Catitude, Revolting Road, Kelly Gang & Text Messages

[mallorys_camera]

I remember sunlight like this in the tropics, bright, impersonal. It strips the mind of context. I must be really old – all I want to do is sit in this sunlight and trance out. Instead I have a staggering number of really boring errands to run.

Marybeth and I went to see Revolutionary Road last night. Big eh. Both leads were seriously miscast and if you’ve seen one empty living room standing in for the desolation of American suburbia, you’ve seen them all. Plus that John-Cage-on-valium score really gets on my nerves. Personally I prefer Speilberg’s view of suburbia as a place inhabited by bright children and amiable, bumbling grown-ups. Very stagey movie too – I have no doubt Sam Mendes is a good theater director but he sure makes static movies. And yes, for the record I hated American Beauty.

Reading Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang – Tom Sawyer in the 19th century Australian outback with a kind of Hamlet’s mom subtext. Wonderful immersion into the first person POV and I love his fuck convention: My mother were poorly she said it was too adjectivial hot for shooting anything but Bill Frost went ahead cleaning his fowling piece his eyes was bloodshot but that was normal he didn’t act like a man threatened with murder the night before.

Also I note that while RTT and my own conversations are the usual banal exchanges between hectoring mother and glowering child, we have quite sophisticated and loving conversations via text messaging. I’m not sure what that means.

Comments

[bel-ebat.livejournal.com]

ahh. i just finished reading revolutionary road (it took me forever to want to pick it up, even though alice was reading and actively suggesting it to me in the summer)- i stopped for a while in the middle of it, but i blame that more on personal distraction than the actual book.

i think i'm afraid to watch the movie.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Marybeth had read the book too. She said there were huge differences between the book & the movie, not in terms of plot points per se but in terms of emphasis.

Kate Winslet wasn't bad. She can't be bad. She's just so much larger than Leonardo DiCaprio and as one of the subtexts of the movie is the manliness of manly men, and DiCaprio is not manly, her acting had to play off that. She was... strident. Think Zelda Fitzgerald. A frustrated actress would be oozing charm.