Stimulated.
No complaining about work today, I promise... but I will say that working a lot makes you acutely sensitive about your time off and using it constructively. For example, since I typically have Monday nights off, I am more apt to capitalize on the time-off and go to the movies with my mom. Usually I roll in the door just after ten, so I usually find a movie on before I go to bed. A couple of nights ago I saw
The Kid Stays in the Picture, a sort of VHI Behind the Music look at the life and times of Hollywood producer Robert Evans. This is a fantastic story - and the film is basically a melange of file footage, photographs, and interviews from the 1960s and 1970s - but is basically gives auteur theory a new twist, that producers have an equally heavy hand in shaping a film, it's not all directors. Evans (as the film would have you believed, single handedly) turned Paramount around and took it back from the brink of bankruptcy more than once. He signed Polanski for
Rosemary's Baby, nurtured
Love Story, and insisted that
The Godfather be a real Italian movie with an Italian-cast and have an Italian director, even if Coppola took some coarscing before he signed on. As an independent producer, Evans hooked
Chinatown and more. It has it's Behind the Music / E-True Hollywood Story moments as exhaustion, cocaine, divorce, and such filter in... but it was tremendously interesting.
Last night, I found
Bombay on TCM. Imagine Bollywood does
Romeo and Juliet, or a Hindu takes a Muslim bride and despite their family in-fighting, make a life for themselves in Bombay. They raise twin boys, one with a Hindu name the other Muslim, in a climate of violent Islamic terrorism in the early 1990s. I really liked this one too, it's a beautiful film, dramatic but kept up-tempo with whimscial dancing musical interludes, nice change and I enjoyed it.
Today, the first day without rain in recent memory gave me a chance to work on my garden and replant some green bean seeds I've been growing on the kitchen window sill. I am not too bad at this gardening stuff and it's fun, I feel like I am feeding some repressed feminine desire to nurture things. I also picked up a book I started eons ago, Benjamin B. Hampton's
History of the American Film Industry and worked on my suntan.
posted by lmjasinski at 3:05 PM
