Marya-3

I just learned today in the New Yorker magazine, that in 1937 Cole Porter was in a horse riding accident in which his legs were severely damaged, the New Yorker says: "but Porter's talent for masquerade, for turning life's griefs and glories into an impudent game, didn't end there. In gruelling pain for decades after the accident, forced to walk with braces and canes, he nonetheless had the humor to give his lame legs names: the left he christened JOSEPHINE, the right GERALDINE," ***(KING COLE by JOHN LAHR The not so merry soul of Cole Porter. Issue of 2004-07-12 and 19 Posted 2004-07-05)***

These are the names that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon decided upon before Jack decided that he'd rather be Daphne. Is that a strange coincidence or what?

Of all the biographical information a reviewer could give of him/her self, I find myself wishing to know the age of my fellow imdb members. It is because I suspect that the rave reviews for Moulin Rouge come from the very young. They are flattered by the use of pop music and M-TV pacing, and they haven't lived long enough yet to find the "love story" insipid and predictable. Of course the lead actors are pretty much kids them self, and the characters they were playing where probably meant to be no more than 21 themselves. Dance hall girls don't stay fresh looking that long, in that case it is perhaps better to die young. And young bohemian boys go back to London to join Daddy's firm to remember, from time to time, their halcyon days; or they stay artists in Paris, and fall in love with a score of other girls in turn. (Mercury salts were the only effective cure for vererial disease at the time.)

Here's a tip, read Hemingway's A Movable Feast, (don't mention it to a soul you know in Hollywood, or Sidney, or London.) There you'll find everything you need to know about Paris 100 years ago, about gossip, betrayal, drunkenness, gambling, infidelity, and a very poor man trying honestly to write. Play the radio at the same time if you think it needs some sound track other than its own. Then take your irony pills and realize that a movie that seeks to flatter you probably does so because it isn't much good in its own right.

If Peter Fonda had some how managed to make The Trip under communist oppression, and if he feared the wrath of his ancestors, and the hand of the Red Army, instead of the bourgeois middle class; if a wedding party was as much a life passage in American as is the drug party, these two would have been the same movie.