1. Debbie and I came to an easy decision about some home related business on the phone this morning. Debbie reported that Ellie's condition is stable. I was happy to hear from Debbie, and later from Adrienne, that Debbie's contributions to life in the Langford house have been a great help to Adrienne, Josh, Jack, and, of course, Ellie.
2. Annually, November is a month full of business: Sube registration renewal, home and auto insurance renewal, and the property tax bill will come soon; I've had these obligations in mind for several months and I have prepared for the bills to arrive. Today, I took care of the auto registration and insurance renewals and I expect the property tax bill to arrive any day now and I'll knock that out.
3. After being away much of the weekend and with a trip coming up on Friday to Pendleton, I decided to stay home today and this evening. I was tempted to go to out to Whitworth's campus and hear a 2001 Whitworth grad, Joshua Robbins, read from his published book of poetry at 6:00, but I decided to stay put.
The other day, my rented DVD of the movie Red Rock West came in the mail. I first watched this movie at home about twenty-five years ago. Back at that time, I actively sought out movies featuring Nicholas Cage and I was curious, all these years later, if I would enjoy him today in Red Rock West.
I did.
Cage plays a flat broke ex-Marine with a knee injury desperate for work. He walks into a bar in Red Rock, Wyoming and the owner mistakes him for Lyle from Dallas, Texas, a guy the bar owner has hired to murder his wife. Out of this mistaken identity, a film noir morality tale about money unfolds, replete with revenge, odd alliances, double crosses, a femme fatale, escapes from danger, arson, gun fights, the works. Director John Dahl and his brother, Rick, wrote this movie and my sense was that they knowingly employed, and exaggerated, the conventions of film noir to tell an absurdist tale of an honest man, the Cage character, who walks almost unwittingly into a world of mayhem, greed, lust, amorality, immorality, and murder -- and does all he can not to lose his moral compass.
The movie reminded me how much I enjoyed and admired J. T. Walsh's work over the years (Walsh died in 1998, only 54 years old). Dennis Hopper gave this movie an adrenaline surge -- and made me laugh. I remembered, when I first saw this movie, how impressed I was with Lara Flynn Boyle. I had only seen her before as Wayne's ditzy (former?) girlfriend, Stacy, in Wayne's World. In Red Rock West she plays a steely and greedy criminal, not anything like Stacy, and did so frighteningly well.
If you have been reading my blog over the years, you know that I do not recommend movies for others to see. I realize that I have private and often eccentric reasons for enjoying the movies I do. I like to write about what I experience when I see movies. Watching Red Rock West ignited an enjoyment I had in the 1980s and 1990s for Nicholas Cage's work. I found myself missing J. T. Walsh's work and thinking a lot about all the movies I've seen Dennis Hopper in. I admired Lara Flynn Boyle.
But, mostly, I enjoyed the absurdity of Red Rock West. I enjoyed how suddenly Nicholas Cage's character was immersed in a puzzling, alien, unpredictable world that he had to manufacture ways of surviving in while trying to be true to his own sense of virtue. I thought, especially with all the early shots of endless empty spaces stretching out around Nicholas Cage's character, that it was an action-packed existential movie. And I enjoy that sort of thing.
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