LUV Is Just a Three Musketeers Bar

[mallorys_camera]

Nasty, cold, raw day. I stayed in the house. Honestly? I was looking for an excuse to blow off the Blessing of the Garden and attendant socializing, being in a sardonic mood.

It seems the whole world is darkening and slowing in preparation for Yom Kippur.

Instead, I worked: Clients are coming out of the woodwork right now, and I would be ill-advised not to net them up, particularly since there won’t be any clients in January and February. I also watched a documentary about Orson Welles called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

Special to Orson Welles on whatever Bardo barstool he’s packed his ample ass: Not necessarily.

In the evening, Max texted me: He’d just gotten back from the Future Mother of my Unborn Grandchildren’s wedding.

I’d already known she’d gotten hitched. Like a true modern bride, she’d posted all about it on Instagram just moments after the ceremony!

FMomUG was by far my favorite of all Max’s girlfriends. I’d always hoped that they would figure out a way to resolve their differences, so she could fulfill the destiny that God intended for her, which was to be a vessel for my DNA!

I don’t suppose she ever will now.

###

Here’s some heresy for you: I don’t think Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made.

Flashbacks are narratively weak.

Voiceovers in movies are vestigial techniques left over from the first person point of view in novels.

I’m not sure anything Welles directed is great, as a matter of fact, though it’s all interesting from a strictly cinematic point of view. But if I had to pick his best picture, I’d say Chimes at Midnight. Falstaff is obviously a main character, and Welles’ genius was to see the considerable disservice Shakespeare did Falstaff in breaking him up over a series of plays.

What seems to have done in Welles in the larger sense was his absolute inability to comprehend that film is essentially a collaborative medium despite those French New Wave guys and their wacky auteur theories. (What the hell do the French know about movies anyway? They think Jerry Lewis is a genius!)

Welles’ ego was too big to permit him to work and play well with others.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is a documentary about the making of one of the many movies that were left unfinished on Welles’ death. The movie, The Other Side of the Wind, appears to have been some Fellini-esque, Fitzcarraldo-like monstrosity that Peter Bogdanovich—another American director with delusions of grandeur—recently scraped together the production budget to finish.

Watching Welles hustle is entertaining up to point. He is so extemporaneously and brilliantly verbal that one really does wonder why it never occurred to him to back into the production process by writing a novel and adapting it; that would have reassured the film people in charge of giving away money that there was some kind of action plan in place.

But I guess Welles thought novels were beneath him.

One thing about Welles: His laugh was exactly like Lucius’s laugh.

Gave me a start, that did.

There were other similarities between the two men, too: Both had been handsome when young but chose to imprison themselves in vast pods of unhealthy flesh as they aged.

Lucius did have appalling eating habits. Left to his own devices—which, mostly, he was—he would have subsisted entirely on a diet of strawberry soda and Three Musketeer bars. To me, it was so obvious he was shoveling what he thought was LUV into his mouth. This is how he nurtured himself throughout his appalling childhood, I thought. With insipidly sugary and tasteless treats.

Of course, there is no way you can actually point this out to someone.

So, I didn’t.

Comments

[robby]

I happened upon a collection of appalling Orson Welles drunk outtakes from a wine commercial that he was doing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFevH5vP32s

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah, someone linked to those on the LJ mirror of this entry. I have to say, they're pretty hilarious.