we like dancing and we look divine

So I did give up on A Great and Terrible Beauty: I found the 3rd Artemis Fowl book on cd at the library on Saturday. I love the guy who narrates those, so much that I’m actually kind of disappointed I read The Wish List, instead of listening to it. I also got Firefly (so I can finally watch the end of it—Katie and I didn’t last that long at our great Fireflyathon last year), Waiting for Guffman, which I probably won’t get a chance to watch before it’s due, Puff by Bob Flaherty, Lads by David Itzkoff, and a book of 3 novellas that I can’t remember the title of right now. Puff is good so far, both in a general way and in an every so often I laugh out loud kind of way.
I had my 3 day weekend and feel like it was jam-packed, which was nice for a change. Friday I painted my bathroom bright pink, which my landlords will discover tomorrow when they have to do a walkthrough for some reason. I told my building manager about the dripping in my bathroom, but I don’t know if that was necessarily the right thing to do. Because I know they won’t fix the roof, the source of the problem. If anything is done, it’ll be done to my newly-painted bathroom, where a mess will be made for me to clean up, once the maintenance people finally get the hell out of there. It’s at times like these that I really wish I had a house, so that all this kind of junk was my responsibility. Slumlordship is only fun in Monopoly. Friday night I watched To Wong Foo with Melissa and a bunch of her friends. Fun, but the movie just made me want to watch Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which is the far superior drag queen flick, for my money.
My Saturday night plans were switched to Sunday, so I got to go to 80s night. It was so much fun to just dance like an idiot and drink cheap gin again. I did feel pretty stupid, though, when I realized that I was the only dancer playing air keyboard during “Take On Me” or pumping my fist at the end of “Dancing with Myself”. It’s a good thing he didn’t play “Like a Prayer”, because I would’ve had to break out the dance Tiff, Cindy, and I made up, and no one wants to see that. Also, it was strange not instinctively knowing what the next song would be. Ah, Lou: you play the same damn set every week. Pittsburgh hipsters are creatures of habit, I know, but c’mon.
And then Sunday I saw Ray. Why, o why, was this the script they used for Ray Charles’ life? It read like one of those made-for-VH-1 movies, leading to a whole discussion comparing those movies. Verdict? The Meatloaf one is the best, and the Lennon-McCartney one is the worst. So many other things about it were good, which only makes the script thing worse. You can be the best actor in the world, but when you get saddled with lines about being blind and afraid of the dark, or have to work through a withdrawl scene so unoriginal I fully expected a dead baby to start crawling across the ceiling, as opposed to just in pools of hallucinated water, talent just doesn’t go as far. No, Jamie Foxx, you’re not, but you see my point. And sorry, buddy, but the Academy isn’t giving you shit this year. Take it up with Clint. Wait…is Foxx nominated for supporting Tom Cruise? Maybe he’ll get that. And the “Hit the Road Jack” scene? I was wincing. In a dark theater.
Luckily, the costume and set design were flawless, so I spent most of my time admiring the ladies’ clothes and coveting the mural behind whats-his-face’s desk at the big record company. Anyone wanna paint that in my hallway? And trying to ID the producer guy at Atlantic, who I finally realized was Endless Mike. I love that guy.
Normally, I guess I’m just not that much of a fan of the musician biopic. They have to have something extra to hold my interest: an almost cloyingly postmodern story structure, like 24 Hour Party People or De-Lovely, or homoeroticism, like Velvet Goldmine. Or Robbie Williams, like, um, De-Lovely.