haze is rarely purple, discuss

It occurs to me that I've talked very little about movies in this space recently, even when I've been watching them.

(Though really, all of life right now is just waiting for the premiere of Carnivale on HBO. I will be so disappointed if it is not my most perfect, favorite show ever.)

Yesterday, I took two movies out of the library, since we were oddly netflixless. The first was Me Without You. It's about the joined-at-the-hip friendship of two girls from childhood to the beginning of adulthood. I could relate. I had one of these soul-sucking, sometimes wonderful but always constraining friendships in my own childhood that crashed and burned about two years into college. At the time, I couldn't imagine anything more painful. In retrospect, even a couple of months later, it felt like freedom and unlike the girls in the movie, it was a relationship that stayed crashed and burned and for the best. I still refer to her, not completely straightfaced, as "Satan" when I tell certain anecdotes. I've heard she grew up to major in recreation, to be a realtor then a pharmaceutical rep. So, yes, that disintegration was definitely for the best. But anyway, this movie is about two British girls, stretches from the 70s to the 90s and has a nice little love story for you to root for all the way through. Definitely worth seeing. It avoids sentimentality and brutality, but manages to be heartbreaking and honest in lots of ways about a certain kind of female friendship that you rarely see in any kind of art. It's messy. Women's friendships rarely get to be truly messy. Plus, I think Michelle Williams in underrated.

The other movie I watched is this bizarre artifact that completely perplexes me. It's called Sordid Lives. This movie has bad acting and overacting and maybe even a smidgen of good acting here and there, and the same with the writing and the directing (though alas, the cinematography is low rent throughout). It's almost impossible to stop watching it, even though it always feels like a sad exercise in community playhouse theater gone wild. I will just say this, as I feel it sums up the entire movie experience: Olivia Newton John sings hymns with a Southern drawl. It's worth it for the utter desperation and sense that Marcel Duchamp will walk through your door at any moment those aural vignettes bring.

Otherwise, yesterday was spent doing pleasant things. Today, we drive places and eat meat cooked over open flame.