I came home to a dead car -- not to mention being locked out -- and it took a few days to figure out if it was the battery or alternator. The good news is that I successfully moved my friend's stick shift car in and out of the garage; the bad news is that I'm totally inept at all car related things. For a moment, watching my uncle tinker around under the hood, I thought maybe I should learn a few automotive repair techniques. But that's probably something I wouldn't be good at so I'll just leave it up to the professionals. It's Alanis Morissette ironic that I drove across the country just fine but the last two times touching a car in San Diego, the vehicle has putzed out on me.
On Saturday night I parked myself in front of the television to continue my romp through the 1993 NBA Playoffs. NBA TV is showing all the good games from each series and I've pretty much DVRed every single one. That '93 post-season is the one where Michael Jordan three-peats for the first time (and retires after his father's murder that summer). It's the one where the Clippers were actually better than the Lakers. It's the one where Charles Barkley was finally freed from Philly and led the Suns to the Finals. It's the one where Reggie Lewis collapses during the Celtics' first round playoff series and then passes away during an off-season practice three months later. It's the one where I was fifteen and skipping every Chinese school class to play basketball. Those were the times.
Here's what else I saw, flipping between the basketball games and our free movie channels: Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, which was her last semi-decent movie, before her then husband, director Renny Harlin, tanked her career. Their team up resulted in the biggest box office flop of all time according to Guinness. Cutthroat Island did so bad it even bankrupted the production company who financed it -- and killed pirate movies until Johnny Depp revived the genre eight years later. No wonder Geena and Renny got divorced. Can any marriage survive that sort of epic failure?
I also rewatched Point of No Return, which was way worse than I remembered, which led me to question my movie taste as a teen. The plot is totally ridiculous and it's really pretty ripe for another remake. I'm into assassin movies but this was just terrible. Bridget Fonda is so 90's. More edifyingly, I saw the entirety of Jaws for the first time and finally understood its power. I'm thinking I should go through the Steven Spielberg oeuvre one of these weekends. After Jaws I got into some documentary about indie movies and fetish sex, which posed the question if actors having real sex on-screen was considered art or porn. ("If a movie makes you think about it, it's art.") Concurrently I watched Prelude to a Kiss, which is a body swap story about appreciating what you have and falling in love with Meg Ryan.
Finally I cleaned up with a viewing of Julie Taymor's Frida biopic, which made me realize that I knew absolutely nothing about Frida Kahlo. It was all new to me: her two marriages to Diego Rivera, her affair with Leon Trotsky, her many physical ailments, her artwork, her politics, and why most of her work was auto-biographical. "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." Narcissist!
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