The Breakup and Other Fun

I borrowed this dvd from the girl I'm kind of seeing in a weird way, and I actually held onto it a couple weeks, forgetting I had it and getting into Season Two of Lost from Netflix. I watched it last night, though, and really liked it. It's not perfect, but I really think it's one of Vince Vaughn's best films (though intentionally not as enjoyable) and a pretty brave effort at really showing how relationships between two nice people who love each other do burn out and fall apart. There are some good laughs, but also some really painful scenes, one or two of which really hit home with me. The outtakes and deleted scenes are good but I think they put the actual film together the way it should have been. The commentary by Vaughn and Aniston is well-done but kind of exhausting, as Vaughn is never funny during it but is always explaining what a scene was trying to accomplish. Instructive, just not that fun.

Watched SNL's Best of Darrell Hammon episode, and he really is a great mimic, though the various clips, while funny, reminded me that either he or the writers or both never, ever push into really magical territory.

Just began the novel Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. I remember liking the description but can't remember it. It's good prose but I'm not sure what it's about yet.

I also read, in just a few days, a great bio of National Lampoon cofounder (and cowriter of Animal House and Caddyshack) Doug Kenney, which ends up more a history of NatLamp, as Kenney seems to have been a pretty hard guy to know intimately, though very well-liked and admired. One of the last notes (some say suicide) he wrote in his notebook before falling off a Kuaui cliff were, "these have been the best days I've ever ignored," which I find chilling. The whole NatLamp dynamic with Kenney, Henry Beard, Michael O'Donaghue, Sean Kelly, Tony Hendra and PJ O'Rourke is fascinating as well. If you've never read the High School Yearbook or Sunday Newspaper parodies, you owe it to yourself to read them, as they are back in print. Extremely influential on SNL, The Onion and countless other venues for humor. While reading about the Lampoon's urbane, literary early days, and how it devolved into a lot of T&A and anti-women humor and darkness a lot of the time, I had on TV American Dad and Family Guy, both of which had some really awful jokes amid a few funny ones. I'm not saying those shows are bad, but so often they go for shocks rather than wit, though of course they're still much better than shit like The War At Home, and why Seth McFarlane would want to appear on that show I can only chalk up to some egotistical desire to be on camera, damn the quality of the product.

Bought a bunch of stuff for the house at Bed, Bath & Beyond. I only went for maybe some knives, but got those (a block of 'em), a KitchenAid blender, a new shower head (the one in my bathroom is custom but it's some gentle rain thing I hate--I like the kind of velocity where you have to worry about your genitals, some wood hangers, a hanging sweater holder, a shower mirror (my shower is done in this fake tile fiberglass that has a texture to it that makes most suction cups useless, so we'll see how this does. I may need to just just a cord or something over the shower head. I also got some travertine accessories for the guest bathroom, which look pretty nice (soap dispenser, tissue box, cup/holder, wastebasket) and towels and shower curtain, so that room is pretty much done aside from paint and a small piece of art. Anyway, enough about me spending money. I'm very tired.

Haven't read comics in more than a month now, but a shipment is on its way.