Movies About Dancing

Doretta finished her thesis and handed it in. We here on the west coast are celebrating by making lemonade from concentrate and drinking the whole jug of it before bed, although that would amount to eighty percent of our total daily recommended carbs (it's the sugar, Jim) so maybe a couple glasses of lemonade and then water. In any case, sorry I wasn't there to make you lemonade from concentrate and take you out on daily walks while you were writing kid, hope the handcream-by-post made up for it.

This weekend, or I guess since Wednesday night, has been a hot-faced blur of flu. Today I hauled my carcass out of bed at 7:20 to go shoot my final directing class project. It's possible that being ill while having to direct is a good thing for me, because I have energy and focus for very few things, not including remembering the actors' (or their characters') names. So instead of making overly fussy, mega-specific comments as I usually do, I let my previous overly fussy, mega-specific comments from rehearsal percolate into good performances of a fantastic script from three decent actors. I should do this every time I have to direct something: rehearse in lucid sobriety, and shoot in the dreamy haze of fever and exhaustion. Anyway, more and more, I am convinced that the secret of working with actors is not unlike the secret of working with horses: be the master or get kicked. I've stopped trying to be nice and friendly with actors and now I just make sure they know it's my show. Which is itself often an act, but if there's anything an actor likes it's acting games.

Speaking of movies, and you'll forgive me because I don't often speak of movies, partly because nothing is more boring than someone who makes or studies movies and only talks about movies and also because movies aren't often all that interesting, I saw a fantastic movie that I would like to recommend called "That's The Way I Like It". If you love Singapore, and superhot pants from the 70s with the waistband around the bottom of the ribcage, and fairly convincing covers of the entire soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever", and supermarkets in Asia called "Oriental Emporium", and lots and lots of hot disco, Netflix this film or get it from Videomatica, because it's very unlikely it will be in your neighbourhood DVD rack.

I also watched "Breakin'" and "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" tonight. Which somehow I never saw before. There was so much hotness that at times I felt like the guy in "Legend of the Lost Ark" whose face melts. How could I have missed these movies? Huge swaths of missing cultural understanding fell into place upon their viewing. "Bring It On"? "Zoolander"? Bow, BOW before the wonder that is the "Breakin'" films. Is the second one not set in Echo Park? Boogaloo Shrimp, why did you not tell me?