To Be or Not To Be, and Trouble in Paradise

I ended up calling Mom early in the afternoon to bolster myself. I told her that I'm taking care of some physical stuff, like making an eye doctor appointment (which I did Friday), and that once I finish with that I will be just about out of excuses for why I'm not looking for an apartment. She says that if I'm not really looking, then I'm probably not quite ready to move. Well, maybe. Anyway, it seems clear that to find the place I want I'm going to have to make a bunch of phone calls and see a bunch of places. No way around it.

Despite all this - and strangely enough, I suppose - my job is part of what keeps me from saying, "Okay, this isn't working, time to move elsewhere." On Sundays I do in fact genuinely look forward to going to work on Monday. I enjoy what I do, and I like the people I work with. And that's worth a lot.

Played around with the digital camera today (haven't yet uploaded any pictures to my Mac, just taken some) and also played a few StarCraft scenarios.

Mid-afternoon, I joined Subrata to see more old movies at the Stanford. First up was 1942's To Be or Not to Be, with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny playing actors in war-torn Poland.

Maria Tura (Lombard) has an affair with a young aviator, Stanislav Sobinski (a very young Robert Stack), although she's married Josef Tura (Benny). After the Germans conquer Poland, Sobinski ends up in Britain, where he learns that a Polish spy working for the Brits, Professor Siletski (Stanley Ridges), is in fact a Gestapo agent with information which can bring down the Polish resistance. Sobinski goes to Poland where the love triangle revives, Siletski is romantically attracted to Maria himself. The Turas' acting troupe undertakes multiple acting deceptions to first try to get Siletski's report from him, and later to try to smuggle the group out of Poland.

It's a very clever film, but I didn't think it was an especially good film, and it's not nearly as funny as I'd expected. A lot of this, I think, is that the humor is very situational (as in "SitCom"), and I'm not much for situational humor, where characters get embarrassed or have to wriggle out of a situation which they got themselves into. So large chunks of this film just didn't entertain me.

Its portrayal of war-torn Poland was fairly well done, however. The Nazis were not entirely portrayed as buffoons, although they did some off as rather ridiculous, and in particular their security seemed be holed like swiss cheese. You'd think the Poles had hundreds of agents impersonating Nazis throughout the war.

The second film was Trouble in Paradise (1932), which I liked a lot more, although I'd heard of hardly any of the actors before. Gaston Monescue (Herbert Marshall) and Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins) are thieves who meet one night in Italy and fall in love, pooling their talents. Shift to Paris, where they steal a handbag from the rich Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). Turning it in for the reward money, Gaston starts a masquerade where he becomes her secretary in a ploy to swindle her for thousands of Francs, and they fall in love. Unfortunately, Gaston is recognized by the man he robbed that night in Italy, one of Mme. Colet's would-be suitors (played by - yes it's him again - Edward Everett Horton).

Although not as funny as some of the other 30s comedies we've seen, this one was pretty witty, with Horton's usual double-takes, some fun physical comedy between the two thieves, and the juggling act of the planned robbery and the budding romance. Check it out.

Sigh. The Yankees beat the Red Sox 9-2 as the Sox' bullpen imploded in the 9th inning, and the Sox offense again managed fewer than four runs. And again, it appeared that the Sox got hurt by a bad double-play call by an ump in the 8th inning. Curse of the Bambino? Try Curse of the Umpires!

Yorkies lead series 3 games to 1, so the Sox have to win all 3 remaining games to advance. It could happen... we'll see.

And, finally, it's the end of an era: I've decided to drop out of the last APA I'm in. I realized that I just haven't been making time to write for it, and that I haven't been especially enjoying the pressure of having to keep up with it. Since I'm on MINAC (also called 'mustwrite') this month, I should get dropped with this mailing.

I've been in at least one - and usually more - APA since January of 1988, so it's been nearly 12 years of writing for me, and I've made a number of friends through my APAs. But, I'm putting most of my energy elsewhere these days, so it's time to call it a day. It's a little hard to believe, but it feels rather natural at this point. That's the way it goes.