THE SWEDES AND FRENCH KNOW FILM TOO.

I went to a nice Christmas party Saturday and was mistaken to be only 25 years old at the karaoke bar Sunday night. Defying my true age feels good.

O.k. I'm obsessed with films. Somebody stop me! It's just so easy to sit back effortlessly and take all this cinema in...I watched Queen Christina (1933) starring Greta Garbo and I was impressed. Really good movie. Emotional even! I was thinking for a while that Garbo may have been overrated during her short acting career, but now I see why she got all the accolades. She was quite an exotic beauty, with an irresistible accent, and very androgynous characteristics. I believe she is more notable for her silent movies, but I have yet to watch those. Like IKEA, Volvo, and ABBA, Garbo is one of Sweden's great exports; amazing that her film career lasted such a short while! She really only made films in the 20s and 30s, and retired from Hollywood and the limelight by about age 35! WOW! Now that's a legend folks! I may be going out on a limb here, but I've seen pics of my mother in her youth, and she kind of resembles Greta. My mother however is not bisexual, which Garbo was; she had affairs with women as well. Garbo lived a long life and retired from acting young and was pretty wise with her cash. She was frugal and lived a comfortable private secluded socialite life until her death well into her eighties.

Another film that I sat through that most normal people would've turned off within the first ten minutes was Jean de Florette, a French flick about a hunchback city dweller (played by Gérard Depardieu) and his family who inherit a nice country home from a dead relative that was killed by his greedy neighbors who want his land for its rich soil and underground natural spring. They purposely clog the spring with cement and do everything they can to make the new family fail at their venture in the country! A very simple, yet interesting story to me, but boring to most I suppose; there are really greedy wicked people out there and this movie shows Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil in some fine performances as very dirty rotten scoundrels! Makes me wanna go visit the French countryside and shoot people like this actually! LOL! There's a part two to this called Manon of the Spring, where the daughter grows up and gets revenge for what was done to her father, so I'm kind of anticipating how she's gonna get back at these two awful bastards! ;) Good for the ear to hear French spoken like this, even though they speak so damn fast and the dialect used in the movie is a bit harder than the one in Paris I believe.

It's raining here in L.A! YEEHA! I got the song for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTLJMSbEnn0