Knocked Up certainly lingered in my mind this morning. I love movies that I can both enjoy just as entertainment, and think about afterward to discern their various meanings...

People say the Katherine Heigl character and the Seth Rogen character seem mis-matched because she is such a beauty and he's an ordinary guy, but it occurs to me that other than their looks, they are much alike. Like him, she doesn't seem especially ambitious, even though she gets handed a great job opportunity on a silver platter; and just as he lives communally with a bunch of pals, she lives not independently but with her sister, brother-in-law, and nieces.

She's not the only one who gets "knocked up" in the movie. If you look at the phrase "knocked up" just as two words with their plain meanings, Rogen's character is "knocked up" too--knocked up the maturity ladder from his extended adolescence towards a sense of greater responsibility. Also, he grows as a person in that he takes on the pitfalls and pleasures of real love instead of spending his time goofing off and making juvenile remarks about sex.

Likewise, Heigl's character is "knocked up" the maturity ladder by being made to realize throughout the film that she cannot control every aspect of her life (just as her married sister can't, either). From unavoidably throwing up on her job when she first gets pregnant, to realizing during childbirth that the process is not going to go exactly as she had planned, she learns to go with the flow just as Rogen's character does.

But the movie also makes the point that this is a story about two specific people; two other people may have acted entirely differently. Heigl's character doesn't get an abortion after getting pregnant during a one-night stand with a friendly but comparative stranger (Rogen) because she decides she wants the baby, and is willing to give the guy who impregnated her a chance; but another woman in her position may have felt and acted differently. Heigl's character is good-natured and sweet, although she has her testy moments (which make her sweetness all the more real). She gets pregnant and accepts without too much struggle that this is the adventure life has handed her, and she will deal with it in a positive, healthy way. This scenario can be seen as just a Hollywood fairy tale only if we refuse to believe that some people can actually accept the things life hands them. But the movie makes it clear through the attitudes of other characters that not everybody shares this "go with the flow" point of view.

I think Rogen's appearance in the film is also a humorous visual pun, as his pudgy hairiness makes one think of a caveman as much as a pot-smoking slacker. Interestingly, although he acts more and more mature as the film goes on, he retains his teddy bear appearance throughout, which is a nice touch since it means that Heigl's character, despite her own tidy beauty, in the end takes him as he is, and does not attempt to transform him into some society-mandated clone of the appropriate husband. The truth of the matter is that both characters meet each other half way; retaining their identities while making necessary but not soul-obliterating compromises.

I also detected, nicely, an ambivalent tone towards marriage and children throughout the film, which makes the movie honest and generally unsentimental. While clearly leaning on the side of matrimony and kids, Knocked Up also acknowledges the darker and difficult side of these things through humor, which can be the most subtle method of presenting a fully humanistic view of a particular subject. In the end, I think it's better to use a belly laugh than a sledgehammer to get your point across.

I think the years are going to show that Knocked Up is a truly classic film on a level with the great comedies of the 30s and 40s, those beauties starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, or Irene Dunne. It would be a great thing to discuss in a film course!

I saw Knocked Up tonight--funny, sweet movie. A very realistic depiction of the kind of men beautiful women should have sex and babies with.

I'm sure you know the plot already, since it's one of the top movies currently in the country. To me, the only truly odd thing about the flick was that leading lady Katherine Heigl kept her bra on in the sex scenes. Maybe her character didn't want to get droopy boobs during her pregnancy?

I noticed in the trailers for all the comedies preceding the feature that most of the humor was based in violence, people getting kicked or hit or smashed. But Knocked Up was able to get big laughs just with dialogue and off people's personal quirks. I don't recall anybody getting slugged during the entire running time. Refreshing.

Katherine Heigl is a very pretty gal. If I absolutely had to get a girl pregnant accidentally, she would be my #2 choice of partner after my current #1, Jessica Biel.

Jessica Biel was in one of the trailers tonight for an Adam Sandler movie, and she...was...awesome.

Anyhow, the way Katherine delivered her lines in some scenes reminded me of the way Diana, a young platonic lady friend of mine, talks. They're both about the same age, and Heigl's character and Diana's real life personality exhibit the same kind of skeptical, "out of the corner of the eye" kind of glance when they look askance upon something, and want to let you know, you silly man, they don't believe a word of what you're saying.

I got a lot of that kind of look from Diana over Memorial Day weekend when I was trying to explain to her my theory that women dress sexy because they want to get a rise out of men. She didn't agree. I tried to convince her, but all I got was that "corner of the eye" thing...

Anyway, I kept sitting there in the first half of Knocked Up thinking, "Damn! Who does Katherine Heigl remind me of that I know?" When I finally realized it was Diana, I was able to concentrate better. Although Diana is raven-haired to Katherine's blonde.

I'd like to see Heigl play a Viking queen in a film. She certainly has the statuesque looks for it. I want to see her rule the empire of the Vikings and send men to do battle in her personal arena.

Can I pre-reserve my ticket on Fandango for that?

Whoops, but she would be about sixty now...

Who is Alaina Capri, you ask? I'll get to that shortly...

For the last couple of days, I've been working on a piece of fiction, a long story idea I came up with over the weekend. Monday's writing went smoothly but today's was slower, a real slogging through at some points. Half the time I sat with my face in my hands, saying, "Why I am writing this? Why bother?"

I've just been reading so much fiction of late and felt inspired to do a piece of my own, I guess.

Whenever I try to write something that might have some real potential I engage myself in a mental battle over whether I'm wasting my time or not. A real feeling of hopelessness comes over me, and uselessness. I do plenty of freelance work that involves some writing but I never experience the kind of self-doubt I do when I try to do something just for myself.

This self-doubt particularly comes up whenever I try to write a serious story about the interplay between a man and woman. When I was in high school, I was once working on a short story and I left my room to go to the bathroom for a few minutes. Well, my father wandered into my room and read the pages I'd foolishly left out on my blotter. His cutting comment has stayed with me for the rest of my life: "Instead of writing about having a girlfriend, why don't you go out and get one?" Since then I always ask myself the same question when I work on fiction that focuses on relationships between guys and gals.

Ironically, my father's question was totally unfair, because I wasn't just sitting around in my room daydreaming about impossible things. Unlike a lot of bookish high schoolers, my friends and I were constantly meeting girls and going on dates. We might not have been the Big Men On Campus, but nobody could fault us for not being in the game. We went to plenty of parties, felt up lots of tits, got our hands under lots of waistbands, took girls to the movies and for pizza and out in the forest preserves near Chicago to make out and fool around. We went to our senior proms and dry-humped our way toward college. I didn't know anybody who lost their virginity until they got to college (this was 1969, remember) but we did pretty well considering.

So my father's comment irked me even as it contributed to my masculine inferiority complex, not to mention my issues as a writer.

Anyway, at least I wrote the daily quota of words I set myself. Will I succeed again tomorrow? Anything is possible. I've given up so many projects that start promisingly that I count on nothing.

Sometimes I'd rather just view a video...like...COMMON LAW CABIN, directed by Russ Meyer, which I watched last night, a 1967 sexploitation bonanza full of exaggerated bustlines and heavy-breathing and starring the gorgeous Alaina Capri (ya gotta love that name) who exemplified a certain kind of woman in the 1960s--the brassy, big-chested, big-haired Mediterranean type who drove a lot of guys (like me) crazy! Alaina Capri was the best of the 60s! She only made two movies for Russ, and then left the cinema firmament forever. She sure was sexy and funny, with her burlesque-dancer wiggle and her Mae West delivery. Anyway, below is a link to a couple of shots of Alaina from the website Mr. Skin.com--no nudity, but two hot shots nonetheless that give you the flavor of her brassy film personality.

In Common Law Cabin, Alaina is the hot babe with the wandering eye who's married to a neurotic bespectacled fussbudget of a doctor. She works as his nurse, but complains that she's tired of all the sick people she's got to deal with. Following her down a staircase as she wiggles her ass and jiggles her tits in a tight dress, he cries, "What do you expect?? I'm a doctor! Do you expect me to treat healthy people??" As if he were willing to do just that to get back on her good side!!

That line made me laugh for five minutes. There was just something about his exaggerated frustration, and her tormentingly perfect poise as she strutted her stupendous body on her stiletto heels, that exemplified for me the cosmic comedy of the war between men and women.

Common Law Cabin is a colossal movie. The story is so totally ridiculous I won't recount it, but the flick itself is like music for the eye and ear between its vistas of jiggling babes and soundtrack of insane dialogue. Good ole Russ was a master at his unique filmmaking thing.

And seeing Alaina Capri's rack in this epic, even though she never unsheathed those jugs completely and kept them in bras or swimsuits, was enough to turn me into a mindless breast feeder again...

I'd give up writing forever for one taste of such heaven!!

AlainaCapriAtMrSkin

I am an inveterate browser of books and movies...

I went down to Union Square this afternoon, stopping by the Strand with its "sixteen miles of books"...the movie I saw last night, By Love Possessed, intrigued me with its storyline, so I picked up a used copy of the 1957 novel it was based upon. It was a top bestseller in its day; and the movie, although entertaining, implied a much larger story, so I thought I'd look at the source material. It's over 500 pages long, and I don't know if I'll get through it, but it was only $3.95...

I like those 1950s and early 1960s Hollywood melodramas set in New England or Southern towns, full of steamy passions and emotional confrontations...my favorite is Some Came Running from 1958, with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, and Shirley MacLaine, but there are others: Peyton Place, A Summer Place, Parrish, and Susan Slade, all providing heavy-breathing screen evidence of the dying of the uptight 1950s morality and the rapid approach of the free-for-all 1960s credo. In these movies, I find the tension between desire and its frustration or guilty fulfillment to be fascinating, and something I can identify with. Because there is definitely a part of me that feels I don't have a right to simply live, to enjoy myself...but rather that I have to prove my worth every second of the day through some sort of achievement.

Sex? A trip to the beach? Those are for slackers.

I also found a $1.00 copy of Learned Optimism by Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the few self-help books I ever actually found helpful. It tells you how to talk yourself out of anxious moods through a step-by-step exercise in deliberate reasoning, and I have found that it can work. It's too complicated to explain here, but it's based in principles of cognitive therapy, where you look at your perceptions of things and events and try to see that it's not all gloom and doom. Anyway, I already have a copy--a well-annotated one--but it's been misplaced in the clutter of my apartment, so I thought I'd pick up a used copy for a buck.

The Strand is a great place to go for bargains like this.

I also discovered a writer I had never heard of before named May Sinclair. I picked up a copy of her 1923 collection of weird tales, Uncanny Stories, for six dollars, and read one as I had my noodle soup for dinner at a restaurant in the block-long "Little Japan" on 9th Street in the East Village. The story was called "Where their Fire is not Quenched," and was about two adulterous lovers in Victorian England who die and then find themselves together in purgatory, reliving their empty and boring love affair throughout eternity. The psychology of the story's realistic set-up of the relationship was more interesting to me than the supernatural part, but nonetheless it did get pretty spooky as the woman's spirit keeps trying to find her lost innocence in the afterlife, but instead just keeps running into her coarse lover who reminds her again and again of the sensual being she really was--an identity she hypocritically denied while alive. Ultimately they just find themselves alone with each other in a hotel room in hell...I'm not sure exactly what the point of the story was; I have to think about it some more, but maybe one of the things Sinclair was trying to say is that you might as well admit what you like and who you are, otherwise life becomes a hell on earth and might even lead to actual hell afterward, an eternal hell of endlessly repeated hypocrisy and boredom.

Her work had a real Twilight Zone feel, about forty years before the Twilight Zone.

Well, there's no use kidding myself on this score...I like to browse and bring home new affordable acquisitions. It really seems to be a big part of who I am.

Come to think of it, I wish there were stripclubs with soft, low key music, where you could just browse amongst the dancers, chat them up, have a drink, and get a dance. A place with the same easy curious rambling to be found by booklovers in the venerable stacks of the Strand.

Sometimes I wonder what my purpose in life is. Don’t laugh; I’m not being pretentious--really, if you don’t think about this question every once in awhile, how can you not lose your way? I don’t get the impression that successful people just "wing" it. And I don’t mean “successful” just in the financial sense, but successful in the sense of people who feel their lives are generally happy and on the right track.

This has to be one of the toughest periods of my recent life and I’m not taking it too well. All the stresses from various angles--freelance work, tighter money, middle-aged health situations--are throwing me into a state of apathy and inertia, rather than activity.

My doctor told me recently, in a good-natured, rather than critical way, that I have to stop worrying so much about myself, that I’m okay. But I’ve had some minor complaints and any little new thing makes me nervous that it’s something serious. My mood is a fearful one. I wonder, though, if this is characteristic of people who are dealing with the serious illnesses of other people, as I have in the last year with my kid sister's bout with cancer. She's doing okay now, knock wood, but it set off a primal anxiety in me...

Also, at the same time, I’ve been staying away from the stripclubs for budget-tightening reasons, and this withdrawal has had negative impact on my emotions, perhaps even on my personality. I was never just going for the T&A; rather, it was a big part of my social life. My connection to vibrant young women, which has always been a part of my life, and which I found in these clubs, has been severed for the most part. This lack has affected my pleasure in my other relationships. I’m finding that in general I don’t enjoy spending as much time with other people, that I'm listless and restless, and would rather mostly be alone to read or write or daydream.

I also feel like time is running out and I don't want to waste it.

Ah, midlife blues...I have so fallen so far from the ideals that I was motivated by in high school and college that I sometimes fear I have made a botch of things.

When I was a senior in high school, I had a teacher who pumped up my ego full of dreams and aspirations to which my talent turned out not to be equal. However, the fact that I had won a prestigious writing award made it seem that I had more promise than I actually did. Anyway, this teacher meant well, and in that heyday of Jewish-American writers she probably had her own fantasy of discovering the next one amongst her students in the local neighborhood, and I remember how one day she told me I had the stuff to be a young Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth. When I got to college, which was far more difficult than high school, I was quickly disbursed of the feasibility of my lofty goals, but NOT of the emotional hunger and fantasies to fulfill them. But it seems that consequently I went in the opposite direction, maybe in despair that I could even fulfill a fraction of the promise that this teacher had seen in me...or maybe it was just laziness and a fear of failure that motivated me to take an easier way. I've had a habit of giving up things when they prove too difficult.

I think about stuff like this when I feel purposeless and directionless on a humid Saturday afternoon, when all I can do is lift yet another suspense novel or film buff magazine in front of my face to distract myself from the disappointments I feel on a minute-to-minute basis. Don’t get me wrong; I have worked hard in my life, I’ve accomplished things, I like the freelance work I do and I’m good at it; but when I'm in a certain mood it all just seems so far down the ladder up which I had figured on climbing...

I think they're called “delusions of grandeur.” It's been hard to shrug them off...

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Ah, my writer/artist friend ZP, who looks like a tall Kafka, just gave me a phone call and I took a ten-minute break to chat with him. He’s going to California for a week to visit his girlfriend, and he’s been taking bold steps with his life: just moved to a new apartment, getting ready to take a long summer course for a complicated new job in the fall, and last but not least, bringing stuff over to his storage space. So he’s actually reminded me of a purpose in my life, one that I constantly procrastinate over: to put MY own extra stuff in boxes and bring it over to MY own storage unit, so I can make some more living space in my cave.

I knew I still had a mission...but sometimes it just feels so mundane. 7:08 p.m.

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Postscript to the above, 10:58 p.m.

Mood is a strange thing. After I wrote the above semi-whiny lamentation, my spirits lifted. I put a movie in the VCR and got myself some Chinese take-out.

My mood had been so low that, in describing myself as "purposeless and directionless" above, I was forgetting that while ate my lunch in a fast food joint this afternoon, I sketched out the complete plot of a novel. I've written three unpublished books, and I'm still hoping to do one that is worthy of success.

One reason I write this blog, going into sometimes embarrassing detail about my emotions, is that I like to show how one mind, my mind, works--in the hope that it will give a little illumination to other people about how our brains work in general: sometimes sharp, sometimes muddled. Reading things like this from other folks has always been a comfort to me, at any rate.

The movie, by the way, was By Love Possessed, a 1961 Lana Turner melodrama that was most memorable for the three scenes in which Yvonne (Batgirl) Craig popped up as "Veronica" the town tramp, putting her hooks in a rich boy played by George Hamilton. I know my writer/bodybuilder/streetfighter friend Rexx likes Yvonne Craig in her 1960s prime; I'll have to pass it onto him so he can take a look. She sure wore some tight sweaters in this one...