California Suite: the Rizz of the 70s

Milk or wine?

I slowly get into the time of my life, when at least some of the heroes of my childhood and public figures that mean something to me start to die. I've never had a functional family, and because of some lucky or maybe unlucky coincidence, I've never been at a funeral in my life. Because I moved abroad at such a young age, I missed all my grandparents leaving this world.

When Steven Hawking died, I was shocked. I woke up in the morning and first thing I started reading the news and there it was: he was gone. Although he was predicted to die in his twenties, he lived much longer than that, to make some of the most significant discoveries in the world of modern astrophysics. But even more important, for me, he was a symbol and sentinel preventing the humanity's succumbing to its most despicable treats. He was a true popularizer of science, and he understood, that as long as scientists give up to their arrogance and stop making science accessible to everyone, they will not only castrate the society from all the future generations of scientists, who are children today. They will also alienate the rest of the humanity from science, paving the road for idiocracy and flat earthers.

The man died, I've never met him, but I was absolutely devastated. I started crying as if he were my father. Fatherless, this is what I felt. Fatherless for humanity, fearful for its future path and if we are slowly descending into an algorithmically engineered dystopian nightmare. And you know, I feel I was right.

The week I write this post, one more important person has died: Maggie Smith. For all millennials, the never changing professor McGonagall, for me personally the reverend mother from Sister Act movies. "Take Weasley with you Mr. Potter, he looks far to happy over there" is something we say to each other with my huzzy when, well, he looks far to happy over there and should help me with something. Her acting skill, wit and the ability to make into whatever medium that is around at the moment. How many other 80+ year olds you know who gets constantly cited on TikTok?

To honor her iconic image and her role in us becoming us, the huzzy and I have decided to revisit her most famous titles. And today it's "California Suite".

The film was made in 1978 and the digital copy of it is surprisingly of a great quality. You don't expect the movies from that era to age so well. Something about this time seems so strangely appealing to ours. The history evolves in circles, spirals and even the fashion comes back. As with "Breakfast at Tiffany's", I felt immediately submerged in the atmosphere of the late seventies in Los Angeles: sun, big clothing, everyone is smoking. You see how that part didn't age well.

The movie tells a story of four sets of characters coming to California for different reasons and is a character study, a play much more than a film as we understand it today. This was the time, when the cinema was very close to the theater, the emotions and characters were much more theatrical than we would expect in the today's Hollywood plastic - wrapped fast - consumed products. They budgets have risen, the talent has become extinct.

The dialogs in this movie can be cut for quotes, but the narrative is quite eventless. In the center of the movie are the talks, the language, the English premium. It's difficult to believe people talked like this in real life, this is what differs the scenery from today's even out of mass production specter.

Young Maggie Smith is much younger than people in my generation are used to seeing her, but she's wonderful. I couldn't say she was ever so beautiful, it's easily visible that people became adults much younger than we do now. The dialogs are full of 70s slang, that sounds so odd today and is a long history. The rizz and goat of the 70s.

You can see the cars having no seatbelts, people smoking in the airplanes, the way the queer card was played in the time when almost the entire western world wasn't accepting anything even remotely diverging from the line of the catholic party.

If there is anything I hate it's a bisexual homosexual

And then the picture descends so unexpectedly into stupidity and racism, and this is what was apparently expected from a movie like that. The fly in the ointment, I suppose.

Diana and Sidney, though, can relate. Me and huzzy.

Rest in peace, professors.