Scenes Sunday

Spent a relaxing Sunday afternoon with Daniel (Daniella thankfully kept to herself.) We watched a few Frasier and Will and Grace episodes. Then we watched two movies, a 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now and an early Pedro Almodovar, Law Of Desire.

Don’t Look Now stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. It’s billed as a psychic thriller, and I suppose when it first came out people found it eerie and the ending shocking. But the only scene which gave me a slight thrill was the infamous love scene between the two leads, and it wasn’t the erotic kind either. It was the thrill of checking if Donald’s “Keifer” would “rear its ugly head” despite the skillful editing and the acrobatics of the actors. It didn’t, and that led a lot of people to wonder if the two were actually doing the deed when shooting that scene. To be fair to both actors, the lovemaking scene looked and felt so natural. It was also unbearably long and boring, which led me to conclude that actual lovemaking is tedious to watch without cheesy saxophone music and bad lighting to heat things up.

Law Of Desire also features sex scenes and heavy breathing, but of the mano-a-mano kind. If Almodovar made his sex scenes as lengthy as the one in Don’t Look Now I’d have instantly dubbed this 1987 movie a masterpiece and a classic. Antonio Banderas pre-Melanie Griffith was achingly delicious as a boy obsessed with a gay film director. The movie wasn’t clear on why he was obsessed with the director, but that only lessened the film’s over-all impact; it didn’t lessen the impact of seeing him clad only in skimpy briefs. Thrice.

After I had my fill of Antonio eye-candy, Daniel and I went out for dinner. There we had fun talking about the stuff we watched and discussing Abba lyrics. Daniel told me he read somewhere that despite writing most of their songs in their second language (English), the veddy Sveedish Benny and Bjorn made only one grammatical error (Daniel forgot which one it was.)

Oh sure, I said, they may be grammatically correct, but c’mon—

The gods may throw a dice,
their minds as cold as ice.
And someone way down here
loses someone dear.
The winner takes it all,
the loser has to fall.
It’s simple and it’s plain;
why should I complain?

Now try reading that out loud like a poem; see if you can pull it off with a straight face.

Thank you for the music indeed.