A Bus is Born
I didn't write anything yesterday about what I did Wednesday evening, but that's all right: the only thing to tell, really, is that I went to see Crazy Rich Asians, which was . . . good. Not great, but good. It was fine. Solid B. Has a few problems, but given its cultural context in 2018 America, it's in a lot of ways also vital. So, there you have it.
I actually rode my bike home for just a minute before riding back down to Pacific Place, just so I could feed the cats real quick so they wouldn't have to wait another 2 hours for Shobhit to get home. That was just before 5:00, and I went to see the 5:30 showing. Rode back home again, wrote my review, which took a while, both because it was longer than usual and because I got delayed by Ivan messaging me about Zipcar. I guess he's considering getting a membership; I went to their website and found a single Zipcar vehicle in all of Bellingham -- on the Western Washington University campus.
Last night was also filled up mostly by a movie, after I made mushroom risotto for dinner: the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, easily the most famous of the 3 versions that exist of that movie (4 if you already want to count the Bradley Cooper / Lady Gaga version coming in October; 5 if you do that and count the extremely similar 1932 movie What Price Hollywood?, which I don't, basically on a technicality).
When Shobhit and I had watched the 1937 version starring Janet Gaynor, he said even then, "I have a feeling I will like this one the best." He had been very impressed with it, but just because I knew the 1954 version was the most famous and best-reviewed, I assumed he'd likely be wrong about that. Well, not anymore: what sets the 1954 version apart is the performances, both Judy Garland's for her amazing singing and even James Mason's without any singing. I'm kind of amazed that movie didn't win any acting Oscars -- it didn't win any, in fact, although it was nominated for several. Shobhit commented several times on how much of the script was completely identical, with passages of dialogue lifted verbatim from the 1937 version. Oddly, even with a run time extended by an hour, this one includes none of Esther's back story or her family like the 1937 one did. It also doesn't bother with the use of iconic Hollywood landmarks like the Hollywood Bowl or Grauman's Chinese Theatre in L.A. That makes for a sort of ironic dissonance -- the 1937 version did way more to illustrate how little Hollywood has changed in the past century than the 1954 one did.
I'm also fascinated by the sort of organic evolution of the characters' professions through all the versions of this movie. In the 1937 version, they are strictly Hollywood actors. In the 1954 version, they are Hollywood actors, but Esther (renamed Vicki Lester) is also a singer -- and it's her voice, much more than her acting, that makes her a superstar; in fact it's what renders the 1954 version a music, and the addition of musical sequences is what adds an hour to the run time. By the time the 1976 version starring Barbra Streisand comes around, though, neither character is an actor: they are strictly singers. The iconic scenes at the Academy Awards ceremony in both the 1937 and 1954 versions are replaced in the 1976 version by a scene at the Grammy Awards.
This year's version is clearly much more in the vein of the Streisand version, with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga playing country musicians. Presumably the awards ceremony scene will again be at the Grammys -- or, I suppose, the Country Music Awards. In any case, the 1976 and 2018 versions clearly have no interest in Hollywood. (At least that means there will be less lifting of entire passages of dialogue verbatim.) By all accounts the Streisand version is by some distance the worst, but still nice if just for her singing. And I've had to find all four versions in different places to watch this year: the 1937 version streaming on Amazon Prime; the 1954 version on Blu-Ray from Netflix; the 1976 streaming on Netflix; then the new one in theatres in October.
So this evening I'll prepare for my time in Vancouver, B.C. this weekend -- just one night, but basically a 2-day stay: I have to get up really early tomorrow (like, probably around 4 a.m.) to catch a bus leaving south of downtown at 6:30, and scheduled to arrive in Vancouver at 10:30. I'll then have the rest of the day there -- basically, all day --and essentially the same again on Sunday, as I don't catch a bus back on Sunday until 5 p.m. What's still up in the air tomorrow is whether I will bus directly to the neighborhood where my AirBnB is (and where Ivan's place is, about 10 blocks away), or if Ivan will be sleeping and I should kill some time downtown first -- maybe go to Steamworks for the early afternoon instead of later in the evening. That part may depend on whether Ivan actually gets on the bus with me as I pass through Bellingham, in which case I may bus with him to the Kitsilano neighborhood. I have my doubts as to whether he will, but we'll see. My understanding is he'll have already been up all night working, so maybe catching an 8:30 bus in Bellingham won't be as much of a challenge for him as it could be otherwise. Then again, I have no idea how close his work is or the AirBnB he's been staying at in Bellingham is to that bus stop, so who knows? All I know is I'm not going to pester him about it, so I'll wait until he either messages me about it sometime today or this evening, or I just find out while I'm on the bus whether or not he gets on it with me. If not, I'll then message him before I cross the border that I plan to spend some time downtown before heading into Kitsilano.
Checkin at my AirBnB isn't until 3pm, after all -- although the guy did tell me I could leave my bag at the house before my room was actually ready. I'll figure something out. I did remember just this morning that I will not have constant Internet connection on my phone and will be relying solely on places with free wifi, lest I get charged international roaming fees; I will want to put my phone on Airplane Mode before I cross the border. So this morning I saved a bunch of walking route and transit route screenshots on my phone, to make it easier to navigate the city without an Internet connection.
I think I'm pretty well prepared, actually.
[posted 12:18 pm]