Jekyll now

If you like a bit of serial darkness, I highly recommend Jekyll, which you can watch on BBC America and get caught up OnDemand. James Nesbitt really seems to inhabit two completely different people. Man, that guy can act. It doesn't matter that it's taken from a preexisting story because it's a whole new angle, a whole new story, and it's just really geniusly done. This is so rarely the case.

On another front, I saw The Ten today at the Laemmle Sunset 5. Despite the stellar cast, it full-on blew.

That classic stories continue to get revisited (Bible stuff, British novels (hello, the surge of Austenmania), and so on) not just on film, but in TV. We're so bent on nostalgia and recreating what's been done that we may forget to make our own classics for the future to worship. Don't you think? No?

I'm reading Michael Palin's Sahara and I get the sense that too much history/awareness gets in the way of the appreciation of what there actually is. Problem is: we read too much, we have too many expectations. This is my LA problem. I had an image, and it is the image, but it's not, and I feel like I can't write about it. Here it is, this place, and what does it mean?

What does LA mean?

LA is your car and canyons. LA is those car commercials that looks like it would be fun to drive and also nauseating. It's gorgeous homes, endless Panda Express and the haze-engulfed Pacific. Really good-looking people, even the non-actors, and car accidents, and the freeway, and dry, dry hills melting into green, green lawns that have been watered to look like a place this isn't. It's Sunset, which is a different place everytime you change neighborhoods, and...

I don't know what it is. I can't get a hold on this place yet. It's too big, it's too foreign, far more foreign than London or any European city I've been to. LA has always been a set in a movie pretending to be other places, and when it was itself, half the time it was shot in Vancouver. I know this place, and yet I don't know it at all.

But my job is absolutely brill. So I'll stick around a little while longer.