diane reconsiders the whole "natural birth" option.
By today's sophisticated standards, Gilbert's century-old Mikado makes Eric Idle's friendly, left-handed "I Like Chinese" seem like an Asian pride anthem.
What disagreement is the given reason for the breakdown in the Israeli-Syrian peace talks?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I moved all of my stuff from my previous office (which will be the baby's room) into my new office, which was the home office but now has to share with me. That was my big accomplishment: applaud me.
I even went to Staples to buy a plastic mat so I can whisk back and forth between my Powerbook and the big fancy desktop Mac on which I will now do all my web surfing. Whoo hoo!
Now I just have to finish clearing the rest of my crap out of the baby's room so we'll have somewhere to put a baby.
INT. DIANE'S OFFICE - DAY
Darin pops into the doorway.
DARIN
Hey, wanna go see Topsy-
Turvy this afternoon?
Diane looks up from where she's trying to smooth
out the plastic mat, which keeps curling up no
matter what she does.
DIANE
Not another goddamn 3 hour
epic about Gilbert and Sullivan
writing The Mikado!
We whisked off to Pasadena. We started off later than we had planned, so we were cutting it close, even taking into account the 45+ minutes of trailers they have before movies now.
Whereupon we discovered it was not playing at the theater we thought it was playing at.
We used the cell phone to get the address. "Do you want showtimes?" the operator asked. No, we said, just the address.
She gave us the address and we drove by there. No theater.
INT. CAR - NIGHT
DARIN
It must be the one in the
mall by Il Fornaio!
He slows the car down long enough for Diane to
hop out.
EXT. THEATERS - NIGHT
Diane runs to the theater. None of the films listed
on the marquee are Topsy-Turvy.
Darin, after a few minutes, walks up beside and
stares at the marquee.
DARIN
I knew we should have asked her
for showtimes, just to make sure
she had the right theater.
We picked up a New Times free paper on the street and discovered the operator had given us a totally fictional address: no theater listed for Pasadena had the address she gave us, including the theaters by Il Fornaio. We discovered the true address for the theater showing Topsy-Turvy -- only about 26 blocks away from where we currently were.
DIANE
So what do we do now?
DARIN
We go find the theater to make
sure it exists.
We found the theater -- way down Colorado -- and then decided to kill three hours by having dinner and perhaps doing a bit of shopping. We came back to Old Town to go to McCormick and Schmick for dinner. Neither of us was terribly hungry, so we split an appetizer and an entree. We were underwhelmed and probably shan't be going to a McCormick and Schmick any time soon.
Then we went to Vroman's bookstore to kill some time. I know, I know -- Darin and me in a bookstore? What would we do? I bought 3 romances and 2 true crime books, just to let you know not much has changed with me.
We headed down to the theater a half-hour before showtime and discovered there was a line, which neither of us were expecting. We also discovered two old-time sitcom celebrities, Howard Hesseman and Peter Bonerz (Jerry the dentist from The Bob Newhart Show) who were there with age-appropriate wives (the four of them apparently came as a group). We settled in the best aisle (right next to the Hesseman/Bonerz party), which had had the entire row of seats in front of it removed, leaving plenty of room for the pregnant lady to make her mid-movie bathroom break.
We got home way later than we planned. But we had a lot of fun even while we were racing around like idiots.
Oh, right, the movie.
The performances are good, especially by the actors playing William Gilbert (lyricist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer). The attention to Victoriana detail looks superb.
Mike Leigh cannot tell a story to save his life.
I noted this problem with Secrets and Lies, a movie that I'd heard such fantastic things about and was completely underwhelmed by.
I know some of my problems with Leigh's storytelling style come from familiarity with the standard Hollywood storytelling method, and Leigh isn't like that: he's messy and has tons of bits in the movie that don't go anywhere, that have no pay off. That's okay: some of them work, some of them don't (WTF is up with the part about the actress's little problem? Is that about her kid or what?).
But some of my objections have to do with simply wanting the filmmaker to do what he's promised, and Leigh keeps saying, over and over again, No, I'm not going to give you that, when that is precisely why we are there.
Case in point: we spend the first half of the movie listening to Sullivan vow that he's not going to do any more of these light and fluffy operettas with Gilbert. He wants to do a grand opera, their last operetta (Princess Ida) failed, and, frankly, he's tired of Gilbert's tired reworkings of the same material, which always involve a magic potion or magic elixir or magic something-or-other. He's not going to do it, you hear? Sullivan is a serious artist and wants to be known as such.
This is not one scene. This is the first half of a three-hour movie.
So Mrs. Gilbert drags Mr. Gilbert off to a Japanese exhibition, in which he sees weavers and a kendo exhibition and some kabuki, and somehow -- we don't get to see how, which is frustrating -- one day thereafter he comes up with the idea for The Mikado.
Cut immediately to a staged scene from The Mikado. Complete with music.
What's wrong with that? It's a cheat. I've just had over an hour of Sullivan saying, "I'm not going to do this, no way no how," and here it is, done. I want the scene where Sullivan says, "Hey, that's a good idea," or "My God, Gilbert, you've done it!" or something. I want the emotional payoff for all the friction that's been set up so far.
Leigh doesn't give us that -- which I thought was highly ironic, since Sullivan's whole bit about wanting to do opera is because he wants to concentrate on showing human emotions, which he feels are not present in Gilbert's libretti. Leigh goes straight to after they've written the damn operetta. Now, you might say, "But Diane, you know they're going to write The Mikado." Of course I know that, but I knew that before I walked into the theater. I want the scene where Sullivan does a reversal.
Darin pointed out in the car on the way home that Leigh almost gives us that scene: Gilbert reads lyrics out to Sullivan, who's happily cracking up at all of them. But he gives that to us after we've seen a completed song from the operetta, so for all we know Sullivan just likes to hear lyrics he's already set to music read aloud.
That said, there's a lot to like about Topsy-Turvy. There are a couple of scenes that are hysterical: Gilbert patiently showing the actors exactly how to do their scenes is one. I just wish Leigh would work with someone other than the actors when it comes to shaping his screenplays. He ends up with too many extraneous bits and not enough meat.
The other Big Fun yesterday was I got a very sharp pain across my groin, between my belly button and my pubic bone, from hip to hip. It went away after a minute. Darin told me to call the doctor. I didn't want to -- it didn't feel terribly serious, more like a muscle pain than an internal pain -- but he said, "Wouldn't you rather know it's nothing than find out later on it's something?"
So I called and had to wait a million years on hold while the service paged him. Finally my doctor came on and I described it. He said, "That's your uterus. You had a contraction."
That was a contraction? I'm going to get hours and hours of those?
Put me to sleep now; wake me up when Bug is five.
I really hope that was an example of a relatively serious contraction and not an early labor or Braxton-Hicks contraction, because if that's one of the "light" early labor contractions, I am in for some serious pain when it comes to actually being in labor.
(I didn't think to ask the doctor why, if it was my uterus, I didn't feel the pain all over my tummy, since my uterus is about 33 cm. tall now. I'll have to remember for next appointment.)
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com