Tag: Sunset Boulevard

eye in the sky

So it’s Monday morning and I took the day off from work, as I have to head out to Metairie for my pre-operation meetings and clearances and so forth. Woo-hoo. But at least today I expect to know what my recovery is going to look like, and how much time I will actually need to be out of the office. I didn’t sleep great on Saturday night, despite LSU’s big win over Florida, and was up before seven yesterday morning and not really feeling like doing much of anything. I did spend some time with Lou Berney’s delightful Dark Ride, which is like nothing he’s done before–something I always deeply admire with authors–and I really love the voice of his main character. There’s a reason Lou’s won every conceivable award from crime fiction writing; his work is exceptional and I only wish he were more prolific. Hardly is memorable, for many reasons that I cannot wait to get into when I’ve finished reading the book.

The Saints played abysmally yesterday, so I was glad I decided I was too drained already to expand any more emotional energy on watching the game. I was very low energy all weekend, which isn’t surprising, given that I’m kind of dreading the information I am going to be getting today even as I know it’s information that I need to have in order to make decisions that need to be made. Heavy sigh, yes, small wonder I was low energy all weekend. But that’s okay; I did actually think about writing this weekend, and did some of the mental groundwork and even wrote a scene in longhand in my journal, of all things. I also started coming up with names for characters for the next book, which is always fun, and started thinking about which direction to take the story. This is progress, and I will accept that gratefully without flagellating myself or wishing I had produced more and had written something on the computer.

I’m not going to lie, my anxiety is spiking this morning and so I am going to need to struggle a bit with it this morning. I know I’m just borrowing trouble, and being anxious or nervous about the appointments this morning will not change and/or affect what I am going to be told today, which is knowledge I am going to try to use as I sit here to calm my nerves and keep my adrenaline from spiking. I’m going to take Lou’s book with me this morning to read while I wait at the surgeon’s office, and thank God for good books with great writing from talented friends, right? It’s weird to think I’m having surgery next week and it’s also Thanksgiving week, too. I am not sure what we’re going to do for the holiday, since it’s two days after my surgery, but I can get some things over the weekend for it and hopefully it won’t be too big of a deal to make pulled turkey in the crockpot, but then how will I shred the meat with just one hand? A conundrum, for sure. I am going to probably be learning all kinds of lessons in these coming weeks about how imperative it is to have two hands–which is ableist thinking, I know; some people make do their entire lives with merely one hand.

The big news in college football is that Texas A&M went ahead and fired their head coach, Jimbo Fisher, triggering the biggest payout ever for a fired football coach. I thought, at the time, that the contract extension was insane; all he’d managed to do was take A&M to a one-loss season during a pandemic and a limited schedule. They finished in the top ten that year, if I am remembering correctly, but they still didn’t win their division or make it to Atlanta, so I thought it was presumptuous. Of course, this was also right around the time that it was becoming apparent that LSU was going to fire Ed Orgeron, and Fisher had been a target before Orgeron was hired….so A&M was preemptively moving to keep their coach from leaving for Baton Rouge. But A&M underperformed other than that one season, and it was a very bad deal–it’s costing them almost eighty million dollars to fire Fisher, which is also going to create a massive mess for hiring a replacement and for the replacement as well. Fisher was terminated immediately and not being allowed to finish out the season, so when A&M rolls into Tiger Stadium Thanksgiving weekend, they’ll be led by an interim coach. It’s not the first time the LSU-A&M game has had an interim head coach calling the game, either, nor will it be the last, most likely. I mean, seriously–how much money do the Aggie Exes have, for Christ’s sake?

Apparently, a lot. I would imagine the Longhorns are even richer, and they’ll be in the SEC next year.

We finished watching Karen Pirie last night, and it was on the third episode that I realized I’d read the book on which it was based–The Distant Echo, which I had greatly enjoyed. We also are watching the second season of the Jane Seymour crime series, Harry Wild, which is enjoyable–and applause for Ms. Seymour for allowing herself to age gracefully. There you see the primary difference between British and American actresses; Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren and Judi Densch have allowed themselves to age, and it’s a beautiful thing to see–whereas American actresses their age now have rigid faces filled with Botox and filler and with all their skin pulled back tightly. It always seemed to me that having a face incapable of movement or expressing emotion would be a negative for an actress, but their insecurities and fears are also predicated on generations of youth worship in Hollywood and sweeping actresses out the door once they’ve hit forty. (In All About Eve the age issue for Margo was turning forty; that same year Sunset Boulevard gave us fifty-year-old has-been Gloria Swanson. The irony that Jessica Lange and That Woman were twenty years older when they played Crawford and Davis in Feud–in which the two fifty-something women miraculously revived their careera–wasn’t lost on this viewer.)

And on that note, I am going to bring this to a close and start getting ready for this morning’s round of pre-surgery appointments. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back this afternoon for some blatant self-promotion.

Crystal

Friday!

It’s gray outside this morning; and the temperature has dropped since the rain of the other night. Yesterday’s high was in the 60’s; today’s apparently will be as well. I don’t mind this–surprise!–because I was a bit concerned about it already climbing into the 80’s in March already, which didn’t bode well for this coming summer. So this cool break is a bit nice–and it’s also nice to not go get into my car and start sweating because the sun’s been shining into it all day plus it being hot outside. Yesterday was also a bit nice because 1) Paul was able to get his second vaccination for COVID-19, and I spent the day making condom packs and doing other, various work-at-home duties. As my fingers and hands worked through the condom packing, I spent some time thinking through what I need to do with the book this weekend, which is always helpful. I also got caught cup with this week’s episode of Superman and Lois, which I am greatly enjoying; the television adaptations of DC Comics continues to outshine the film universe. I am debating where I want to spend four hours watching the Snyder cut of Justice League–four hours is a big commitment–and I also discovered, browsing through my many streaming apps last night, any number of films to add to my watchlists.

(Aside–they are hanging new gutters on the house next door and I can see them going up and down those shaky, rickety extension ladders–whose bases are braced against the wooden fence between the properties. As they go up and down the ladders shake–which is one of many reasons I will never climb an extension ladder–and watching the corresponding movements/shaking of the wooden planks in the fence. I should also add that Michael, our neighbor to the front with his partner John, has retired from his job and has started working on the flower beds that run alongside the fence, which have been disaster areas ever since Katrina, and is doing a very nice job making them look pleasant and appealing and all cleaned up.)

As I looked through HBO MAX looking for something to watch for the rest of my condom packing, I came across Inside Daisy Clover, a film from the mid-60’s that is supposedly one of those “gritty insider looks at Hollywood”. It stars include Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, and Robert Redford; and I vaguely remembered Ruth Gordon was nominated for an Oscar for it. I also had a vague memory that the character of Daisy Clover was, in theory, based on Judy Garland, so I thought what the hell and queued it up. This morning, I cannot believe I sat through the entire thing–it was really that dreadful and pointless–and it really was squirm-worthy. When the story opens Daisy is fifteen, leaving in a trailer along the boardwalk at Angel Beach with her not-quite-all-there mother (Ruth Gordon) who has a great natural singing voice, records it and sends it to Swan Studios. Daisy has basically, for all intents and purposes, been raised by wolves, has no manners or filters, and while she is quite pretty beneath the grime and strange haircut (those eyes! Natalie Wood was so beautiful), her getting signed by Swan Studios and being groomed by studio head (Ray Swan–played to odious perfection by Plummer) seems a bit of a stretch. She is marketed as “America’s Little Valentine” and immediately becomes hugely successful. She also becomes involved with another star, Wade Lewis (Redford), who is heir to a vast fortune and a completely one-dimensional cad–which becomes really creepy on two levels–first, she’s supposedly a teenager (Wood was at least in her late twenties by then) and Wade is in his late twenties/early thirties, which is creepy to say the least (studio head Swan refers to her as “America’s Little Jailbait” in one cringeworthy scenes), and then, after he deflowers her, is ordered to marry her or be arrested for corruption of a minor. (The second creepy part is Wade lives on a sailboat anchored just off the coast; seeing Wood on a sailboat or heading to and from one on a motorboat, given how she died, is foreboding and squirm-inducing) They do marry; they spend their wedding night in a motel in some remote location in Arizona, and when she wakes up he’s left her there without a word, stranded. After her mother’s death, she has a breakdown of sorts on set and is unable to continue working, which delays the picture and puts her at odds with the studio–which has spoiled and indulged her so far, but not anymore. The movie’s ending is neither a conclusion or an actual resolution, not a real end; it just….ends. We don’t know what Daisy is going to do–but again, it’s cringy. Inside Daisy Clover could have been a chilling and realistic exposé of the old studio system; it could have shown how an innocent but strong-minded young woman is corrupted and changed and turned into a monster by the system because of her talent–the film does none of these. Daisy is still the same impulsive, emotionally needy mess at the end that she was at the beginning, and such an incredible waste of Wood’s talent. She plays the character without any depth or interior; she plays her like an uncontrollable brat, and the performance doesn’t really ring true. All I kept thinking as I watched was that Wood was miscast–the lip-syncing was especially bad–and about half-way through I thought, this script is terrible and the direction equally bad, but Liza Minnelli could have killed in this part; it was perfect for her. The truth was the title was a misnomer–at the end of the movie we’ve not gotten “inside” Daisy at all but rather skimmed over the surface….and to make matters worse, by the end of the movie she is only seventeen.

America’s little jailbait, indeed.

It is a shame; Hollywood did some amazing films that exposed stardom and the Hollywood machine quite expertly; think of Sunset Boulevard and even though it was set in the theater world, All About Eve. Quite frankly, both book and movie of Valley of the Dolls handled the same subject–the coddling of talent resulting in the creation of a monster–much better.

I started reading The Russia House by John LeCarré yesterday while I waited for Paul to get his shot and then wait to make sure there was no reaction to it; it’s quite good–the writing in particular and voice are exceptional; it’s also world-weary, snarky and funny–and am really looking forward to getting back to spend some more time with it. It will depend on how the work goes, of course; my priority around my day job is going to have to be the book until April 1. (although…April 1 is the day before Good Friday and in theory, I could use that three-day weekend to finish the push to finishing the book; or I could finish on time and spend that weekend relaxing and preparing myself for the next project on the list)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you tomorrow morning.