2003-01-27 - 6:29 p.m.
Skipped the Superbowl, saw Gangs of New York instead. Worth seeing on a big screen for the first 15 minutes and the last 20; the rest wanders quite a bit, and could have used the services of one of the three editors in Hollywood with the wrinklies to tell Martin Scorsese that he needs to tighten his narrative skills. And Leonardo DiCaprio is much too much of a little weenie to cast as a charismatic leader of Irish immigrant gangs--maybe it’s because I haven’t done enough blow, or I’m not a 13-year-old girl, but I’m just not feeling the charisma. Brad Pitt, of all people, would have nailed that role spot-on.
Still, Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, the cinematography is stunning, and the fight scenes are just as harrowing and even gorier than the Helm’s Deep scenes in The Two Towers. And Scorsese fans who like to spend their free time decoding the symbolism in his films will find hours upon hours of amusement with this one.
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On the way out of the theater, I went past the trolley station just as a large group of dejected Raiders fans disembarked and headed to their cars for the long, sad drive back to Oakland. After the film I’d just seen, pushing my way through a crowd of sullen, violence-prone men in matching outfits and face-paint gave me one of those choice moments of memetic convergence that only Blivet seems to have.
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In other news, I’ve taken up the saxophone again.
I shouldn’t even say "again," really. My sole experience with it before now was a few weeks in 7th grade. I was pretty good, if I do say so myself--for an undersized kid who’d never come within 100 feet of a woodwind instrument before--but unfortunately I signed up for band class late and they already had plenty of sax players, so the sexually repressed, ticking time bomb of a band teacher (doesn’t every junior high school have one?) foisted the clarinet on me instead.
Yes, the clarinet. The favorite instrument of nerdy prepubescent punching bags the world over. Sax players got all the chicks. What did clarinet players get? Dumped in the trash can during nutrition break, more often than not.
But enough about my 7th-grade band issues. In recent months a number of my friends have been dusting off their old instruments, and have been working on me to take up music myself so they have someone else to jam with. It’s been a tough sell, to be honest--I’ve never truly seen myself as "musician" material, even though I’m a passionate lover of all kinds of music. Well, except for rap. And New Age jazz. And all country-western stuff that doesn’t pay tribute to Johnny Cash.
But hey, I’ve got free time, my mid-life crisis is due to start soon, and I really don’t care how badly I suck at it so long as I’m having fun and the neighbors don’t have my evicted. Who knows, I may even turn out to be good at it. Wish me luck.
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