On this long weekend, we are pretty much camping in, cooking meals, working in the daytime and watching movies in the evenings. No Black Fridays or Saturdays for us. Couldn’t catch us dead within three miles of a shopping mall (the closest one is 3.5 miles from our house).
Yesterday I finished revisions of a story and sent it off to market. I have another one that has to be ready by December 1st that I hope to get drafted out today. It’s cozy and warm in the house, even though the outdoor temperatures plummeted by forty degrees between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evening. We hovered near freezing overnight, but then it’s going to go back up to the high seventies over the next day or two. I wish it would pick a temperature and stick with it.
Last night we watched The Kids are Alright with Annette Benning, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. The women play a lesbian couple, each of whom had a child from the same anonymous sperm donor (Ruffalo). When the daughter turns eighteen, the son, who is only fifteen, talks her into tracking down the donor. Hilarity ensues, along with domestic drama. Though the daughter didn’t really want to have much to do with Paul, she’s the one who is more fascinated by him once they meet. The boy, with the unlikely name “Laser,” is less impressed, though Paul does plant more seeds of doubt about his friendship with a reckless loser than his parents (Moms, they’re called as a collective unit) ever could. Paul is happy-go-lucky, carefree, and a bit goofy, and his arrival on the scene throws a major monkey wrench into the family unit. The dynamic was already strained, with Benning’s character, a surgeon, being the primary wage earner and Moore’s character less self assured and frail, still seeking her career after staying home to raise the kids. The second-act twist is rough going, but fortunately there’s enough levity in the script to keep it from being too much of a downer. Funny self-referential moment: after discovering gay male porn in his moms’ drawer, Laser asks why lesbians would watch something like that. Moore gives a rambling, detailed explanation and Benning concludes that she finds lesbian porn hard to credit since they hire two straight women to pretend to be gay.
On Thursday night we watched All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. It isn’t out in theaters yet but was available via OnDemand. It’s based on the real-life case of Robert Durst, whose wife vanished in the 1970s. He was later charged with improper disposal of a body after killing a neighbor, supposedly in self-defense. It’s a twisted tale of powerful people (the Dursts, or rather the Marks family in the movie) owned some of the seediest properties in Times Square and collected rent in cash while publicly stating their plane to raze the buildings and put up theaters and office buildings. (Durst’s father in real life was the creator of the National Debt Clock). Since Durst is still alive, the filmmakers probably had to tread a fine line to avoid being sued, but they certainly implied that Durst killed his wife and left her body with his father (Frank Langella) for disposal, and that he tricked an elderly neighbor into killing the only person who knew about his cover-up of that crime before staging the “self-defense” killing. It’s a grim film, with Gosling switching from an okay guy with lots of friends and interests into this closed-off pseudosociopath (Durst was originally diagnosed as schizophrenic and later as having Asperger’s). Dunst’s character is not well developed, but Langella is his usual powerhouse.
On Wednesday evening we saw Beneath the Dark, starring a bunch of people I’ve never heard of before, although the female lead was apparently on The Sopranos and the lead is on No Ordinary Family. They’re a cute dating couple heading from Texas to L.A. for the wedding of one of his old frat brothers. She gets frisky, distracts him, they spin out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and decide it’s time to find a place to stay for the night. The place they find isn’t quite the Bates Motel, but it’s the next best thing. They’re the only guests and the guy behind the counter is a bit of a creep. When Paul goes to the cafe for a late night coffee, he encounters a mystical black man who gives him Overlook cigarettes and mentions the name Ullman (the officious little prick from The Shining). He says he’s Jesus Christ and tells Paul that he has to reveal his secret to his girlfriend. A mysterious woman shows up in their room later that night and, in a parallel storyline, we find out the guy from the front desk’s own tragic story. It’s not the typical harum-scarum haunted hotel story, but the resolution will be familiar to anyone who has watched movies of this type (or The Twilight Zone). Still, Paul’s final decision was interesting enough to keep us talking about the film over breakfast the next morning.
