Hello world. This is one of those unnecessary posts that one must make every now and then... obligation post... keep hope alive post... Hopes and dreams and, um, what's the word? love and hope and sex and dreams still surviving on the streets - right? doing it from memory. My brains in tatters. Okay, so this isn't going to shatter anything, this post, but it exists, which is more than can be said for the last - what - week? month? of posts? You bet! I should be offended or amused or feel something about something, but don't. I suppose there are movies, I could write something about movies. Saw two this weekend - Monster - highly acclaimed Charlize Theron performance, Christina Ricci as well. Serial killer. Based on a true story. It's good - it's got a kind of movieness about it - like a lot of those based on atraue story films do, a degree of point, and lots of showy scenes and the like. On the other hand, the people in the film felt real - there's a kind of truth to the lowlifes in the film - kind of dumb, kind of deluded ("kind of"? a few steps beyond kind of) - but with an odd insight into themselves. It's hard to explain what I mean, especially when I'm tossing something off like this. The mix of bluster and dumb and street smart and pretending 1+1 does not equal 2 and trying not to let anyone else notice that 1+1 are 2 is all, somehow, right. It's interesting. It's also - sometimes, I have to say - it would be interesting to see a film about women (this is almost always a thing about films about women) where women who are not Hollywood pretty (though there's plenty of pretty short of Hollywood pretty) are able to be sexy and sexual and not have to kill people or die. I mean - aren't there stories to tell about middle of the pack lesbians who don't go on killing sprees? That's - someone else's problem I guess.

Hey! Today I saw Nosey Parker - set up in the top of Vermont, somewhere up by St. Johnsbury, Tunbridge I think it is - an old timer local starts doing handy work for a couple yuppy scum just up from NY. It's shot like a documentary, though it is fiction - most of the film is observational - the old timer and the wife (who's 20 years younger than her husband) hang around, amuse his grandchildren, do chores (he does chores, she watches and longs for his antique farm equipment - god, that sounds rather prurient.) There's a touch of a story - the New Yorkers coming to fit into the town a bit better - the woman's husband deciding to have a kid with her (he has grown up kids, resists having another - sigh...) That's about it. That's about all you really need. You have Vermont, you have amusing old codgers and culture clashes, and people playing cards and kids giving a babysitter a hard time and mauling a cat and antique farm tools and old photographs and demonstrations of apple peelers and gold plated faucets - that makes a perfectly good movie. Especially amusing old codgers. If you can create characters you want to watch and listen to, what more do you need in a film? I mean, need?