I cleaned the hardwood floors last night. Chris (my partner) has been gone since Thursday and whenever he’s away for more then a couple of days I inevitably end up firmly planted on the couch watching the DVD’s that haven’t even had the protective seal cracked open. I ended up watching all 13 episodes of The Comeback in like, 3 days…including a lot of (but not all) the extras. I’m starting to sound like Entertainment Weekly harping about the fucking Gilmore Girls (do they really have to mention them very week?), BUT, you really should watch The Comeback because I doubt if you’ll ever see the likes of it again. I guess it was doomed from the start because it had the audacity to combine humor with moments so uncomfortably hilarious and tragic that reveal the vulnerability, that the main character, Valerie Cheirsh so desperately tries to hide, and watching this process is fascinating (to me, at least).

I also finally watched the extras on my A Mighty Wind DVD. I love the music in this film. My favorite group is The Main Street Singers with Jane Lynch, Parker Posey and John Michael Higgins. They have the ‘corniest’ music (I love the music in this film), and their performance faces. Smiling like their lives depended on it. I have a couple of Ray Conniff CD’s and the Main Street Songers remind me of them. Pure joy, with lots of sugar-and bugs.

Donna, a friend from my Joan Crawford Group who I met in San Francisco kept extolling the the virtues of Detour, a cheapie film noir made in 1945 that’s considered a classic among noirs. The reason for this is the incredible Ann Savage, the ultimate hard boiled noir DAME. This is one of those moments when I watched silently with my jaw agape, like when I watched Caged for the first time. Un-fucking-believable. The movie is about this dolt that hitchikes from New York to Los Angeles and runs into trouble along the way. The he runs into more trouble in the form of Ann Savage, one of the toughest broads you’ll ever meet in your life in a fearless performance. She snarls out her lines at a 100 words a second, and when she’s REALLY mad, she has this threatening growl that will make your hair stand on end. When she spits out SHUTUP! it leaves a mark on your face. She has lines like, ‘What you do, kiss him with a wrench?’. I watched this film 3 times. It’s only 67 minutes long and Ann Savage doesn’t enter until 35 minutes into the picture. Get it! It’s very inexpensive.

So… I cleaned the floors last night. I forgot what the point was…

Filed under: My Way Of Life