Eccentric Flower:199911/Hedonists and unlikeables

I heard the street-sweeping machine turn the corner outside my window a few minutes ago and I thought, oh, damn, I'm parked on the wrong side of the street, I've already got a ticket on my window.

Then I remembered: Oh, wait, I don't have a car right now. My car is out in Watertown at the Toyota dealership. A very small amount of silver lining for a repair bill that's going to be in the high three figures and will put a serious hole in the Christmas budget.

I hate street sweeping. It's just an excuse to make money on tickets, if you ask me. The rules are designed for maximal confusion - "park on this side of the street if it's a second or fourth Wednesday, but not if the moon is full" - and what does the street sweeping accomplish? Especially during this season when the maple trees drop approximately fifty leaves a minute?

I am also learning to dislike maple trees. When I came up here, they were a novelty. Now they are a nuisance. Do you know what maple trees do best? Shed cruft. Maple trees have three seasons: Pollen-dropping season, seed-pod-dropping season, and leaf-dropping season. I tell you, if it weren't for sugar maples, I'd take an axe to the lot.

I have been having a weird set of mental reactions the last few days. I want to be sybaritic. I want to revel in food and sleep and sex, and the touch of my clothes, and hot baths, and other sensory delights.

I've been relishing food even more than usual, reading smut compulsively, and sleeping just a little more than is good for my productivity. I don't know what's causing this. If I were actually female, I'd say it was hormonal, but everyone knows that men don't have any soft, sensual hormones. Male hormones make you want to go out and blow things up.

That was a joke. Honest!

Anyway, I mention this so you'll know that not all is crankiness and angst here on Planet Columbine.

Given this sybaritic attitude, when I was too blurry to work on edits last night, I probably should have taken another stab at the H story ... but I wrote a Stay Tuned item instead.

I started a new file, and prepared to name it - the file name is based on the date - so I checked the clock on my computer. Now, on a Mac, the menu bar shows the time, and you click it to flip it to the date. I checked, and then I saved the file - st1109.htm. Looked up again at the clock. It was 11:09. Oh, I said to myself, I must have accidentally read the time instead of the date. So I clicked the bar again. Well!

So this particular Stay Tuned entry was begun at 11:09 on 11/09. For what that's worth, which is not much, but it amused me.

I have been asked to get on the stick and give my comments about Being John Malkovich already. Well, okay, but you won't like them.

Frankly, I'd rather be writing about Princess Mononoke, but it is showing at only one theatre in town and they are not selling anything but same-day tickets, and we'd be foolish to try to penetrate the swarm of fanboyz and fangirlz. Pity, since I actually am dying to see this film, but as I said a few entries back, there are few things in life worth waiting in long lines for. That goes for fighting huge crowds as well. People are coming from other states to see this film here.

So we went to see Being John Malkovich on Friday night, and it became the second film I've ever walked out on in my life. (I don't remember what the first one was - it was a long time ago.)

Now, ponder the significance of that for a moment. I am, as has been noted, extremely cautious about seeing films. I generally go to films in theatres only if I think the odds are very good that I will like the film. So that means I was expecting to enjoy this film, had every reason to believe I would like it - and was made so uncomfortable by the film that I couldn't bear to sit through all of it.

And now I'm wondering how everyone else can be raving about this film so much.

Look: This film has characters that manage to be unlikeable and purposeless at the same time. Its lead character is not just a loser, but a loser who doesn't understand why he's a loser. A man who really can't comprehend why people might not want to see a puppet show of Abelard and Heloise. A man who you can't even hate for wanting to cheat on his wife because you're not clear that he has any real passion for the act, that it means anything to him. Not only is he just going through the motions, he's not doing it particularly well.

His wife - well, it got to the point early on where, even though she's sweet, I wanted him to have at least one serious confrontation with her, tell her off, just because she annoyed me so badly. (An award of merit, though, should be given to the crew for accomplishing the difficult feat of making Cameron Diaz look unattractive.)

And we won't even get started on Maxine, the office worker and utterly heartless manipulator that the lead character inexplicably wants to sleep with. I wanted someone to tell the wife off, but I wanted someone to push Maxine out a window.

But, I told myself, this movie will get better once the Malkovich stuff starts. Then it will actually become funny. Then it will become clever and snappy and jazzy and deliciously weird.

It didn't. And the "inside Malkovich's head" effects made me slightly nauseous, as handheld work tends to do. To hell with it. By then I had already squirmed in my seat through several major scenes. (I had to shut my eyes during the Abelard and Heloise sequence - it was painful to watch this character do this. I had to shut my eyes through every interaction between the main character and Maxine. I just couldn't stand it.)

This movie is not focused enough to be a farce - it's not making fun of anything in particular. It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not sharp enough to be a satire (and again, it doesn't have a target anyway). The characters don't get deep enough into their interactions to make this a romance or a drama. This movie - or the half of it I saw - is random weirdness with nothing to hold it together.

Thank god Marc hated it too, or I'd have wondered if something was wrong with me. (He was seated on the row in front of us, and didn't notice when I left - he told me later that he wished I'd tapped him on the shoulder, he'd have left with me.)

I can't find a bad review of this film anywhere, which makes me wonder what I'm missing.

In the half of the film I saw, there was only one piece of weirdness which was brilliant and funny - the seven-and-a-halfth floor. Specifically, when Cusack is trying to get off the elevator and the other passenger helps him get there. She reaches in the back corner and grabs a fire hook to yank the doors open. She moves up next to the buttons, preparing to push the emergency stop at exactly the right moment - all the while with a completely impassive look on her face, like this is in no way unusual.

Cut to the doors - which show the dents and cuts of having been opened this way a thousand times.

That made me laugh. It was the only belly laugh I remember having.

In general, if there had been more material where everything else treats the events as commonplace and only Cusack thinks they're strange - where only he is seen to wonder if the world's going nuts - I might have been able to sit through this film.

Of course, it would have helped if his character had been the least bit interesting. Or likeable.

I feel like I've covered that theme before, though, so I'll stop there.