Spent most of Sunday in the malls and caverns of big-box retailers, assembling the weekend’s hauls of Items and Objects. A pillow. Some paint. Oh, look: a retro clock radio, designed to look like an old Fada Streamliner. Must have. The new rugs for the season are in! Let’s look! And, over here, the Shelf of Failure: all the items that failed to catch on, now half-price. There was an entire wall of pucey-hued bath items, and you had to wonder whether puce had just run its course here, or whether this was a massive expensive mistake that had cost dozens of execs their career. They were now hunched over the back table of a dim bar, staring at their vodka and tonic, their career in flames - no, not in flames; that would suggest they were still not. Their career was a campfire the morning after the Boy Scouts had moved on. Cold, wet, and dead.
The puce crap was at the Pottery Barn (“Using muted colors to part you from your money since 1994”), which is an interesting store. There’s hardly any Pottery. Nothing suggests a stable, either. The name is left over, I think, from the late 70s quasi-rustic HeeHaw Billy-Carter Dukes-of-Hazard rural-chic craze that also resulted in the most unfortunately named store in the country, “Dress Barn.” (“Elllleee! You git on in here and git y’self some gingham tittytents, now! Come on, girl!”) Pottery Barn is stuck with the name, which is at complete odds with the store’s ethos. It’s all stuff that suggests hip, classy, middle-age that knows how to look forward as well as to look back. They sell phones you can use to order DSL while listening to Columbia-period Sinatra.
Could be worse. Could be Restoration Hardware. I talked to a clerk today about the irritating little story-signs that accompany every fargin’ object. “The owner of this company writes all these things,”
the clerk said. “I’m an English grad student. He can’t write. He uses words incorrectly all the time.” Gritted teeth. Every clerk I’ve talked to HATES the little story signs.
They all promise that these things will make your life happier, and they will, if they’re the right things. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can surely augment it; one is more likely to be happy in a place where you’re surrounded by objects you find aesthetically pleasing. Money helps you to live in places where happiness is more likely to flourish. Money takes the edge off.
It’s so nice that there are so many stores eager to help you find just the right way to use your money.
I’m serious. I’m drugged, having spent the entire day in malls and shops, but I’m serious.
Saw “Chicken Run,” which surprised me - I’d been feared a sad slack lameness, a sense of opportunities missed and talent stretched too thin. And I’d based this entirely on the trailer, which contained a joke about airplane safety instructions that was old and hadn’t been amusing since it was a dorm room poster about nuclear war instructions circa 1969. But right away it felt good, and I relaxed; at worst, this would not stink. Once you relax, take the critical faculties off the hook and let the movie unspool, you enjoy it. This is why stupid people are often happy people. Everything’s great. Or at least okay.
Most of the dialogue was so-so, but it didn’t spoil the movie a whit. A movie can consist of people reciting the alphabet if it has heart and charm, and this one had both in abundance. It also had the nasty, dark, scary side that makes for memorable children’s entertainment. Plus, it was done by those people who made those clever Mobil ads with the talking cars. They’re really quite good - several scenes had some commonplace sights that were quite extraordinary when you realized the work involved. When the villainess stares at her reflection in a spinning metal saw blade, and we see her reflection, speaking, it’s a cool shot - but man, at 24 frames per second, what coordination and attention to detail that must have required.
Better than A Close Shave, which felt strained; this one just flowed and sang. How anything constructed so slowlycan have such rhythm and momentum is nothing short of amazing. Good work.
Didn’t see any movies at home, because my mother-in-law is visiting, and she’s on the sofa. (The guest room is being redone, to make it an even better guest room, for all those guests we have. Interesting side-note: we don’t have any guests, except for my mother-in-law. So this year she gets to sleep on the sofa AND get pressed into helping paint the very room she used to use.) But while I had a little time I saw something I’d taped late last week: The Thing From Another World. ( As I’ve learned, the movie was originally called “the Thing,” but along came a popular novelty tune of the same name, so they added more words. (That tune was one of the scratchy 45s my dad had, and I played it smooth when I was a tot.)
Odd how that term “thing” has ominous connotations. If you said “The Item From Another Planet,” it would sound as if we’d been invaded by office supplies. “The Object from Another Planet” sounds like a Pottery Barn vase fell from space. But “The Thing” sounds . . . creepy.
And the movie was creepy, too. It looks like those dopey movies that we all grew up seeing on late-night TV in the pre-cable days, and at its heart it is one of those movies, but it must have been the Alien of its time. And its time was a half century ago, remember. What sets it apart from the other cheap monster movies is the Howard Hawks’ direction. (He’s not credited; rumor says he took over the movie from a less-capable director, and gave it hard, nervous edge. Orson Welles was rumored to have lensed some scenes as well - slumming for fun, perhaps.) Everyone’s always talking over everyone else’s dialogue, something that rarely happened back then. The jokes have the right sound of sweaty graveyard whistling. Not a drop of blood - and you’re glad. It’s better to hear that two scientists have been gutted and hung from the rafters; whatever you imagine is worse than what you see. This version also included a scene that stands out as Exhibit #8493 in my ongoing argument against the 50s as a decade of hideous repression: the hero, for sport, goes to his quarters with his girlfriend, lets her tie his hands behind his back, and then lets her pour a couple drinks down his throat while she gets hammered as well. Who-hoo!
Note: I apologize for using the word “lensed.” I will now ankle out of here. |
