surely a day in which I did not get enough sleep due to not getting enough sleep – about four hours, I think. I had to be up by eight-thirty and to the Group Rep for a ten o’clock play reading – the author had asked me to see it as she was a big fan of LA Now and Then and the other shows I’ve done at the Group Rep. They do these play readings (Doug created a playwright’s unit at the theater) every Saturday. These are just readings – actors in chairs, no rehearsal, stage directions read. This one was a thriller of sorts. It’s in its early stages of development so I won’t say anything other than thrillers are very hard to write and I say that having written one for the stage and now this one with David Wechter for the movies, along with a couple of books you could call thrillers, I suppose – Writer’s Block and Rewind. You have to get everything just right, the tone has to be consistent, you can’t telegraph the surprises that thrillers have. It was in one act that ran about eighty-two minutes and would probably run ninety with staging.
After the reading, I stopped at the mail place and picked up an unexpected and huge residual that might just buy me a Big Mac and small fries – maybe. I didn’t even look to see what it was for. Ah, one of my Happy Days episodes. Then I came right home, then ordered food from Barbie-Q, their pulled pork sandwich, which I’ve had many times. It arrived about forty minutes later and it was as huge and good as ever. Here is a photograph. It took me thirty minutes to eat the damn thing. I had coleslaw as my side but didn’t eat it. So, of course, now I’m hungry but I’ll try not to eat anything until lunchtime today.
Then I did some work on the computer, then watched the two motion pictures. I had some Diet Coke delivered from Ralph’s, along with some Drumstick ice cream cones and several boxes of different flavored fruit bars, which are extremely calorie friendly and tasty. And here I sit, now listening to Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis – another beauty of a performance, the first thing in stereo in this set – the symphony was an earlier recording in mono. I think there are about four stereo albums in total and those are coming up soon, I think.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I’ll have a ME day mostly, I’ll eat, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
This coming week will be very busy and I’m praying not too stressful.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, have a mostly ME day, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, wondering when titles to movies became so lame.