Listen, I had a long night on Monday.  Worked from 9:30 am to 11 pm, when I started hallucinating about Joan of Arc (the flames rose to her Roman nose and her Walkman started to melt).  So bear with me if I start lapsing into cliches and mashed syntax.  Okay, here goes:

On Friday, I went to see Blade Runner 2049 again.  The first viewing had been at a Dolby Surround
Sound theater and, though it conveyed the sturm und drang of swooping rocket cars and a pounding electro soundtrack, the soundstage completely smeared the dialogue ... and dialogue is crucial to this movie.  This time, I went to a so-called Dine-In theater where they serve you dinner at your plush seat: I had a pretty good fish and chips.  My server was very friendly, a young lady studying to be an audiologist at Columbia University and, as an obsessive audiophile, I had an involved discussion with her about analog vs digital sound, though she wanted to talk while the previews were bashing away in the background.

Blade Runner 2049 is an uncanny masterpiece.  I haven't seen such an original and, surprisingly, poetic film in five years or so.  Reviews sniff that it is 3 hours long but, in both viewings, I was so absorbed by the concept of the thing that time was only an afterthought, if that.  Most of the pre-hype was about its super-sci-fi presentation, but it completely missed the lyrical moments, as did the reviews that, though mostly positive, took a rather bland view of the film.  Like Blade Runner itself, it did not have the huge money-haul that was expected of it, probably because word of mouth about the multi-level plot turned off your usual popcorn crowd.  As in "uh, what's Nabokov's Pale Fire that he wants to read to his synthetic girlfriend?  Why didn't they use Stephen King?"

I won't give away much else about the film.  The performances by everyone are topnotch, especially Ana de Armas as the holographic synthetic girlfriend of the Blade Runner.  Even as she flickers in and out of view and shape shifts, she conveys a compassionate and gorgeous aura.  In one scene, the Blade Runner gives her a gift that lends her the ability to leave his apartment: she walks out to the balcony and senses the endless snow of the city falling on her hand with the sweet surprise of a child: then, when she is frozen in an ecstatic pose during an interruption by a holographic voice mail, she looks like a graceful surrealistic statue in a Jean Cocteau film (his Beauty and the Beast has never been bettered).  If I had any faith in the Academy Awards (I haven't since they bestowed kudos on the mediocre Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction), she'd get one.

I came out of the theater completely overwhelmed.  I think it will be appreciated more in the coming years than now, much like the original film, which Blade Runner 2049 honors in mysterious ways.

From genius to moronic then: I've had feedback from a reader of this blog about my observations on the amusingly hideous Sex and the City movies.  She maintains that SATC 2 is worse than the first movie and, you know, I have major conflicts over choosing between the two.  When I watch SATC 2, I think, God, SATC 1 has true contempt for the human condition but SATC 2 is below contempt, based mostly on the girls' jaunt to Abu Dhabi where they patronize local culture while indulging in gluttony in a resort kingdom that resembles a crass cross between a debased Disneyland and an Arabian Nights playpen zone of West World.

My reader asks me to bullet point low lights from this senseless travesty:

• The Gay Wedding that opens the movie.  The whole scenario resembles a John Waters construct of a Wedding Cake in Hell.  Cliched and condescending mewing, shrieking, flouncing.  A gay male chorus singing Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddlers Roof, Big and Carrie meeting the author of the Sex and the City books (and believe me, she's no Nabokov), Big smiling off the advances of a handsome gay stallion (an aside: SATC 3 would have been perfect if Big, exasperated by Carrie's deranged behaviours, indulges in a gay tryst in a steamroom.  Let's see how Carrie's accepting and caring attitude toward gays withstands that turn of events!), and, finally, the appearance of gay icon Liza Minnelli (still a poor substitute though, for her sainted mother) conducting the ceremony then launching into a production number of some song or other about single women. An insult to the gay community and to humanity in general.
• Carrie's hissy fit when Big buys her a grand TV set for their anniversary so they can watch black and white romantic movies that they came to love after the gay wedding.  She shows her true colours with this convulsion: no, Carrie doesn't want romantic interludes, she wants more jewelry.  This leads to a plot twist where Big suggests they spend time alone away from each other occasionally, provoking more agony out of Carrie that sends her to Abu Dhabi with her hellhound friends.
• While shopping for shoes (what else) in a marketplace, Carrie meets some nonentity who use to be her boyfriend, purely out of coincidence or Jungian synchronicity, I haven't decided.  They make cutesy-pie talk, he invites her to dinner later, and afterwards, they kiss.  My God, this sends the self-obsessed Carrie into a fit of black-and-white romantic film proportions as she tries to decide if she should tell Big.  Will he understand and forgive her?  Of course not, he indulges in a male version of a hissy fit, leaving Carrie in a real bind.  I was hoping she'd suicide, but fat chance.
•  A cameo by Miley Cyrus
• The girls joining together to sing I Am Woman at a disgusting Westernized disco.
• Samantha hooking up with some Swedish nonentity that gives her hot flashes throughout the rest of the film.
• Moslem women who reveal that, behind their Moslem women wear (sorry, I'm losing track here of the actual word), they wear Gucci and Versace.

But, you know, all this stupidity tends to elicit in memories of low points from the first film.  Especially the humping sex dog (how do you train a pooch to do that, gone are the days of Lassie Come Home) and Samantha's obsession with her next-door neighbor Dante who she sees having a three way with two bimbos one night that, again, brings on virulent hot flashes.  And then there's Carrie stood up at her own wedding by that idiot Big then spending days in bed in a darkened room like a suffering madonna in black velvet at a Mexican resort.

But I respect and honor those who consider SATC 2 to take the gay wedding cake for badness.  It's just ... me.

I'm cutting out now.  I know I promised an appreciation of Fredo in the Godfather films.  And I still haven't mentioned a possible swerve in my upcoming short story that would involve cannibalism and Grace Slick singing about it on the Sunfighter album.  But I'm fading fast.  Until next time.