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26 september 1997

8:15 p.m.

Dear diary, Yet another Friday, yet another painful Hawaiian class, yet another late night waiting for Derek to leave work after an evening of sapping the state for every cent of overtime it can muster... Yet another movie. It's not by bizarre coincidence that we're taking in all these flicks. It's part of a comprehensive "get out more" (read: stay in less) campaign Derek's concocted to keep our relationship from becoming... too one dimensional. That's why I love the guy -- he does all the "girl thinking" for me. I don't think it is, but... well, there is a reason why there hasn't been much to say about my love life. Tonight will probably be "Shall We Dance," a Japanese film unavoidably compared to "Strictly Ballroom" (which I also loved). We picked it partially because it comes highly recommended and partially because everything else out there (at least from American studios) seems to suck. At least the movie industry as a whole is worth a faint giggle. Scanning the airwaves today for movie ads netted the oxymoron of the day (with emphasis on moron): "Brad Pitt, in an epic film..." (Okay, Pitt films are traditionally too long.) O rapture. Both meatheads I love to hate are in movies coming soon to a theater too near for me. Brad Pitt as an enlightened soul in Tibet and Keanu Reeves as a lawyer (or something equally preposterous). I'll concede that Reeves' Shakespearean work wasn't bad, and I guess he has to get extra points for being a local boy (but one-quarter Hawaiian? I think not). After he mangled Gibson's awesome "Jonny Mnemonic," though, there will never be redemption. Why do I have to be movie mad when the flicks are so bad? I mean, I just bought six GMT movie tickets (discounted to "expensive" from "hideously expensive" for sapped students), and I can barely afford a Spam musubi for lunch. Lately my suspicion of a Grand Hollywood Template seems nearly indisputable. When Derek and I saw "In & Out" last week, the movie previews were all the proof I need. Two crime suspense flicks coming out -- "Kiss the Girls" and some other film -- smell like the output from the same bad Mad Lib. Shown back to back, the similarities between the two plots were painfully obvious. "Joe/Bob was a good cop..." says a booming voice, "Until someone made it personal." "Where's my son/daughter!" screams the star. Throw in lightning-cut scenes of running through a forest, an echoing scream and a couple of booming orchestral crashes, and you've got sure-fire blockbusters. Bleah. When is Diane graduating? I need good American cinema, and I need it now! Since I'm sitting here instead of in a rubber room, I obviously survived the handover to the new MacOS (why don't they just call it "moss"?). No mess at all. Turns out a lot of my fellow fruit fans were a little nervous about making the step, waiting for me to jump first just in case the pool was empty. What dears. Rest easy, meekies, it didn't hurt at all. Actually, I have to confess it was a little anticlimactic. <GEEK> Sure, there were a handful of hiccups in the switch to make it interesting. The system software now sucks up 8 megs of my hard-won memory (is that why they call it OS8?) -- that's half my baby's brain. And now the pull-down menus stick open with a single click, eerily like clunky old Windoze. On the other hand, my dear Mac -- often marginalized as a simpleton's machine -- moved closer to feeling like a hefty swiss army knife. Gobs of new options in new menus, many I still have to figure out but none cutting in on the basic grace of the system. And I don't think I was wrong about it being zippier. Before, when I'd open a folder or drag a file, my Mac used to seem to want to think about it first. Barely noticable (though when I was using the IIsi I could count seconds), actually, but now that hesitation is simply gone. Even starting up is faster... though still not real fast. About that multithreaded whatsit. Forget the jargon -- it's a refreshing advance. I copied my graphics folder and trashed it while starting BBEdit -- just like you see in all those glossy ads -- just to prove it could be done. Simple pleasures, I know. Even the new desktop patters were entertaining enough to waste ten minutes playing. I really like the new options for views. I've always thought the standard Mac icons were just a little too big, a little too Duplo. Now I can make them tiny, have them line up and always sort themselves alphabetically. The basic list view is a little buggy, though. The much gushed-over Platinum look? Feh. Not oodles better than the old look, not oodles worse. Since I'd been goofing with Kaleidoscope for months (there's a pastel pink star-and-heart scheme out there, for chrissakes), the official face didn't impress. Nothing I'd had installed before conflicted. I'm not sure about RAMDoubler, though. It wants to do its memory shuffling thing, but OS8 wants me to use "virtual memory" (a hard-drive scratch disk). It can't do both, and I'm not sure which is better, or faster. </GEEK> Just a few minutes left. Reading the latest Weekly. There's hope for me after all. The Hawai`i International Film Festival's coming to town in November, as is the Honolulu Underground Film Festival. HIFF is always chock full of guaranteed winners, and maybe I'll actually get to see a few -- this year you won't have to be a member of the film society to get in. Director Ang Lee and critic Roger Ebert (analyzing Akira Kurosawa films of all things). John Seale of the good-but-not-that-good "English Patient" will also be in town. I've never checked out the underground festival -- frankly it scares me -- but I just might try it. Bare-bones filmmaking turns out some terrible crap but it also has its brain-popping gems. There are usually some local filmmakers mixed in, too... maybe the gang from "Sleepless" put something out this year. What else... Oh, the Iona Pear Dancers have a new show. Now there's "art" that makes even PBS-loving liberals consider censorship. Now, I'm all for abstract non-sequiters (HAND!), but -- I'm sorry -- wrapping a guy up in tin foil and Christmas lights and having him writhe around in a tub of marbles and lobsters while a line of dancers in black body stockings does the congo backwards around him is not dance. What's worse, they dare call it "traditional Japanese butoh." No doubt Hijikata would roll in his grave... if he was dead. (Seeing Iona Pear could easily do him in.) I see a disciple of the evil John Gray is also on the island... but I've already talked about justified censorship. Oh, and happy birthday Michael. It gets better, I promise.