OK, I've had my coffee (actually, am having it), so I can now make a stab at posting something insightful or, at the very least, something that makes at least a teensy bit of sense.
My, what an opinionated column today, and all about DVDs. Not that I mind; on the contrary, I love it. I am in total agreement about scholarly commentary - I once tried to listen to the scholarly track on Criterion's
Rebecca (a truly incredible two-disc set that any fan of Hitchcock's first American film should buy; and soon, as Criterion is letting it go out of print this year) and it was good for nothing but a soporific. We're talking Snoozeville, daddio. The guy appeared to be reading his master's thesis. A good professor
can speak interestingly about film, given the chance. But not when he's allowed to read his treatise on the subject. Avoid that like the plague. Strangely enough, a professor of mine did the commentary for the LD of
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Though his class was always engaging and interesting, I'd be willing to bet that his commentary was just as tedious as the other scholarly ones.
Plaza Suite. That brings back fond memories. I did the beginning of the third act (the Lee Grant one in the movie) as a one-woman thingy for an acting class I was in around three years ago. I just did the part up to where the husband shows up (my last line was something like, "There's your father at the door.") We had to do our scenes over and over in front of the class, and the weird thing was that around the third time I ran through it, some weird magical thing happened when I was pleading with Mimsy to come out of the bathroom and I got BIG laughs. On the third run-through! Either I experienced that transcendental moment where performers rhapsodize, "I
became the character" or my audience had just noticed I had spinach caught between my teeth. I'm hoping the former.
Naturally, on the fourth run-through I tried to replicate all the nuances of my third performance, but it was for naught - can't catch lightning in a bottle. Ah, well...it was grand for that one moment in time.
