today's testament to mediocrity
What's to tell about yesterday? I read my library book while walking home. I had thought I would be taking the bus, as rain was suddenly in the forecast earlier in the late afternoon and I had not brought my umbrella. I even wound up in the elevator with Marianne from HR (I used to sing with her in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, and it was because of her in 2002 I even knew about the opening here at PCC, which she forwarded to me), and she asked whether I walked home. I had told her I usually do but I would be taking the bus. It's probably due to having that conversation that I was distracted when I got off on the third floor, and completely forgot to just look over and see if the doors to that empty office space were open again. I have no idea whether they were or not, as I just made a beeline for the skybridge.
When I got out of the building across the street and onto Western Avenue, though, it was slightly breezy and overcast, but still totally dry. I decided I would go ahead and walk home for now, and just slip onto a bus if it started raining. It never did, though. I was weirdly hungry and tired, however, so by the time I reached the bus stop at Pine & 9th, a #49 was coming within a couple of minutes, so I did hop on that and ride just up to Broadway, where that bus turns left. I then walked the last half mile home again.
We watched the second of the five movies about Las Vegas that I selected to watch in the lead-up to our trip there for Shobhit's birthday and Halloween weekend. The first had been the 1971 Sean Conner James Bon film Diamonds Are Forever, which was utterly ridiculous but still entertaining, and fun to see representations of Las Vegas from the early seventies. What we watched last night was the Scorsese film Casino, which was released in 1995 but set from the early seventies until the early eighties. That movie consistently topped the lists I found online of the "best movies about Las Vegas," and I don't know what the fuck people are smoking, because that movie is a three-hour testament to mediocrity.
Also, its one and only Oscar nomination was for Sharon Stone's supporting role, as a woman constantly engaged in grating histrionics. She wasn't the only dipshit in the movie, though, basically everyone was. About two hours in I said, "Everyone in this movie is an idiot." Why the fuck was Robert DeNiro's character so in love with her? She made no secret of what kind of unstable presence she would be. There's a scene where he comes home and she has left their daughter tied to her bed so she could just . . . go out. And he still takes her back!
Worst of all was the voiceover narration. Oh, my god! It was fucking incessant. As in, it genuinely dominated the dialogue for well over the first half hour of the movie, and then still occupied a good 30-50% of it the rest of the time! Okay, so the movie isn't terrible exactly. It has some good cinematography and acting. But, neither is it great. As I said: mediocre. I need to make a note of this so I don't bore myself for three hours trying to watch it again some years down the road. I even rented this movie for $3.99 on Prime Video! The only one of the five I'll need to do that for; I did have it on hold at the library but the number of holds already on it meant that I was not going to get the DVD soon enough. I just canceled that hold.
The three Vegas movies left on my list are the 1996 film Swingers (set in then-present day, so it's really the 90s representative); The Hangover from 2009 (which will probably be the most fun watch out of all five of these); and the 2013 film Last Vegas which was basically a low-rent Hangover just with old people, but the 2010s turns out to have slim pickings for movies about or set in Las Vegas. It's still a fun enough movie anyway, and that DVD is already ready for me to pick up at the library—the other two are streaming on HBO Max.
Anyway, then we watched this week's episode of the Hulu show Only Murders In the Building and then I went to bed.
[posted 12:39 pm]