Nothing beats old Italian movies when it comes to serious contrast, right, gang? I mean their highs are high; their joy is incredibly joyful; their lows, however -- you gotta scrape them up from the sewer grating. If you can keep your eyes open through the horror long enough to see what you're doing, that is.

I've been re-watching Scorese's 3-hour documentary on old, black & white Italian films, My Voyage to Italy:


I love this movie mostly because I love most of the movies that this movie is about! (I hope you don't speak English as a second language, gang, otherwise that sentence would probably be a killer. Since I am still studying my French constantly, I am super sensitive to insane sentences like that one!)

Okay, anyway.

I really do love this movie but the Umberto D. stuff is really, really too much for me. It is too gut-wrenchingly sad and horrible, and since I was drinking maybe perhaps a tad too much red wine last night, I could not get to the remote quick enough and all those heartbreaking, yelping, whimpering dogs made me want to tear my own head off. So once I finally got my hands on that remote, I just shut the whole movie off.

Jesus, I figured. Gotta get that awfulness out of my head, pronto. Thanks, Marty. So I perused my stacks & stacks of movies down in my family room and thought: what to do, what to do? (This is actually one of my favorite lines from the Peter Falk - Keanu Reeves comedy Tune In Tomorrow.) (I so fucking love Peter Falk. I also love Keanu Reeves, for decidedly different reasons. If you like either one of them, or the lovely Barbara Hershey, and haven't seen Tune In Tomorrow, you should; it is so fucking funny.)

I know, I know; I digress.

Anyway. The wine I was drinking was very, very, very, very cheap merlot. However -- it didn't taste all that bad. Seriously. I was enjoying it. And I was exhausted, but in a good way. A brainiacal way -- to quote Patti Smith. I had made good progress on the screenplay, but it is still extremely hard work for me. And all this other stuff that I can't really talk about on the blog is going so mindbogglingly great for me right now that really all I can do is drink red wine and be blissfully happy about it. So. In that vein, to try and stay stupidly happy and drown out the echoing sound of dying dogs, I turned to this; another of my all-time favorite films:


I have tried to describe it before -- how Lasse Hallstrom (sorry about the missing umlaut, gang, but I'm just not up for html right now) has this visual pacing to his films that is so compelling and magnetic. I don't really know how to describe it with words, but I love to watch his films (even the ones with all those subtitles) and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? is really one of my very favorites. I do not know how many times I have watched this film in the last 16 years (ouch!). Or how many times I've watched it while drinking too much wine, but last night was certainly another one of those happy times.

And Bunny was curled up in my lap, looking so phenomenally beautiful; and Buster was perched on top of the bar, staring hard at me, at us; sending us very, very strong thought-pictures that went a little like this: go upstairs and get some snacks; go upstairs and get some snacks! And tonight, I'm flying First Class to Costa Rica (sorry, can't really go into that one right now), but it is sufficient to say that last night, I had the best evening. It was a perfect world. (No, not the Kevin Costner - Clint Eastwood variety; the real kind. The real goods, as they say; an actual perfect world. Wow.)

Well, okay, on that auspicious note... I have to get back to 1927 in Hollywood, gang, and get a little more writing done before the limo comes to get me at 6:45 this evening! Yay!! Hope you have a really great day wherever you're off to, folks. Thanks for visiting!! See ya.