the heat, the visit, the first weekend of summer.
Darin said the funniest thing at the Great Greek last night, and I said, Oh damn, I have nothing to write it down on, and he said, We'll remember.
Darin, I didn't remember.
Running news:Today: 5.3 iffy miles.
Yesterday: 5.3 miles.
A week ago, I was checking the closets to make sure I had enough sweatshirts for my morning runs, because it was so cold out that I had to keep running to avoid hypothermia. (A huge blast of Arctic air had swept down from the north, lending itself to near-freezing temperatures. Don't write me and say, "Well, if you think near-freezing is bad, you should try Minnesota..." I live in California because I don't want to get anywhere close to near-freezing temperatures.)
That was then; this is now.
It was 83F at 9am this morning. Yesterday afternoon it got to nearly 100; I assume it's going over that today.
If you must know, I prefer Northern California.
I had a bad run this morning because of the heat. I haven't acclimated. I had to keep taking walking breaks, which just lengthened the run, which just made me hotter.
I had been staying in bed these past few mornings so that the morning air would warm up a little before I hit the pavement. Clearly, I've just gotten my first indicator that it's time to get my butt out the door by 7am again.
Friday night Darin's friend Paul Provence (a friend from UT Austin and a former roommate) came into town for a weekend visit.
I was not much of a hostess; I got deathly nauseous.
Okay, not deathly: I did not, in fact, even throw up. But I felt like I was going to. I went to bed. Darin and Paul took a walk down to Ralph's to buy me some fizzy water, and, should that not settle my stomach, some Alka-Seltzer. I drank a glass of water and immediately fell asleep. I woke up around 1am and puttered around a bit until 2:30 or 3; then I slept until 7.
I got up and went running--so clearly I was feeling better--and then Darin, Paul, Fernando, and I went to breakfast at John O'Groats. There was some discussion of what we'd do afterwards: if Paul wanted to go to the Getty Museum, I'd drop them off and then come get them when they were done. (You don't make reservations to go to the museum, you make reservations for the parking. This is actually a sensible way to handle the traffic problem a major attraction like the Getty might experience. If you find some other mode of transportation to get there--someone drops you off, you take a taxi, you walk--you can go any time you like.)
Or, we could go to Universal's City Walk.
This appealed to Paul much more. So we went to Universal. The City Walk is a worthwhile tourist attraction, which is why we always take visitors there. It's a pedestrian street filled with neon and noise and dancing fountains and lots and lots of touristy shops. I wonder how the Upstart Crow Bookstore stays in business there: who would go to the City Walk to buy a book?
We walked down to the entrance to the Universal Theme Park (home of Jurassic Park: the Ride! and Backdraft: the Ride! and ET: the Ride!...you get the idea). Darin, Fernando, and Paul decided they wanted to go into the park, if for no other reason than to find the I Love Lucy museum, which Paul wanted to see.
I was feeling woozy in the heat and said that, like a good Mom, I would come pick them up when they were done. I was the one who went to buy the tickets, which were a shocking $39 a piece. (I am easily shocked.) It turns out you get a wee discount if you are a AAA member, so I flashed the auto club card before paying.
(Important tourist tip: always ask if they have a Triple-A discount. Always, always. It works at Universal and at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, to name two.)
They walked in--"Bye Mom!"--and I headed back down the length of the City Walk to the garage. There was no one standing by the Universal 18 multiplex, which surprised me, seeing as how it was a very hot Saturday. I looked up at the movies playing there and decided there was nothing I wanted to see...except one, Goodbye, Lover, about which I had heard many tales. I was reasonably sure Darin did not care if he saw it or not, so I went in.
The theater was nowhere near as air conditioned as I'd expected. I sat in the mostly empty theater--me and three to five other people; this movie is not going to do well--and held an outrageously expensive bottle of water to my forehead.
After the movie I went home and changed into a t-shirt and shorts. I lazed around a bit before getting the phone call to go pick up those recalcitrant kiddies. After returning home, Fernando went off to have an evening with wife Nancy, and Darin, Paul, and I headed down to the Great Greek for dinner.
The restaurant was packed. Luckily, we were seated right away; unluckily, we were seated right next to the musicians. The Great Greek is noisy in the evenings anyhow; Saturday nights are especially noisy; and Saturday nights with two large parties of people celebrating a birthday and a wedding anniversary are really, really noisy. We could barely hear one another, so there was not much conversation.
There was plenty of entertainment, however--The Great Greek: it's like dinner and a show!--with the waiters doing Greek line dancing, the waiters leading a huge group of patrons on a huge conga-type line around the inside of and then around the outside of the restaurant, and finally the maitre d' showing a group women how to belly dance and a group of men how to do some kind of dancing that resulted in the men competing to show off their best moves. (It's just the same in every species, isn't it, girls?)
We came home and I went to bed. I couldn't believe Darin and Paul weren't totally exhausted after a day in the sun, but they stayed up a while longer, watching TV and chatting.
Goodbye, Lover was a spec script written by a guy I know (I don't know him well enough to call him a friend, though that is a quibble as far as most people are concerned--I know him through the Internet and I met him in Austin last October; Pooks knows him much better). The script got lots of attention at the Austin Heart of Film Festival contest a few years ago, even though it didn't win; it was picked up by Roland Joffé, whom I would like to think of as the director of The Mission and The Killing Fields. Normally I would be too nice to mention The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore, which should never have been committed to celluloid, but sadly it becomes relevant.
Joffé then brought in some new writers (Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow, among them) to rewrite the script. This often happens; I remember reading what Ron had to say about that process. (It wasn't positive.)
They made the movie.
And then the movie sat on the shelf for about a year. It's only being released now, and if Friday's box office results are any indication, it's tanking.
I could see why.
I love film noir: the idea of people screwing one another over with any degree of cleverness attracts me. The audience is left to guess who's doing what to whom. One of the problems with film noir is that there is, usually, no one to root for; the whole movie tends to be a big puzzle without very much emotion.
There is a character for whom I felt a great degree of sympathy in this movie: he's clever, he's arrogant, he's a bastard, but he's also intelligent and tender and caring and wants to do the right thing and gets screwed over anyhow. He also gets killed at the end of Act 1. If you've seen the commercials, you know that Don Johnson dies early, so I'm not ruining anything for you.
It's a really bad sign if you kill your best character 30 minutes into the movie. I was really surprised at how much I liked Johnson, who's never really done anything for me in either Miami Vice (primarily memorable as a drinking game in college) or the seriously inept Nash Bridges. But he was so smooth and collected here I found myself wondering, Has this guy shot himself in the foot not to have a better career than he has?
The direction is terrible--this is definitely the Roland Joffé of The Scarlet Letter. (Mind you, I'm no connoisseur of directing, but when it's this bad I sit up and take notice.) The femme fatale, played by Patricia Arquette is all characteristics and no character. The detective, played by Ellen De Generes, is excruciating. (And who the hell designed her look for the final scene of the movie?) I guessed most of the plot twists ten minutes before they happened (even the ones not given away by the commercials) and I hated the ending.
I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of this movie other than: the helmet hairdo is not a good look.
I'd ask Ron for a copy of the original script, which a number of people I know absolutely loved, because I want to see what changes were wrought. But Ron's going through a tough personal period right now, and being reminded of this movie might not be a good idea. Maybe Pooks has a copy.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com