It was a little cooler than normal on Saturday morning, with a breeze, so once I got going on mowing the front lawn I let momentum carry me over to the back, which has been much neglected this summer. It’s completely fenced in, so no one but us can really see it, and the grass is patchy but it does grow long in some sections, so I cut it, probably for the first time in three months. Maybe longer. I lose track of time.
I worked on the opening sections of the story I’m revamping. I have about 1500 words now, but I’m going back over the sections I’ve already written over and over again, trying different approaches and wording. It’s a difficult story, for some reason, and progress is slow, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.
We had an international movie festival of sorts this weekend. On Friday night, we watched a Japanese film called Still Walking. It’s about family members going back home for a commemoration day for the oldest son. Though it takes a while for all the details to come out, we discover that he’s been dead for a number of years, and they do this every anniversary of the accident that claimed his life. An outsider who was involved in the accident is invited each year, too, as a perverse form of punishment. It’s a small family: the father is a retired doctor. The wife never worked outside the home. There’s some interesting history between them that comes out through the playing of a record. They have two adult children. The surviving son (the viewpoint character) is in the shadow of his dead sibling, and the fact that he married a widow with a young son of her own doesn’t elevate his status. The daughter wants to move into the family house to look after the aging parents. The situation itself–the annual ceremony–is unfamiliar, as are a few of the details of this Japanese family’s lifestyle; however, for the most part, Western families will probably recognize details of themselves in this story. It’s a universal tale. The family is dysfunctional, but aren’t most in their own way?
A couple of weeks ago, I found a list that we’d started about 14 years ago — movies we saw trailers for that we wanted to see. The list went AWOL for over a decade, but now that we have it we’re looking up some of those old films. The first was Kolya, a Czech film that won the Academy Award for best foreign film in its day. It’s about a womanizing bachelor who used to be the cellist for the Prague Symphony before his smart lip got him on the wrong kind of list in the Russian-occupied nation. Perpetually short of money, he agrees to a scam whereby he will marry a Russian woman so she can get her Czech papers. Unfortunately, she treats Czechoslovakia as something of a rotating door and passes straight on through to Germany, leaving behind her very young son who, through a series of circumstances, ends up in the cellist’s care. After all, technically he is now the boy’s step-father. To complicate matters, the boy only speaks Russian, and the Russians aren’t very popular in the country at that point in history, the days leading up to the Velvet Revolution, one of the first breaches in the Iron Curtain. It is a charming film, written by the lead actor and directed by his son. The little boy who plays Kolya is charming and talented. There’s a scene where he’s in the bathtub talking on the shower head as if it’s a telephone that will break your heart.
Finally, we watched Basquiat, the fictional biography of the artist from the early 1980s who became one of Andy Warhol’s protégés, but whose flame burned too brightly. David Bowie plays Warhol, and the film also stars Dennis Hopper, Benecio Del Toro, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, Parker Posey, Courtney Love , Claire Forloni and Tatum O’Neal. The movie wasn’t quite as interesting as we thought it might be, and I could easily have switched it off after 30 minutes, but we stuck with it. If the film is to be believed, Basquiat never really took his painting seriously. He had the spirit of a graffiti artist, always overwriting what he (or other people) had done. Warhol comes off as a real airhead (the film was directed by Julian Schnabel, who was part of the scene, so maybe he knows), picking people and things to promote on real whims. Nothing that I saw of Basquiat’s work spoke to me in the least, and his graffiti was more perplexing than profound. The big question posed is who was using whom, if anyone, and the film doesn’t answer that but the question is worth exploring.
On a lighter note, Eureka was fun this week. A sort of clip show from the past, but with a good contemporary storyline to carry it off. I think Matt Frewer is coming back for the next episode in two weeks, which should be fun.
I’m about 90% of the way through Mister Slaughter by Robert McCammon. It’s a fun book, with lots of interesting historical facts and settings. I could do without the retconned cliffhangers every few chapters though. He died! [Chapter break] No, not really. Once in a book, an author might get away with that trick, but there’ve been at least three of them so far and it feels gimmicky. Still, the title character is wicked awesome, and you’ll never look at sausages quite the same way again, either.
