Buttons, movies

At the corner of 8th Street & Avenue C, Way East Village, there's a police bunker that has ground floor archeological exhibits instead of windows (think Fort Apache, with the contents of colonial privies on its side). A bit weather-beaten now, the exhibits are a worthy effort, documenting the excavations of the site before they built the precinct in the early 90s. These buttons are bone, ivory, like the Gates.
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The Host: A Korean horror flick of high entertainment value. The mutant fish-beastie’s a big ol’ blue-screen McGuffin -- for the kids in the audience, I suppose -- because the interaction between the dysfunctional Park family is really the point of the film. I love the scene where four of them are brawling on the floor, while crying in mourning for one of their own, with media vultures circling them with video cameras, and the father’s main concern is to pull his archer daughter’s top down over her low-rider exposure of the southern portion of her small of the back. Nice touch, daddy-o.

The Long Goodbye, at the Film Forum. Elliot Gould is ridiculously cool as Philip Marlowe, mumbling his way through the moral sewer of ‘70s LA. Down those mean streets a good nebbish must walk, and walk in a most loose-limbed way. Very Altman, very, very 70s. Man, I miss narrow ties. We live in an age of fat ties, symptomatic perhaps of the excess and nonsense of the day. But no man looks good in a fat tie.

Sterling Hayden was enormous! You don’t notice that in Dr. Strangelove.