1. Klimt (Raúl Ruiz, 2006): Man, this movie was good. It’s the least bio-y biopic ever, which I mean in the best possible way. I’d never seen a Ruiz movie before, and I was totally mesmerized by his crazy “moving camera and putting people on casters and swinging them” cinematography. I further loved all the clever bits where Ruiz broke the fourth wall, like when the baron guy is watching Klimt and this actress through a police lineup mirror, and we’re on his side of the mirror, and Klimt comes up to the mirror and rubs his eyes or something? Also, the fact that George Melies was in it. I like movies about art.
  2. Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999): Nothing follows up a difficult movie about a dying artist like…another difficult movie about a dying artist. Only this one is almost three hours long! This was totally incredible though. They managed to cast a guy who looks so much like Marcel Proust — he was an embodiment of this portrait — and I thought the film did a pretty credible job of capturing Proust’s prose cinematically (noting, of course that I have not read the actual volume of The Search for Lost Time this was based on, I only made it halfway through Swann’s Way). There were some just fabulous moments — there’s this scene when he’s in a cafe where a newsreel’s playing and starts reading a letter, then he’s like, lifted up in his chair, onto the screen, which is showing the area where the woman writing the letter is (this is during WWI). And this beautiful close-up when he’s listening to this concert, and the everyone starts moving (in a surrealistic way), and Proust is overwhelmed and he starts crying, but just a little. Anyway, it was amazing and made me want to start reading Proust again.
  3. The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (Norman Taurog, 1957): This movie — about a movie star who gets kidnapped and everyone thinks it’s a publicity stunt because she has a movie about getting kidnapped opening but then she falls in love with her kidnapper and the conflict is whether he admits it’s a real kidnapping and goes to jail or she says it’s a fake kidnapping and then loses her career — is really not very good. The conflict doesn’t really get resolved at all, but of course her hardwon movie career didn’t matter because it was the fifties. But Jane Russell is fantastic in it. I’ve seen big hunks of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on TV recently and I’d forgotten how much I love her. She has a body like a Barbie, but she also radiates intelligence and wit, and the whole movie is basically an excuse for her to be awesome.
  4. The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007): Okay, it was pretty good. It made fun of government (“President Schwarzenegger” heh), of the Fox TV network, of religion, and it was mostly about Homer and his relationship to the family. The downside was how little play all the townsfolk got: there wasn’t much Apu or Principal Skinner or Lenny and Karl or even Mr. Burns (which I found tragic). Also, I like brainy cynical annoying self-righteous Lisa a lot more than giddy lovestruck Lisa. But it was basically like three and a half episodes of the show strung together, but with better animation, except for the one scene when Marge thinks that maybe she can’t put up with Homer anymore was actually really raw, emotionally.

In other news, I got a new dress at Winner’s that’s all puffed sleeves and empire waist with a square neck and it’s like bright blue. Plus I have all these freckles these days and I dyed my hair dark red brown — Alex called me “a more academic Lindsay Lohan, without all the coke.” It’s not like, I think I look like her, it’s more like I look like I’m trying to look like her. (Which I’m really not.)

Also, I spent a considerable part of my weekend reading the archives of ex-millenial girl. She’s writing her memoirs in blog form, and they are really good. For one, she was a stripper who got addicted to opium, so you know that she had stuff happen to her. For another, she is a really good, honest writer. She writes really honestly about who she was and the choices she made, but in a detached way; she’s neither looking for pity nor is she painting herself as a hero or anything.