Valentine's Day 2012

All day yesterday I thought it was the 14-th, then I woke up and discovered it's today. I tend not to love by schedule, but there's one thought I'd like to share with you, and recommend a movie you might like to watch with your loved one tonight.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind",  aside from being a story with a deep understanding of what love is and how we feel and remember, is the only film I know that acknowledges the fact that Valentines Day is weirdly placed in the middle of one of the coldest and more depressing months of the year.



It is also the only Gondry film I like :)

Crying

This is my favorite version of Roy Orbison's "Crying":



And this is even better:

Proud Mary

Every time that job hunting season rolls around, which can easily happen more than once a year, I find myself looking for "Proud Mary" on Youtube. Something in me wants to believe that I have the option of tossing everything out the window and hitching a ride on a riverboat. The biggest problem with this plan - I live in the desert. Still, it's always nice to hear that song again.


Of course, whenever I search for it, there's a decision to be made: Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Tina Turner. The Creedence version has the obvious advantage of being the original, but it doesn't make you dance around uncontrollably in your chair. The Tina Turner version is much more in line with the rebellious mood of a nearly unemployed animator, but it has several disadvantages: first of all, in every concert version, you have to suffer through a stupid little "nice and easy" speech that she's been doing since the seventies. Secondly, and speaking of the seventies, if you choose a clip from the Ike Turner era, it's hard to enjoy it without thinking about domestic violence. Then again, whichever Tina Turner video you pick, there'll be lots of legs in it.


Here are three options: the Creedence original, the most 80s of the Tina versions, and one thats Ike-included, beautiful but always disturbung:







P.S. The Ike one is the best, there's no getting around that.

Helen Mirren - 1975 Parkinson interview

Helen Mirren is turning out to be the love of my life. I've certainly been in love with her longer than with anyone else. Anyway, this is a remarkable interview which shows how classy she's always been, and how little she has changed over the years. It's also a very good lesson for us "modern and independent women" on how to keep your dignity in a conversation with someone who insists on keeping it vulgar, how to always be saying something interesting, and still be innocently sexy.
By the way, although she looks like she's in her early twenties, and Michael Parkinson keeps talking to her like she's a hello kitty sex doll, she was actually thirty years old that year.

על קו הזינוק - החברים של נטאשה

ממש לא מזמן גיליתי שכולם חושבים שהשיר הזה הוא על סקס. לי היה ברור, מאז הפעם הראשונה ששמעתי אותו, שהוא מדבר על מערכת יחסים. יכול להיות שאני טועה, יכול להיות שמיכה שטרית בעצמו אמר שזה על סקס, אבל אם כן, אני מוכנה להתעלם ולתת לו בכל זאת יותר קרדיט מזה. פשוט כי אם זה על סקס, זה שיר משעמם וגרוע - ומי בכלל רוצה לשמוע שיר על זיון? ואם "המירוץ" הוא מערכת יחסים, הרי שזה שיר די מבריק ושנון ורק הפזמון מעצבן.י

Chan-wook Park's "Thirst"

This is from the director of the revenge trilogy, but it's not as good as "Oldboy" or "Lady Vengeance" (haven't seen "Mr. Vengeance"). However, the best sex scenes I've ever seen in a movie. And by that I mean cinematicaly good, not "sexy".

Roseanne

Some people are younger than me, and they are too young to remember. Some people are my age or older, and their memory isn't what it used to be. Between these two groups, the number of people who remember Roseanne in her prime are few and far between. My sister is both young and knowledgeable, and she reminded me of good old Roseanne, the domestic goddess, the universal goddess that made one of the best TV shows in history long before TV's "golden age" that we're still enjoying today.

The most remarkable thing I want you to notice about this show is that the characters in it actually laugh at each-other's jokes. The only other sitcom I know of where this occurs is "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - it took about 15 years and a guy like Larry David to repeat this feat - it didn't even happen on Seinfeld. In every other comedy show the character says something funny, and then everyone in the room struggles to keep a straight face wile the audience laughs. Not these people. That's why Roseanne and Dan look like an actual couple, they have an amazing love relationship that any of us would be proud to have. When they fight they actually yell at each-other at the top of their voices and tell each-other really hurtful things, and still manage to be a loving couple through it all (look up an episode named "Lobocop"). They are so believable together that Roseanne's real-life husband made a nuisance of himself with jealous fits and tried to write their love scenes out of the scripts.
If I remember correctly, in its later seasons Roseanne made a point of breaking taboos that people try to keep away from even now. They also had the brilliant idea to cast Shelley Winters as the grandmother. I also know that they jumped the shark a bunch of times before they finally gave up. I'll have to re-watch all the episodes (I'm on season 2) before I can talk about all that.

One day I'll write something long about how artists achieve inner peace at the expense of their creativity, and how we are torn between being happy for them and the heartbreak of losing them forever. Roseanne married and divorced Tom Arnold, then she lost her mind for a while, then she found Kabbalah, lost half her weight and cut 20 years off her face. She had a talk show that got canceled, and now she is mostly a gray-haired political activist. She hasn't lost her edge completely, but the good old days will never return. I am here to shake the dust off the good old days:

This is an episode from the first season of Roseanne:




This is her first TV stand-up appearance:



And here she is annoying a stadium full of baboons:



Finally, this is today's political activist Roseanne:



I've skipped her blonde beauty stage because I find it hard to stomach, you're welcome to Google it yourself.

Please remember this whenever you're tempted to believe that women aren't funny, that there's nothing good on TV, that romance is dead and other dark thoughts that make a person give up on this world.

Anna Karenina revisited

I feel the need to clarify - when I said about Madame Karenina "may she never darken my doorstep again" - well I did mean it, but I wouldn't say that the book didn't have any enjoyable parts. I feel like making a list of the things I loved. If you've read the book you might enjoy the reminders, if you plan to read it, the next section is spoilers, and if you're the other 90% of humanity you can just spare yourself this post. Here we go:

The whole beginning where Levin loses Kitty to Vronsky and Kitty loses Vronsky to Anna is funny and moving and an interesting insight into the way people used to interact in those years.

Karenin the husband is a great character throughout the book.

I love the way the book deals with how everyone else's affairs except Anna and Vronsky's are light-hearted little games that revive the spirit and often serve to promote the social status of the couple.

Levin's struggles with metaphysics, if they weren't so draaawwwwn ouuuuut would've been very enjoyable. For sure the part where he joins the peasants in cutting the grass, even as it is six or seven chapters long, managed to move me deeply. After that, the chalk proposal is one of my favorite love scenes ever.

The part where Lavin's brother is dying and Kitty takes care of him is maybe my favorite part, but Tolstoy manages again to drag it out for much longer than necessary.

The character of Varenka, in her influence on Kitty in the times when Kitty thinks she might remain an old maid, and later on when there's a pathetic attempt to get her engaged to Sergey Ivanovitch, is for me one of the most thought-provoking and memorable parts of the book.

There's the episode where Dolly is jealous of Anna's life, and disgusted with her own state of constant pregnancy and humiliation, including a peasant girl she meets that tells her ‘I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent’ - in her misery, Dolly even manages to be jealous of that girl for a while.

Another thing I loved was the horrible succubus woman that latches herself to Karenin, culminating in the great seance scene they force on Stiva.
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About the movie: it was pretty weak, but well cast - Sean Bean as Vronsky (naked, yummy!) and Sophie Marceau as Anna, Alfred Molina as Levin (weird) and the always pleasantly annoying Mia Kirshner as Kitty. The actor who played Karenin, James Fox, was as good as Karenin is in the book.

איתו לנצח

יש עכשיו גרסה של השיר הזה בביצוע של בחורה. אני לא מאמינה שאני צריכה אפילו להדרש לזה - השיר הזה ל א  ע ו ב ד  אם הוא לא מבוצע על ידי גבר!י

כמובן שזה משקף בצורה מושלמת את ההבדל בין שנות התשעים לשנות האלפיים: תשעים - חתרנות ושמחת חיים, אלפיים - גיי אור סטרייט, אנחנו רק רוצים להתעבר ולשרת בצבא.י

Come on Eileen

Is this the best song in the world? It certainly is the most widely loved song I know, and the video is enchanting.

     

 It wasn't easy to find it in decent quality either. Were the 80-s really that long ago?
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