temporary filling

[ironymaiden]

mostly here to say i'm alive. i want to say that the dental drama is at an end. i now have a temp filling in place, and lots of angry gum swelling. (i'll not get into more detail although i'm starting to wonder if i should have a teeth icon.) i think i like my dentist. he's good at the work, really steady and gentle, but not good at small talk. part of me appreciates that.

i think it's been sapping my energy. i spend a lot of time lolling around and feeling stupid even without the drugs. C says he could see a change in me as of last night. i hope so.

meanwhile, we caught The Long Goodbye at SIFF Cinema. an odd bookend to the noir festival, it's sort of anti-noir, anti-detective. i enjoyed it, especially touches like the long opening scene with Marlowe trying to get the right food for his cat. (alas, not a feature of the book.) Altman decided that the plot wasn't important; it isn't exactly what i want from a detective movie, and for once i wish i had been spoiled on that before i started watching. there's a nice bit on wikipedia about just that and how they were more successful once they changed the marketing to reflect the film's real attitude. C and i still talk about it now and again. a plus. still, the more i think about it, the more i think the structure is weak and the ending not well-motivated. Roger Ebert's analysis is notable.

as part of the lolling, C and i rented Rome from Scarecrow. we're watching a couple episodes a night, doing a lot of pausing and looking stuff up online and around the house when we have questions about the history because we're that kind of nerd. (while it's like watching Titanic* since we know the big stuff that will happen, the journey is what the show is about.) so far, i'm digging it, although i'm starting to feel like the sex is gratuitous even though i'm generally pleased with it being a natural part of storytelling. (anyone else get a "because we can!" vibe from HBO shows? maybe it's just me.) we inadvertently timed it so that we will finish season one shortly before the season two dvds come out. (this show is dead, buhrger - watch at will.)

looking forward to going to a Tufte seminar next week and being more social and less dopey.

*Titanic, the most expensive chick flick ever. so many great true stories to tell, and we have to paste on a completely lame love story. the effects did *not* make up for it. what were people thinking beyond "it's really hot. three hours of air conditioning, yes!" ??? also, Leo DiCaprio, ratfaced.

EDITED TO ADD: ya'll are right, it came out in the US in December. now i really don't understand.

Comments

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

Crap, I completely forgot about the noir festival. And The Long Goodbye was definitely on my list (noir or anti-noir doesn't matter; it's Altman). I'll have to catch some of what remains of the noir films.

Thanks for the Rome mini-review. Even if there's a certain element of "because we can" in the sex, if it generally fits into the storytelling that's fine. In the right mood, it's a plus.

Since I haven't seen the show, I can't say for sure, but as a writer with screenwriting ambitions, I can see an ideal purpose for gratuitous sex in a setting where it's permissible.

On television, there's a specific time budget, maybe 55 minutes for a schedule hour on a no-ads channel with five reserved for self-promotions. If an episode runs 52 minutes, and the only subplot scenes that can reasonably be added to an episode (as opposed to leaving them for the next one) run at least four minutes, adding another scene would mean squeezing something out. Scattering an extra three minutes of sex through the scenes where it fits isn't the worst possible way to balance the episode's time budget.

If there's an eventual plan to resell the show to a basic cable channel, then it makes great sense to limit non-sex content to 42 minutes or so and padding the rest with skin – then cutting the sex makes room for the ads.

Finally, sympathies about the teeth.