becky haycox

Month: October 2006

  • acktober: don’t look now

    dont look now posterBefore I begin, I would like to declare that I would trade several years of my life to look like Julie Christie does in this film. Hubba-freaking-hubba.

    I saw Don’t Look Now about 12 years ago on video, on a rainy day in San Francisco, with a boyfriend. It got to us, big time — one big mindfuckapalooza. K I clung to each other while watching it, and it took a long walk outside and several beers in a nearby bar to get back to “normal.”

    The first scene, in which Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie lose their daughter, is pretty brutal. It hits me close to home, as someone in my family lost their life in a similar way. So, from the outset (particularly for me) the teeth are clenched and the guts are a-roiling.

    You just don’t see movies like this anymore. The editing, pacing, the intentional imperfection .. all of it is of its time. Nicholas Roeg can be a painfully ponderous director, but this film is so tense and weird that and peppered with “boo” moments that its a refreshing vacation from the crapheap that is most of mainstream cinema.

    And that sex scene! A lot has been written about it, so I don’t need to add too much there, except: it’s great. And: see paragraph #1.

    And the horror aspect is also great. Gothic! That figure in red: a spectre? A ghost? Something else? It’s all off-kilter. Now that I have experienced it firsthand myself, I can see how the film explores grief and mourning. How pain ebbs and flows, how you wish — need! — it to feel different, how easy it is to get distracted and how hard it is to forget.

    I have no idea when I started liking Donald Sutherland. His glassy eyed earnestness used to drive me a tiny bit batshit, but now, well, I get him, I guess.

    Soundtrack: every once in a while it veers into the worst, most misguided treacle, but then it rights itself and shuts the hell up.

    Length: 110 minutes. Not long, but it could have been shorter. But you know, I’m always gonna say that.

    The ending: what th’??!? Be patient and get there (it’s worth it!), and try not to remember every fucking review that spoils it. To hell with spoilers!

    (And this is the point where I apologize to Nora G, to whom I blew the twist to The Sixth Sense.)

    A much, much better review than mine lives here.

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  • octNO!ber: interiors

    interiors[if you want to see all my October movie reviews, just click the “review” category at right]

    The horror movie originally scheduled for this slot has been preempted to bring you this scary mutha. Hold onto your hats.

    Backstory: I lived in New York from 1976 to 1982. On the whole, it was an intensely unhappy time for me. In respect to the players in that drama who are still living, I’ll keep the curtains closed on the gorier details out here in the blogosphere.

    What an strange time to be in New York. I lived in the uber-WASP version of the ‘burbs, and New York City was glittering, dangerous and dirty. I lived with my father who ran with a cinemaphile crowd in those days, so there were lots and lots of trips to the City to see everything. Bergman. Star Wars. Chaplin festivals. I even audited a “Psychology in Cinema” class with dad, and delved into Antonioni and Cassavetes before I even hit high school.

    I can remember the reverberations around Woody Allen‘s Interiors as people tried to process .. this .. block of ice after the lovely passion of Annie Hall. I think my dad kept me away from this one, perhaps sensing that I might fall apart, like I did while watching the most feel-bad movie ever, Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. I may be mis-remembering the timeline, as both movies came out the same year. I’ll have to dig into my diaries for the answer, and I’m afraid I am too frail for that at this moment.

    If Augusten Burroughs (who programmed Interiors for TCM) talks about how hard the film is to watch, you know we are deep into fucked-family territory. It’s very bitter and dry in a talky 70s way. Charmless and remote. Completely soundtrack-free. Squeeze the heat out of Ordinary People and we’re getting there. Diane Keaton spits out nearly every line of dialog in the same timber I used throughout a majority of my adolescence.

    It hits me on a lot of personal levels, as perhaps you are sensing. There’s drinking, angry sisters, even a beach house. How happiness (personified by the incredible Maureen Stapleton) can be a displaced, unwelcome emotion. Living in the presence of a huge, towering absence. The peculiar, cramped-but-echoey houses that only seem to exist on the east coast. And those bad, bad perms.

    In 1978, at the age of 14, I was the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist was me.

  • these are the thoughts i think when i diet

    Half a pomegranate

    Pomegranates! Those suckers are a lot of work for one of the oddest payoffs in the fruit world. Strange, gut-abrading seeds that are more likely to be painfully sour than sweet. But I cannot resist all that work and fussing to get to those little guys.

    Pomegranates! Kong Balls for humans.

    kong ball!

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  • gigantic peeve: check out those its

    I have tried really hard to keep silent, I really have. I don’t want to offend my loved ones that are afflicted with this condition. I don’t want to be the cranky, grammar-correcting schoolmarm. But jesus christ, people:

    IT’S MEANS “IT IS.” DON’T USE THE APOSTROPHE AT ANY OTHER TIME. I have been driven to all-caps usage. This means that I am serious.

    Every time you wonder whether to use “it’s” or “its”, say “it is” in your head, rereading your sentence:

    • Sentence: “It’s a giant pet peeve of mine.”
      Say to yourself: “It is a giant pet peeve of mine.”
      DING DING – makes sense! You can use “It’s”
    • Sentence: “The monster looked at the knife in it’s hands.”
      Say to yourself: “The monster looked at the knife in it is hands.”
      BUZZZZZ – makes no sense! You can’t use “it’s”
      Correct sentence: “The monster looked at the knife in its hands.”

    This incorrect usage is so widespread and so unchecked that I don’t think anyone cares anymore. And it makes me crazy; I really feel like we’re slipping towards the fall of our empire that much faster. If everyone and their dog (and me) are going to email, blog, myspace, write write write write, it behooves us all that we take a swipe at our writing with a scrubbing pad called grammar!

    And I know I am the pot informing the kettle of its blackness. I am as sloppy and as informal as you can when when I write (outside of work), and I’m sure good writers are cringing at every hambox-produced ellipse, made up word, and dangling participle (if I knew what that was).

    Whew. Be glad you weren’t around in the early days of the Death of Typography (late 80s), when everyone and their dog (but not me) were using inch-marks instead of real quotation marks. I was beside myself.
    It's Its

  • ahz neh govoryah bilgahrskee

    puppets Last night, I saw As You Like It performed by Bulgarian puppets. What did you do?

  • don’t feel left out

    You’ll notice some (alliteration alert) password-protected posts popping up in the future with the title “devil’s cake.” The other password you know will not work for these entries.

    Feel free to write and ask what these are about. I might even give you the password. But I might not, and don’t feel bad! It’s a subject matter interesting only to a specific few, and even then, maybe not so interesting.

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  • octobrrrrr: nightmare (1964)

    NiiiIIIiiiightmareI remember being 9 (ish?) and it being a weekend day in Phoenix, AZ. I was kind of a loner (my bestest friend had moved away and my siblings had already flown the coop) and was kicking around our giant house, bored as usual. Bored, that is, until the most terrifying movie ever came on TV. I was glued to the television, unable to look away, even knowing that my already-unmanagable fear of the dark was going to get a whole lotta worse.

    After it was over, I looked out the windows at the backyard in the sunlight, realizing that daytime no longer meant safetime — that the boogieman was in full force 24 hours a day! For weeks, the unhappiness level of my household rose to red alert, as I was unable to sleep, approach darkness, or be alone without freaking out. The nutty thing was I remember seeing that movie more than once in my youth. What was I (or anyone else) thinking?

    That was my experience with Nightmare. My memory of the actual plot is spotty, though I have vivid memories of certain scenes.

    And here we go again, oh so many years later! I’m writing this as I am about to hit the play button. It is daytime, I am alone, and really glad I’m a grownup now…

    …OK! All done, still here. It’s amazing how the first 45 minutes or so are branded on my brain — I remember almost every scene. And it is scary, in an is-this-a-dream-or-reality? mind-fuck, shot in very glam black and white, surprises a-plenty. Then it all plunges downhill, into a whole different movie, a whole different protagonist and theme, what? It kind of rallys at the end when twist.. then twist.. then another twists ends it.

    And I don’t remember having watched anything past that first 45 minutes, which leaves me to believe that 9-year-old Becky was as easily bored as the present-day Becky when confronted with a film that becomes overly talky and complicated.

    1964: What a stellar year — not only for for humankind when a very special girl was born — but for swing coats and mod boots, for high-contrast black and white, for really ambitious hairdos, for a certain round and sweet style of British leading lady, for black vests and ties under tweed coats, for tilted camera angles, and for an naive style of horror that’s pretty damn scary.

    Big plus: 83 minutes, yes. Other big plus: British title was Here’s the Knife, Dear: Now Use It.

    If you’d like to buy or rent it, it is part of the Hammer Horror Series.

    Fun/sad fact: I was terrified of the dark until I was about 14. The fear re-flared briefly when I was 16 and watched that goddamn Talky Tina episode.

    Coming up: wh-what the hell was THAT?