Life, Liberty, The Pursuit of Happiness

 When I finally got home last night, after work, after walking over to the sheriff's for my weekly sign up, after going to Walmart for chicken, I was too bloody tired to do any work on "Love Stinks." It was close to 3 hours from leaving work to getting home. I did call KH. He had finished reading the parts written. He dislikes it. He finds my female lead a basket case. It is experimental, I wanted the characters to be problematic - damaged people, and I did not want to tell it in the usual bright-eyed and chipper way. She is supposed to be neurotic, under-educated, but intelligent. Anyway, that was last night's bad news.

I have been up for a bit over three hours. There was a trip to McClure's. Fiddling with articles I have downloaded. One post on Erich Remarque was started. The email got a light review.  I caught the start of the Dev Patel David Copperfield. I heard about it - the casting made the news. It is rather good, the casting controversy detracted, IMHO, from the quality of the movie. You should check it out.

Readings from The Guardian:

The King Who Never Was review – the gripping tale of the first royal to be arrested ‘since Marie Antoinette’ 

 If the film begins with a slight sense of a barrel being scraped – a 1978 not-even-murder by a pseudo-royal the international market has largely never heard of? C’mon! – it soon justifies itself as an examination of how much can go right in your life if you have enough power, business connections, money and private travel arrangements. It takes up the genre’s common thread – the contingency of freedom and justice on all the things that should have absolutely nothing to do with it – and adds a royal twist without descending into sensationalism or gorging on the opulence and wealth of everyone involved. It gives plenty of space to all the main characters to tell their stories without interference, and if one side seems to crave indulgence and showcase an extraordinary amount of self-pity while the other seems, frankly, to transcend all earthly failings and make you want to lead a better life – well, that’s on each of them.

It has an unexpected and absolute kicker of a coda, too. Don’t switch off too soon.

‘Newsflash: we’re not all meek’: how brash, funny Asian women took over our screens  

But that’s changing in a loud, significant way – and Joy Ride, out July, is the latest film to trash those old stereotypes.

Starring Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu, Ashley Park from Emily in Paris and comedians Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu (who uses they/them pronouns), Joy Ride doesn’t just centre the stories of four Asian-American women and non-binary people; it does so in a bawdy, raucous and unapologetically crass comedy.

I updated More Thoughts on Cormac McCarthy - The Sound of Writing.

I have been trying to fill in a gap in "Love Stinks". I am getting close. Time to get to that.

8:40