1. Bay 2 Breakers. Don't know what that is? It's basically a drunken parade of costumed wasted people who march from one side of the seven-square mile peninsula that is San Francisco to the other. There are people dressed like life-sized vaginas, tiki-bars on wheels, the most graphic dry humping I've ever seen, house parties like you haven't seen since your days in a fraternity, obnoxious half-naked women, endearingly naked old drunken people, puke/piss/shit all over the place, trash piles, police piles, me dressed like a 1970s Hanoi tourist half-cocked peeing on a tree in front of more than one family, and seriously, everything else you can imagine. I'll be quite honest, I felt a little bit out of place at the event as I was drunk, but could still move/remember/think but there's a lot of good to be had in this sort of burst of intoxicated revelry. I think I'll take a different, more enjoyable tact next year, but I'll say this: any city that allows this occur on a yearly basis is pretty fucking amazing. I recovered from this event all Monday, waking up at 11 and only leaving the house to see Star Trek (my review later this week) and to eat 12 bites of 12 different cookies.
2. Friends. Good, good friends were in town, and even if I didn't see them as much as I wanted, it was nice to have them here. For whatever reason if anyone is ever visiting, my mind automatically shuts down in terms of any sort of responsibility I might have. All of sudden I'm tossing caution to the wind and just not doing jack shit. Some people might call this laziness, I call it loyalty.
3. Work. Who would've thought that going to bed two nights in a row after drinking myself in to a slumber at 1 in the morning and then waking up four hours later to serve coffee to hundreds of slack-jawed yoke-heads would make me pass in to a deep slumber every afternoon? Smart people, that's who.
So there, excuses. I know you were dying for reasons.
What I've learned about Japan from the film Good Morning (84):1. Japanese children fart in tiny whistles, seemingly only when pressed lightly upon the forehead.
2. Japanese male adults seeming fart in a way that only their spouses can hear, and when they do so, their wives mystically appear, worried about their health and well-being.
3. Japanese travelling salesmen are a cunning lot of tricksters and schemers who hang in tightly knit groups and meet in bars to discuss the newest way to scam their unwilling customers.
4. The only way to combat these cunning bastards is to arm your elderly, slightly belligerent mother with a long sharp knife and place them in front of the door. This causes the salesmen to retreat quickly, sharpened pencils tucked in to their strange boxes.
To say the least, I didn't really get this film. It was a slight film, a silly sort of look in to post-war Japan, but, and I'm sad to say, I just didn't get it. It felt like a film made in the aftermath of a terrible war, which it was, and it seemed to ape some of the strangely sit-com family shows of America's 1950s. There was a Father Knows Best sort of feeling to the whole proceeding that threw me off. Was I supposed to be laughing at this film? Sad at this film? Or just sort of jollily plopped in front of it, eyes watery, mouth agape?
It makes me wonder: maybe I can't do happy films? You know? Maybe I need something serious to sink my teeth in to or I'm just not as good at dissecting a film. Maybe this little triffle of a Technicolor Japan film wasn't enough for me to grab on to and it just slipped through the gaping cracks in my brain. Maybe I can only process in any sort of thoughtful way films that discuss serious things like romantic affairs and death and anything German.
Or maybe, maybe this highly acclaimed classic just didn't fit my mood.
Who knows.
Wednesday: What's Next!
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