Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Brother and Sister Grice Go to L.A., Birthday Week, "To Live and Die in L.A."

Day 6: Depression

Nooooo, not really - but there's something a bit saddening about approaching your birthday (Feb. 14 -- gifts, well-wishes, and handouts are currently being accepted) and your mid-late Twenties without the security of a job you hate. Where do I direct all that negative energy??

So far it's been confined to the sterile streets of Cambridge. This crippled lady has taken to jogging (!!) in this upper-middle class suburbia dreamland; I've cooked more food than I thought possible; I've drawn cartoons, reaching back into my 6th-grade bag of hobbies, which I'm going to hang on my wall with a little placard that reads: "What happens when you try to pass time due to Unemployment."

There's been a couple good developments, however.

Sister and Brother Grice are using Bl'erg severance to go wander around Los Angeles! We're doing it - the tickets have been bought, the e-mails have been sent, the tentative interviews with movie-industry jobs are in the works. It should be grand.

I've also begun planning my usual Morgan's Birthday Week festivities, which begin on Wednesday with another Grice dinner party. On the menu so far are Texas Hold-Ums chipotle hamburgers, chicken rice pots with avocado/sour cream dip, some variety of cookies -- and, as usual, a lot of Grice stress.

Oh, unemployment.

Of course, my Cantabrigian host has been a dear friend and has facilitated much movie-watching to get me through my trying time of sloth and gluttony. My favorite film was the well-timed (considering my very possible Westward move) "To Live and Die in L.A." Man, oh, man -- it features a young Willem Dafoe as a rotten counterfeiter, a cuh-razily young John Turturro, and William Petersen (looks like his only other big thing he's done is CSI, meh) as a Secret Service agent who's going after Dafoe. Wang Chung does the original score for the film ... I mean, you can't get more 80s than this flick. I knew I was going to love it when a money-carrier character goes into a train station, walks up to the Amtrak counter and receives a note that just says "Hello Asshole."

The only thing that comes close was another Friend movie suggestion, "Thief," which I watched a couple months ago. Same synthesizer-loaded music soundtrack, lots of crazy car chases and bad explosions ... It turns out William Petersen was in that oldie as well. Some of these 80s dudes really suited their decade.

The "To Live and Die in L.A." trailer, below.

God, in another life, please make me a cool Secret Service Agent ... or, rather, maybe a cool counterfeiter who is described as Armed and Extremely Dangerous. Don't let me be a laid off movie critic! A second-rate movie critic at that, SIGH!

3 comments:

Sunday's Child said...

totally off the main point---
when i grew up in texas, we thought the difference between tex-mex and cal-mex was that californias used sour cream.

was i always wrong, or have texans changed? (yes, i know that i am old)

Anonymous said...

I follow this blog through Google Reader.

Go act it out in LA. See you on the big screen.

Paramendra Kumar Bhagat said...

February 14 is such an amazing day to have for birthday. Wow.