I'm feeling sluggish, sleep-deprived, ennui-riffic, and bored this week, and I don't feel like writing in the blog. I'm tired of writing about gorilla masks, robots, movies, etc. I have no enthusiasm. I just want to stay in bed and sleep, but I can't do that because I'm at work. I feel like I'm neglecting the blog, but I don't really care. I want to be lazy. Lazy. Laziness is good. I did manage to see a movie last night, Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen), at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown. "Easy Living" is a screwball comedy from the thirties and a part of the new Austin Film Society series about the career of actress Jean Arthur. It's the kind of movie they haven't made for a long time, full of twitchy, jittery character actors with rubber faces, clever puns, goofy slang, and one pratfall after another. In fact, the entire cast is made up of character actors, including Jean Arthur, an unconventional, unglamorous movie star who moved from shy embarrassment to huge bursts of action with an off-kilter timing all her own. The movie is an odd case for me because I generally prefer films where the director is the primary author/architect of the film's content, style, and form, and this one is a true collaboration. Preston Sturges, one of the all-time great directors, wrote the screenplay, and his humor and cadence are stamped all over the movie. Mitchell Leisen directed, and his placement of the camera and the actors has a style all its own, separate from Sturges's. The actors also function as co-authors, since much of the humor depends on the way a line is spoken or a facial expression is performed. Now I want to go outside so I'm going to cut this short. Goodbye, everyone.
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