Incredibly Stupid Bliss

Memory gets more epic the older you get.  Maybe that's too much of a cliche to blog about, but here I am.   I'm reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann now.  One of those books that you are supposed to read if you're serious -- or at least if you were serious back when seriousness really meant something to me, like 1989-90, when I was a Junior at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), a commuter college that really helped me pull my head out of my ass and figure out what to do and where to go next when I was in my late 20s.   The campus itself, in my memory and sometimes even my dreams, is a lot of concrete and brick and new construction.  Skeletal sapling trees planted in planters along side new parking lots, lots of icy sidewalk and barren sky footage.  Maroon and blocky signage.  Formica tables in little vending machine canteens and bandage-colored chair-desks you could barely fit into.  In short:  gorge...

  Barbara Barrie is a strange and comforting angel to me.  Her face exudes light somehow, no matter what character she's playing, and she has played a lot of them in movies and TV for the last half century.  (She's still at it, at age 90, God bless her.)  You automatically and gratefully recognize her as soon as you spot her:  Barney Miller's wife, Michael Steadman's mom, the ironic but loving moms in Breaking Away and Private Benjamin -- even Lou Grant 's girlfriend in a two-part episode.  The list goes on.  She occupies a beautiful space in my head, a familiar sleepy-eyed queen doing her son's laundry and smiling ironically at having to do these stupid wonderful chores.   Her resume is so exhaustive in fact that I missed her first starring role as a divorcee who marries a black man and loses the custody of her daughter.  The movie's title is One Potato, Two Potato , and it offers a bleak, spare, black-and-white vision of 1964 race re...

Oxygen is the cable-TV junk-drawer for true-crime programming.  Stories about murder are the only thing on it.  Oxygen's tagline is:  True Crime 24-7 .   I watch it all the time; it is the background-music for just about every mindless activity I do.  Even just taking a nap; I call them " Snapped naps," because Snapped is the ultimate Oxygen iteration.  In its 30th season, the show brilliantly and cheaply deconstructs murders by ladies who lose it, and each hour-long episode proceeds from back-story to the dirty deed to the courtroom drama and so on.  It is the formula that soothes you.  Also the cheapness.  It looks like it's shot on somebody's phone, with a lot of repeated shots of blurry reenactments, blurry  presumably so they won't have to pay actors a lot of dough to show faces.  Crime-scene photos are often used too, but most of the time there's not any footage to use, or the Snapped makers just didn't feel like shoot...

  And Just Like That is a zeitgeist shit-show:  a 2022 streaming sequel to a couple of truly over-the-top movies based on a pay-cable breakthrough series based on a sex-centric column in the New York Observer in the mid 1990s.  The focus of all these versions and revisions and remakes is (usually) a quartet of sex-positive lady sophisticates walking around Manhattan in uncomfortable shoes and stopping off for brunch somewhere so they can kvetch about their lives. That brief archeology might help a little in explaining how much I want to love this current iteration.  The Sex and the City brand is seismic in its weird connection to all kinds of cultural totems and mores that have morphed into the cluster-fuck we are living in now.  And Just Like That tries to negotiate all these topics and torrents with a  keen, digital sense of both irony and sentimentality, satire and sincerity.  It really doesn't work, but that's not the point.  You love it an...

Red Rocket charts the course of a total loser as he returns to his hometown in Texas after getting the crap beaten out of him in LA.  Simon Rex plays the dude with meth-amphetamine gusto and a slick, sad toxic masculinity that gets inverted by the end of the show.  It's Simon's movie the whole way through; he is its center of attention, and also the soul-center of the universe each scene and flourish create.  A high-energy sad-sack with a predatory eye for just about everything, Simon's Mikey doesn't offer us a lot of redeeming value; he is not at all likeable, unless you like being constantly lied to, jerked around, and just plain messed with.  He is hilariously, stubbornly amoral, always on the trail of some kind of fix, but somehow Simon allows Mikey to shine when you need him to shine.  He finds a sort of aesthetic integrity in almost every low-rent desperate attempt Mikey makes not just to survive but to return to his glory as a porn star bragging about hi...