Abbie's Real Life Blog

I highly recommend the Christmas Blues genre station on Pandora, if you’re looking for some new Christmas music.  Lovely and lacking in sentimental schmaltz.  I’m not a fan of schmaltz, as a general rule.  I bought a new Christmas album, as I seem to do every year, but it hasn’t arrived despite the fact that I ordered it in early November.  Rgh.  Oh well.  Pandora is good for now.

I finally watched On the Waterfront last night, which I had rented at least twice from Ninth Street Video (our local arty video store in Columbia) but hadn’t actually managed to watch yet.  I hate it when I do that, but sometimes these movies just sound much longer and much worse than they are.  I mean, they’re not bad movies, obviously, because they’re in the Top 100 of all time (American) movies, but that doesn’t seem to matter to me.  I rented Ben-Hur for at least two weeks last year and still haven’t even put it in the disc player.  Dumb.

Anyway, I wish I could appreciate Marlon Brando a little better than I do.  I know he is considered a great actor, possibly the greatest of all time, and I do appreciate his work, but I have to admit that I was more distracted by his eyeliner in On the Waterfront than excited by his acting.  That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate the acting.  I thought Rod Steiger and Lee J. Cobb were both really fine.  There were some reaction shots- by Rod Steiger at the beginning and by Lee J. Cobb in the final scenes- that took this movie to another level.  And I always love Karl Malden.  Roger Ebert, however, thought that Brando influenced Steiger and Cobb and that Malden looks cheesy in comparison, but what does he know?  He’s only the greatest living (American) film critic.

Maybe cutting my baby teeth on Marlon Brando by watching Guys and Dolls three thousand times during my preteen years wasn’t such a great idea.  I’m sure that didn’t lay the groundwork for an objective appraisal of his acting style.

I am so behind on Christmas shopping/preparations.  People on Facebook are crowing about gift-wrapping and I don’t even have something to gift-wrap.  I know I’ve already bitched about this, but I can’t seem to get started.  My holiday cards do arrive today, though.  Maybe I’ll order myself some calendars for the new year and that will help me too.  Low expectations, low expectations.