cravings for food and film

I’m trying not to let it be a pattern that I never update on Saturdays and rarely on Sundays. The point of this blog is to write about everything that’s going on with me, and I have lots more time for contemplation on the weekends, so I should be updating more. I just don’t love spending time in front of the computer when I’ve got a TV and a pair of knitting needles and don’t have to look like I’m working. If I had less time for blogging while I’m at work I bet I’d want to blog more at home.

Anyway. Last night BF and I watched Caligula. We had both been looking forward to it because (me) it’s a legendarily bad movie, similar to Ishtar (which is sadly not available through Netflix) and (BF) it’s also very famously sex-oriented. The legends were correct: it was truly, intensely terrible, and there was an unbelievable amount of sex in it. Plenty of h a r d c o r e  p o r n-style sex, too; lesbian scenes, g o l d e n  s h o w e r s (deflecting the search engines), the whole nine. There was so much sex, in fact, that it even turned BF off substantially – and BF could be a four-star general in the pornography wars. It was really an awful movie, though, badly made in every way possible. P e n t h o u s e put up some of the money for it, which partly explains the sex, but it was poorly written (by Gore Vidal!), poorly directed, often poorly acted (although McDowell was pretty game, he had a horrendous part to work with), very poorly edited, weirdly scored, and in general just 2.5 hours of NOT FUN.

Today I watched Catch Me if You Can, which I’d seen a couple of times before and which is a movie I like a lot. I recommend it to anyone reading. I really enjoy watching a director who thoroughly knows what he’s doing make a plain old movie full of entertainment - as opposed to making Munich, or War of the Worlds, all the time.

Yesterday afternoon I flipped through the TV, and found that Herbie: Fully Loaded and Walk the Line were on channels near each other, so I went back and forth between them at the commercial breaks. Haven’t seen Herbie, and ordinarily wouldn’t be interested, but watching LiLo is both delightful and quite sad; she’s so sweet and appealing and pretty, but God, what she’s done to herself privately… The movie was eh, but it was better than the commercials during Walk the Line, which I’d seen before and which is a movie I like a lot. I felt something the first time which was even stronger this time, something about the nature of how men love women, how men need women to be sane and happy, how it must feel to want all of a woman that there is – her body, her mind, her heart, her soul – and not be able to have her. Her scent is in your nostrils, driving you mad, and still you just can’t catch her. That seemed to drive the movie version of Johnny so desperately, and I felt for him. At least that was what Joaquin communicated to me through his performance; others might not have seen the same thing.

I saw Walk the Line shortly after I saw Klute, and the two main female performances reminded me of each other a lot. There’s a certain kind of acting where an actor just loses him- or herself entirely in the character, where you know that they’re acting of course but you still feel that you’ve watched a full, complete transformation from a flesh actor into a fictional character, or the other way around. Fonda’s and Witherspoon’s performances in these two movies are like this, and I think that’s why they were shooed in to Oscars for them. The only male performance like this that I can think of off the top of my head is DiCaprio’s in The Aviator. It’s a really rare thing to see. Some actors do it partway for most of their careers, and some only get one chance. You can’t always tell when it isn’t, but you can always tell in a moment when it is.

Yoga this morning went well, technically, although for most of the class we were preparing to do hanumanasana, which is a pose that I knew going in I couldn’t do, since I’ve been practicing the stretches for it for two weeks now. There was a lot of leg-stretching against the wall and attempted standing splits, and it was painful and very tiring. I worked well and did most of what we were asked to do, but my quads let me down again for the first time in a couple of weeks. Frustrating. More and more I’m enjoying my home practice as a sort of palliative for the challenge and struggle of the classes I attend. This week I did yoga every day but Tuesday, and I had good practices every day.

Last night BF, MB and I went out to a terrific rib place in town. I had BBQ wings and a gigantic burger and french fries, and it’s the first time I’ve eaten food like that in a REALLY LONG TIME. I thought I would feel terrible today, but I feel fine, and boy did it feel good going in. I’ve been craving wings since we watched a Good Eats about them and they were exactly what I wanted.

Today I made a non-stir-fried stir-fry. I roasted the veggies under the broiler, deep-fried the tofu, rice-cookered the rice, and BF mixed up one of Deb’s sauces. I find stir-frying to be a pain in the ass but I love the mixture of textures and flavors, and the heat of the food, that you get out of them, so this was a great compromise. It was delicious, and there’s enough left over for lunch tomorrow.

Next week is certainly going to be unusual – only one full day of work – and I really look forward to it, which is why I’m not as depressed as I usually am on Sunday nights. Yet it’s time for bed now.