And I revise my statement once again: on the basis of all eighteen episodes and especially the last one, Slings & Arrows actually is some of the best television I have ever seen. We finished the third season last night and I resent very much that I can't see any of the cast in Shakespeare near me. (Stratford Festival, not an option this year.) But I recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in theatre or good storytelling—or dialogue, or keeping a handful of tones in the air like something edged and fragile that at any moment might hurt you or make you catch your breath to laugh—and my list of actors to watch for has taken an expontential leap.
This is a good week. On Monday, Viking Zen showed me Down with Love (2003), a movie I hadn't even known existed—a pitch-perfect, oversaturated Technicolor, larger-than-life homage to all the romantic comedies Rock Hudson and Doris Day made in the early 1960's. Everyone drinks martinis, the decor is space-age, and the dialogue is so laden with innuendo, you're faintly surprised the Hays Office didn't have coronaries all round when they screened the rushes. The plot is ridiculous, but it's ridiculous in precisely the right ways for the period pastiche and the present-day twist. And then there was David Hyde Pierce. Clearly I should have been watching Frasier all these years, because I can't imagine where he's been all my life. In the entire cast, he was the one actor who looked and sounded exactly as though he had been filmed in 1962: diction, accent, physical comedy, and just the right degree of overplaying; he was magnificent. (It didn't hurt that his character is the kind of scene-stealer who can exclaim, "Catch, you are the best friend a guy with twenty diagnosed neuroses ever had!" The reply is, of course, "Well, we've been friends a long time. I knew you when you only had twelve.") I don't even particularly like Renée Zellweger, and I'm recommending it. As to yesterday, see first paragraph; before then, I spent some of the afternoon in the Old Burying Ground in Harvard Square, drinking lemon ginger honey from Burdick's among three-hundred-year-old names. Autumn is a good light for reading headstones by. By the time Eric and I walked up to Demos in Watertown and back, the sky was a mackerel shoal that kept sliding overhead in blue oils and rose-quince and brush-flicks of grey, banks and tide. At moments, I could have sworn we were inside a museum diorama; at others, under some other planet's sea. We took about two dozen photographs, but because I still do not have a digital camera, I am beginning to think they will have to wait for some kind of almighty image post, starting with my brother's wedding. It is just as clear out today, windier, light-blown. I'm abandoning this post and going for a walk. I have to mail Tristen's birthday present anyway.
Happy birthday,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shirei_shibolim!
This is a good week. On Monday, Viking Zen showed me Down with Love (2003), a movie I hadn't even known existed—a pitch-perfect, oversaturated Technicolor, larger-than-life homage to all the romantic comedies Rock Hudson and Doris Day made in the early 1960's. Everyone drinks martinis, the decor is space-age, and the dialogue is so laden with innuendo, you're faintly surprised the Hays Office didn't have coronaries all round when they screened the rushes. The plot is ridiculous, but it's ridiculous in precisely the right ways for the period pastiche and the present-day twist. And then there was David Hyde Pierce. Clearly I should have been watching Frasier all these years, because I can't imagine where he's been all my life. In the entire cast, he was the one actor who looked and sounded exactly as though he had been filmed in 1962: diction, accent, physical comedy, and just the right degree of overplaying; he was magnificent. (It didn't hurt that his character is the kind of scene-stealer who can exclaim, "Catch, you are the best friend a guy with twenty diagnosed neuroses ever had!" The reply is, of course, "Well, we've been friends a long time. I knew you when you only had twelve.") I don't even particularly like Renée Zellweger, and I'm recommending it. As to yesterday, see first paragraph; before then, I spent some of the afternoon in the Old Burying Ground in Harvard Square, drinking lemon ginger honey from Burdick's among three-hundred-year-old names. Autumn is a good light for reading headstones by. By the time Eric and I walked up to Demos in Watertown and back, the sky was a mackerel shoal that kept sliding overhead in blue oils and rose-quince and brush-flicks of grey, banks and tide. At moments, I could have sworn we were inside a museum diorama; at others, under some other planet's sea. We took about two dozen photographs, but because I still do not have a digital camera, I am beginning to think they will have to wait for some kind of almighty image post, starting with my brother's wedding. It is just as clear out today, windier, light-blown. I'm abandoning this post and going for a walk. I have to mail Tristen's birthday present anyway.
Happy birthday,
shirei_shibolim!
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