Another Quarter

Tomorrow is October 1st, and although I'll have lots of paperwork to do this week, and even some backdated 10/1 quotes to work on, the real crunch time is over. This September I put in a tremendous amount of time at the office, or at home on my computer, to quote as much Workers Comp insurance business as I could. We're talking at least ten, but more than once a thirteen hour day, even fourteen. I even had a meltdown to one of my bosses, about her boss' incessant, insulting emails exhorting us to quote more, more, more. It was a real surprise to her, seeing me lose my shit and slam my office door, because I'm known as a really mellow guy at the office. My outburst did have some benefit--the emails mostly stopped, or at least when they did they were more general in nature and without the stupid, outdated spreadsheet reports attached to them.

Anyway, it was great to be able to decompress with the kids and a female friend this weekend. The latter is a woman I dated a couple times and decided we'd be better as friends. And that usually means you never call that person again, but I do like her, so I wanted to try the friend thing. We watched some dvds last night and it was pretty fun. A little weird, too, as she's kind of flirty, so I had to kind of fight against my instincts to stick with the friend decision.

We watched Vacancy, a stupid but moderately entertaining suspense flick with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale. Both actors are better than this material and it seemed like just a paycheck for both of them, though a fairly physically demanding one. It's a really predictable movie, and one that requires a high level of suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, it's a good movie for kind of making fun of while you're watching it--you'll be entertained while still having numerous opportunities to mock it.

Earlier in the week, though, I watched a couple of '70s films, each a choice from a different impulse. The first was Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, which I think was directed by a man named Jon Hough and is clearly one of the influences on Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, as far as setting (multilevel, Southern dirt roads). I liked the extended, unrated Death Proof (maybe I'll write about this at another time) and felt like watching one of its influences, just as I watched Vanishing Point after seeing Grindhouse in the theater. DMCL stars Peter Fonda, an odd-looking guy who probably wouldn't have gotten work if his dad wasn't a Hollywood star, and even then, not if he started acting ten years later than he did. The late '60s through late '70s were a great time for strange-looking leading men like Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and even leading ladies, too, like Shelley Duvall, Sandy Dennis and here, Susan George, whose teeth are so large, uneven and protruding they look like they came from a novelty vending machine in the front of a grocery store. But she's kind of cool, too, at least in this movie. Fonda is a would-be NASCAR driver who, with his mechanic, played by Adam Roarke, holds a grocery store manager's wife hostage until he opens the safe and gives him the money he needs to build his competitive race car. Now all Roarke and Fonda have to do is get away, to a strand of walnut groves off the highway that have so many exit roads the police will never catch them. But they have to get there first, and complicating that is the spunky George, whom Fonda bedded the night before and planned to never see again, and Vic Morrow, a funky cop on the edge who seems to have a personal grudge against Fonda, or maybe just his car...it's not explained. Morrow chews up the police station scenery for half the movie, telling his superior to kiss his ass, until he gets out in the field, appropriating a helicopter to try to take down Fonda & Co personally. Ironic that Morrow is involved with dangerous helicopter stunts, huh? He actually tries to hit the car with his landing gear in order to make it crash.

Fonda is a real prick in the movie, not a Bandit type of free spirit. The movie makes clear he's no hero to be admired--even Roarke and George can't stand him much of the time. Roarke, an actor I don't know, puts in a very good performance here as a man smarter and more soulful than Fonda, but self-aware enough to realize Fonda has the guts and talent he lacks. It's a good action movie with good character dynamics, at least among Fonda and his companions. The Morrow stuff is pretty sloppy. I saw this movie when I was a kid, probably on ABC, and was always shocked by the sudden, extremely violent ending. For most of my life that's all I remembered about the movie, aside from what I thought was the theme song, which I just found out I must have made up back then.

The other '70s movie came out of a more generalized desire to see another '70s classic I had missed, Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge, with Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as friends from college onward, the film a sequence of moments from their relationships with women. Nicholson is obnoxious, charming and confident while Garfunkel is sensitive, gentle. At college, Nicholson secretly carries on with his friend's girl, Candice Bergen, and we see she is much freer with Nicholson, but there's just no way to make it work without breaking Garfunkel's heart. It's the most interesting part of the film, because in this short span we see how big a heel Nicholson's character is, but also that he can redeem himself, by breaking it off with Bergen.

The rest of the movie is good, and colorful, but sort of unravels a bit. That is, Garfunkel's character becomes secondary to Nicholson, to the extent they only get together two or three more times, first when we find out Garfunkel married Bergen and has kids with her but now feels something is missing, and in later scenes just a guy with different women, trying to find the right one. It becomes blurry, because Garfunkel's character loses his appealing shyness and doesn't seem to have things all that much better than Nicholson's character, when it seems we're supposed to see Garfunkel's as perhaps a more desirable or honorable road to follow.

Nicholson has some good scenes with Ann-Margret, who starts out as his equal in free-spirited carnality, but then wilts with no structure to their relationship and loses confidence as his attentions are drawn elsewhere. When Nicholson turns on her, it's a very good scene in that it's funny because Nicholson is funny, but also very sad and mean, which are also qualities he brings out in the writing. Or, more correctly, it's a mean scene that he makes somewhat funny in his line reading. Ann-Margret is beautiful here, and the movie is worth seeing just for her nudity. It also has an abrupt ending, after a really uncomfortable scene in which Nicholson subjects Garfunkel and Garfunkel's latest girl to a slide show of pictures of the various "ball busters" Nicholson has been involved with since childhood. The use of the fetching, faraway figure skater as the image of the unattainable, perfect woman for the self-hating Nicholson is effective, if a bit Great Gatsby, and certainly enough films have used similar devices since then so it's not going to be fresh. The script is by Jules Feiffer, and it's dark and witty, sexy and angry, and I kind of wonder why, with such a range and such success in so many media, Feiffer isn't talked about more these days. It seems like a good time to dig into not only him, but early Mike Nichols.