and now a moment of silence.
I've been calling him "the Zen Master" since the First Act.
-- me to Darin, during Pushing Tin. Running news:
Today: none.
Friday: 4.1 miles.
Thursday: none.
Wednesday: 8.3 miles.
Our Dumb Century by the writers of The Onion is the funniest book ever published. Do yourself a favor and buy it immediately. I have spent much of the past several days doing nothing but opening it at random and laughing hysterically.
Wednesday I went over to Tamar's again for lunch. I apologized for being early; she had actually wanted me there at 11 so I was actually 50 minutes late. Heh. We walked down to Little Odessa--all Russian, all the time!--and bought pirogis for lunch. Mmmm...grease. They were very tasty.
Thursday...I have no idea what I did Thursday. I don't see anything on my calendar. I'm going to assume I did something, but clearly not important enough to take note of.
I'm falling behind in taking note of my life. This usually connotes that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. Other than writing, I can't imagine what that is.
Friday I met David Erickson for coffee. I haven't seen him for a year--he pretty much dropped out of the USC program toward the end because he was working on rewriting a script for Showtime. In other words, he's the only one of us working. I adore David; everyone in the program adored David. He's the only person I don't begrudge having success before everyone else.
Darin and I decided it was time to start seeing movies again, so on Friday we made plans with Fernando to see Pushing Tin. Strangely, it was only playing at the Universal City Cinemas around here--The Matrix has taken over every available slot at the AMC Theaters in Burbank--and parking at Universal is $7, so Fernando came to our house and we took one car over.
The 6:10 showing was cancelled because of some mechanical glitch, so we bought tickets for the 7:20 and wandered around the City Walk for an hour. We'd just been there the week before, so not too much had changed.
Pushing Tin is a comedy about air traffic controllers, who are a wacky lot. A friend of mine had a friend who gave up his job in the high-tech industry to become an air traffic controller because he wasn't getting enough stress. They're weird, okay?
The best parts of the movie are the parts about them being air traffic controllers. For example, the ATCs for the JFK/LaGuardia/Newark nexus are evidently nowhere near those airports--they're in a big facility located elsewhere. The stuff about how they do their jobs is just great.
The entire plot about John Cusack getting competitive with Zen Master Billy Bob Thornton (the best gunslinger...I mean, the best air traffic controller who ever lived) was just nonsense.
Cate Blanchett has nothing to do in this movie. (Yes, I am going to note this for every female role in every movie I see.) Angelina Jolie is okay, but her role is pretty much a device. We both, as always, love John Cusack, but he's a phone book guy: he could read the phone book and we'd love him. Darin hated Billy Bob's character; I thought he and the role were good. We both agreed the movie was a structural nightmare.
Hint: Act Three sucks.
I liked some of the stuff in this movie and hated, absolutely hated, the formulaic Hollywood movie stuff (and as you all know, I live to write formulaic Hollywood movies, so it must have been really annoying). Some cheap shots in there that scream, loud and clear, that this movie was written by two sitcom writers.
Verdict: matinee.
I'd forgotten that one of the mailing lists I'm on was having a chat Saturday night in Hollywood. I was glad to have something to do--gotta get out of the house once in a while--and so I headed down 101 to the Hollywood Blvd. exit.
Big mistake. Huge.
Last night was the opening of the season at the Hollywood Bowl, and traffic was uno nightmare grande. It took me twenty minutes to go two or three blocks down Hollywood. I was grumpy by the time I showed up at Hampton's on Highland, a well-known local burger joint.
I already knew some of the people there, which was good (goes a long way toward making me feel less nervous). I had a pretty good time, eating a chinese chicken salad (slightly oily) and making jokes and playing with Damian (yup) when he and mom Tamar showed up. Tamar talked to me some about my novel, which I appreciated.
I still crashed when I got home, though. Emotionally, I mean. Just wanted to curl up into a big ball and not talk to anyone. Darin called and I told him about it and he said, "It happens." He's so understanding. I adore him.
|
|
|
|
Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com