Up at, oh look at that, a reasonable hour for doing stuff. Which in this case meant breakfast with Matt (both of us conveniently late), a brief walk, and then a bus to New York. A half hour to kill, wandering Manhattan and exciting locales like Best Buy and a grocery store. And then off with Katie for actual grocery shopping, food making, and dinner. Yummy veggie rice thing, brownies, lots of tea, and eventually chocolate alcohol things. Interspersed was Taboo for 3, watching TV things, like Project Runway, a lot of laughing, cats, and a game of Scrabble. Excellent game- I won 415 to 392. Katie went out with STIPEND, then I went out with HOISTER next to it for HE, ON, and ID. She later made RANCOuR. We also made use of the two new words QI (mine) and ZA (Katie's). Great game. And Tiffany did well on my movie quiz. 10 on an initial run through. I will update that to reflect the new victor. Much to do tomorrow! Much!
Also, last night I watched Palindromes (*), Todd Solondz's latest film. At one point a character says of a failed project, "at least you knew it sucked now, rather than work on it for two years." A shame no one told Todd how much he misses the mark here. I've loved his films, because he uses emotional honesty and brutal humor to approach difficult topics so perfectly. Here, he approaches the abortion debate. But instead of his trademark approach, he creates something far too soft, as if to remove all the teeth from the issue, and leave a soggy, indecipherable mess. Aviva is a girl who wants to have a baby. She succeeds, is forced to have an abortion, runs away, and finds a Christian home. Aviva is played by various actresses, and changes her name at one point. Not much is made of this clever device, except to distract us. When Solondz works so well at humanizing issues through characters, why eliminate them so definitively. Aviva is passive, quiet, and says almost nothing. The people who surround her speak in affected, odd phrases- the mother speaks in sycophantic mother-knows-best formulas, the Christian family speaks in campy dialogue met with laughter at stupid things, and Earl or Joe or Bob, who shows up twice as a trucker who has sex with her and abandons her, and later returns in a different way speaks melodramatically flat. The only scenes that work are the awkward scenes upon Joe's reappearance, because it's the only moment that seems to treat the characters as actual humans facing a problem rather than blank players to deliver rather inane dialogue. Neither emotional, nor satirically sharp, Solondz's film feels less about abortion, and more like the interminable wait in a doctors office with three-month old magazines.
12:01 AM
