Destroyer - An Actor's Revenge

It's all disengagement today on the news. I started out my day by getting teary-eyed. I'm sure I'll end the day the same way.

But to less stressful things. eMusic has all the Destroyer albums now. Previously, they only had Streethawk, a Seduction. So I am overdosing now on the exhilarating Your Blues and This Night. Destroyer is one of those bands that's one guy plus whoever he has record with for that particular album. So this Daniel Bejar guy is basically Destroyer. His voice and singing style are really close to Bowie in his Ziggy period, but the lyrics remind me of later Bowie -- very cut-and-paste and opaque. The music is kind of Decemberists, kind of. Lots of fun. Bejar was part of the New Pornographers at some point, so he's the vocals on some of Electric Version.

Anyway.

My g/f is back from her trip to the East Coast. It was fun picking her and her girls up from LAX and seeing everyone again. Her girls have their dad and I'm not trying to compete or anything. But we have a relationship of sorts, and I do miss them when they're not around.

Yesterday my g/f and I we went bra shopping! It's hard to beat bra shopping for sheer weirdness of the usual rules being out the window. Normally we try and avoid staring at breasts. At Victoria's Secret, it was a salesgirl and I intently inspecting the way my g/f's breasts looked in one bra vs another. Very weird and fun. And we discovered the demi was the way to go.

Then we saw Broken Flowers. Gorgeous movie. Bill Murray is wonderful. Very ambiguous ending. It's like the movie was one long shot of an ice-covered lake. At the end, the ice begins to crack. And that's it. Of course, the movie is not just one shot of an ice-covered lake, but Bill Murray's character Don Johnston IS frozen in the movie, very passive, paralyzed into inaction by an unknown event or life crisis. And when he ends up flying around the country to visit ex-girlfriends to see which one of them wrote him an anonymous letter saying he has a 19 year old kid who is on a road trip to find him, it's only because his internet-savvy wannabe-detective next-door neighbor tracks everyone down and plans the whole trip. Nothing in this movie is caused of Don's own volition until the last minutes of the movie. There is a great arc in this movie. It's not fair to compare Bill Murray's character here to his character in Lost in Translation or The Aquatic Life or any other of his recent roles since he suddenly became one of our finest actors. But it's safe to say that if the other recent movies he's done irritate the hell out of you, Broken Flowers is definitely not for you.

Something hit me as we watched the previews --- I feel so unusual and odd most of the time, in my taste in movies as everything else. But when these little indie moviehouses get an audience for movies like Broken Flowers together, the theater is suddenly filled with people that share my taste in movies. And all the previews are often movies I want to see (mixed with one or two pretentious period costume drama pieces geared towards women). And then I realize that I am part of a neatly defined demographic that can be advertised to and classified and compartmentalized, despite all my feelings of uniqueness. Which is comforting, or scary, depending on what's going on in my life at the time.

Anyway. Back to work.