Incredibly Stupid Bliss

THE MORNING AFTER is a 1986 neon-candy-colored Hollywood thriller that beautifully encapsulates the mid-80s without being overly campy. Sidney Lumet directs it, and his serious cinema-verite style gets opened up to a glossy Southern California headspace, a cheery but sad backlot full of blank industrial buildings and pastel hairdresser condos. It's like Altman and DePalma having a deviously fun conversation.  MORNING AFTER would be a great curiosity, but then there's Jane Fonda. She pushes the movie beyond its kitschy itch. As a frantic over-the-hill actress with a booze problem waking up in bed next to a bloody corpse, she navigates every scene with a twitchy but steely ache. She seems to understand both the plight and the triumph of being a nobody, but also she carries the murder plot along with her like a dreamy moldy minkstole.  You feel everything through her determined but about-to-lose-it gaze. She's never been better and I think it has a lot to do with the melodrama...

This is what you get when you AI "Incredibly Stupid Bliss": The phrase "incredibly stupid bliss" is a paradoxical or ironic expression, suggesting a state of happiness or contentment that is based on   a lack of knowledge or awareness , particularly regarding potential problems or negative aspects of reality.   It builds upon the idiom "ignorance is bliss," which means that being unaware of something can make you happier or less anxious. However, the inclusion of "incredibly stupid" adds a layer of commentary. It implies that this state of bliss is not just a simple lack of knowledge but rather a  deliberate or willful ignorance .   Here's what it might suggest: Happiness through willful ignorance:  The person or group is happy because they choose to ignore uncomfortable truths or facts that would otherwise cause them distress. Criticism of blissful ignorance:  The phrase might be used to critique those who are content due to their ignorance,...

Jeff Hiller's self-conscious and self-effacing and pure true gem of a meta-memoir is so flat out necessary and beautiful I didn't want it to end for me. It kind of did today. Finished on Juneteenth and really don't know what that means or if it means anything but there you go: it was incredibly stupid bliss. ACTRESS OF A CERTAIN AGE gives you the inside scoop on what it takes to be an under-the-radar actor/celebrity without any self pity or aggrandizement. Jeff just moves through his gay Christian empathetic sarcastic soul-scorching life-narrative with both a Paul Lynde sense of abandonment and a Oprah sweep of sweetness. Bitterness is caught and shown for what it is: disappointment. Bravery mingles with desperation. If you read this book and don't like it you're nothing to me. That's kind of what it feels like.  Please read the whole thing but the last 25 pages are the shit. Jeff narrates what it was like participating in the making of SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE, the g...

  Carolyn Ard passed away a few months ago. She was a part of our lives when Bill and I were in our early 20s and part of an artists' cooperative in Indianapolis called 431. We were raw absurd kids making weird art and everyone at 431 was kind and helpful and put up with all of our shenanigans, but Carolyn was the kindest and the one who truly kept things going. She was also the most gracious. One story that sticks out for me: she and her husband Tony were going out of town for a week and Carolyn asked Bill and me to house-sit. Their house was gorgeous, like one of those upper-middle-class mansions in ORDINARY PEOPLE. I remember being terrified that we would ruin something. Start a fire accidentally or run up their utility bill or leave behind a whitetrash stink. Bill and I were poor as hell then. Trying to make it through college, living in a shithole apartment. We were also a little uncouth. But Carolyn saw us as sweeties. She trusted us with her house. That kind of cross-class s...

I dropped a bottle of pills a couple weeks ago. Those pink allergy ones. They scattered all over the floor like an exploding star, and I spent what seemed like an eternity picking them up, and I swear to God I got all of them. I even pulled the refrigerator out from the wall, got behind it, etc.  But then today I was sweeping the kitchen and there a couple of them were, in the pile I was getting ready to sweep into the dustpan: two little stupid pink reminders of that dumb experience. I don't know. I keep attaching anything I'm thinking about to Tony Dotson dying, but there you are. A comic slapstick incident (dropped Benadryl bottle) becomes a cosmic experience (two weeks later two small reminders, and then probably in a month another pink reminder and so on.) It's the Chinese water torture method of memory, but also a stupid joke. Which reminds me of Tony's paintings, Tony's personality: This one always got me. Taking something serious as all get out and landing t...

  Some movies have a potency built inside them that can't be unpacked with words or even thoughts. They just have it somehow, and it's not plot or cinematography or even performance that sends a film into this territory: it's a tone inherent in the subject matter maybe, and how the actors and everyone else take that subject matter on and hold it so dearly in their hearts and brains that the movie they make together becomes bigger than what they even thought they could accomplish. Like kindred souls combining into a mutual dream caused by honoring what they love. The Last Showgirl is one of those. The plot, about the last days of a showgirl's professional life on the Vegas strip, kind of feels a little cliche, reminiscent of other loser movies like The Wrestler or The Whale , but Pamela Anderson's face and demeanor and glow (as she portrays Shelly, the main character) make you take all that back. In fact, her face is the plot of The Last Showgirl :  wan, wrinkled, s...