The scariest thing about “28 Years Later” is how great Ralph Fiennes looks.

But before we go any further into how Ralph could serve as a gym-rat superman, a side note about why “Ralph Fiennes” pronounces his name “Rafe Fines.”

Here’s why “Ralph” can be pronounced “Rafe”:

1. Old Norse and Old English Origins

• The name Ralph comes from the Old Norse name Ráðúlfr, meaning “counsel wolf” (ráð = counsel, úlfr = wolf).
• It was adapted into Old English as Rædwulf and later into Middle English as Rauf or Rafe.
• Over time, in Southern England, the pronunciation “Rafe” persisted, especially among the upper classes.

2. Spelling vs. Pronunciation Divergence

• In the past, English spelling was not standardized. People often wrote names phonetically, but eventually spellings became fixed.
• “Ralph” became the common spelling, but the older pronunciation “Rafe” stuck in some families and regions, especially in aristocratic or traditional British circles.

3. Modern Use

• In American English, it’s almost always pronounced “Ralf” (rhyming with “calf”).
• In British English, especially among certain families or in historical contexts, “Ralph” can still be pronounced “Rafe”—e.g., the actor Ralph Fiennes pronounces his name “Rafe Fines.”

That’s courtesy of ChatGPT (which I pronounce as “Chad,” just “Chad”), and note that Chad used Ralph Fiennes as the poster boy for this pronunciation. 

In my more petty moments, I think that Ralph could simply pronounce his name as “Ralph” and be done with it, but I suppose that’s up to him. As for why Ralph pronounces his last name “Fines”:  Well, obviously it should be pronounced “Fee-EN-ess,” but he’s just difficult.

And: He’s a strongman.

SPOILER WARNING:  This includes spoilers for the recently released movie “28 Years Later.” But it’s a bad movie. Really bad. So if you haven’t seen the movie but decide to read on, just figure that I saved you some money, and now you owe me. I spent $55 on two tickets and popcorn (just popcorn, no drinks) so that my son and I could see this on Sunday night, and we had a lousy time because it’s a lousy movie. So this is my retribution. Except:  I’m still nice enough to post this long spoiler warning.

As a strongman in real life, Ralph has got a killer workout routine, one that enables him to look extremely fit even though, in the movie, he’s been living on his own for 30 years and scavenging off who knows how little to eat while fighting off zombies of three types:  neo-traditional fast-running naked zombies, slow-rolling fat zombies who somehow stay remarkably obese even though they eat only worms, and giant Viking-like berserker zombies who make no sense at all and are somehow able to make babies with female Viking-like zombies even though they’re all out of their minds with unblinking rage.

While the movie deserves no respect — because of bad “look at me I’m clever” editing that splices in clips from WWI and WWII and old movie versions of Shakespeare plays or somesuch and jarring jump-cuts from the older and far better “28 Days Later,” plus a pusillanimous 12-year-old boy as our theoretical hero who sets off on his own at the end of the movie to wage war with an entire nation of zombies armed only with about 12 arrows and incredible stupidity, plus an overall story that makes no sense and lacks almost any iota of pulse-pounding zombie-fighting action — in counterpoint to all that, Ralph’s workout routine demands attention.

Here’s Ralph’s daily schedule (minus the one cheat day per week, when, I guess, he just runs up the side of a mountain while eating a sliver of cheese):

05.30-06.30 – Training
06.30 post workout – Protein shake and fruit
08.30 – 75g salmon + 3 eggs + 1 tomato + 2 slices rye bread on training days
12.00 – 150g chicken breast + 150g sweet potatoes + steamed vegetables
16.00 – 150g chicken breast + salad + half avocado
18.00 – run
18.45 – massage
20.00 – Steak + salad
22.00 – Oats + 150g Greek yogurt

Okay, that may not sound so bad, and I eat most of those things myself and would not object to a daily massage at 18:45 hours.

But here’s the workout, as per the full story in British GQ: 

Fiennes and Avasilcai (his trainer) hit five heavy workouts per week, followed by up to 45 minutes of hill running each evening, after filming.

Gym-based training happened between 5.30 and 6.30am, prior to the day’s shooting. Avasilcai kept workouts to an hour because, he says, go for longer than that and cortisol starts to build as testosterone decreases, leading to a greater risk of injury, and exhaustion.

Training covered one body part per day, with four to five exercises per muscle group, with a HIIT-based core workout as a finisher.

“We’d finish the workout with a circuit that would include battle rope, slam ball, press-ups, and core work,” says Avasilcai. Alongside this, Fiennes fits in weekly ballet sessions for posture and mobility. Crucially, while he has a rough plan for each session as outlined above, Avasilcai remains flexible, scoping out his clients’ moods and energy levels each morning to ensure they’re pushing hard, but not too hard.

“Ralph loves free weights, like bench press, deadlifts, squats, leg presses, lunges,” says Avasilcai. “His favourite exercise is dips. At 62, I can say he is in the best shape ever, and injury free,” says Avasilcai. “Even now, we try to achieve new records in the gym; just today we did 65kg bench press for three repetitions.”

I’ve done lots of gym time in my life, and continue to put in about 75 minutes four times a week. But I’ve never done battle rope or slam ball.

Ralph and I are the same age (he’s actually six months older than I am), but there are some dissimilarities as well. 

• Ralph is said to be worth $50 million. Me, somewhat less.
• Ralph is an internationally famous movie star, going back decades. My audience as a playwright and writer is in the hundreds (well, thousands, cumulatively). So we’re similarly known for having an audience, but there is a numeric difference.
• Ralph had an affair with Francesca Annis and I did not.
• Ralph is benching 145 pounds and I’m not.
• I still have my hair. Most of it, anyway.

In fairness — and I do always try to be fair, even in this desperately unfair age of ours — I have to say that “28 Years Later” has one good thing going for it, and that’s Ralph. He’s terrific. He looks great (much as I doubt his character could, living on scraps out in the woods while being terrorized by flesh-eating humanoids, and I say this with authority, having grown up out in the woods alongside snapping turtles), and in all his scenes his clear blue eyes and even temper cut right through the crap that is the rest of the movie.

Unfortunately, much like the iceman in “The Iceman Cometh,” he arriveth too late. And I never learn enough about his character, who is a combination of an MD and a shaman and your friendly child psychologist, to be truly satisfying. I don’t know where he gets the morphine he administers with abandon, or why he lays dead bodies in a perfect grid pattern, or why he lives where he does, or even why he’s in the movie, except as a contrivance. But I do know he is damned fit.

The word is that they’re making two more of these “28 Years Later” movies. This one isn’t fit for consumption. I hope the next one puts Ralph in the lead, and that it takes a few years to reach release. Maybe by then I too could be a super-fit zombie-defeating doctor in the middle of nowhere with no clear means of support too.

Today, on a whim, I asked my fiancée to join me for a matinee of “Mickey 17,” the new film by Bong Joon Ho. Like “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer” and so much else of Ho’s work, “Mickey 17” turns out to be both a socially concerned dark comedy that portrays the awfulness of some human traits, and a highly entertaining movie. If you can imagine a future Donald Trump (played by Mark Ruffalo) asserting himself as the leader of the first colony we send to a distant planet, you can extrapolate much of what’s made manifest by this plot. 

Afterward, we walked to a nearby ramen house for a leisurely dinner and to talk about the movie. We stopped in later at Republic of Pie, site of our probably third date, almost two years ago, and ate apple pie and played Uno and I had a latte.

After all this time, over four hours total, K. began to wonder if her car might have gotten ticketed. She’d parked in a free parking spot, but was now over the hourly limit. As we approached her car in the dim light, I saw a scrap of paper tucked under her windshield wiper, and K. moaned. But it wasn’t a ticket. Instead, it said this:

We looked the car over, but there was no damage. Not even the slightest.

The biggest impression made was, instead, the one made by the note. How refreshing and unexpected in 2025.

In the movie, Ruffalo’s character, a failed celebrity Congressman who somehow becomes a bigger celebrity in his electoral failure and soon finds a larger way to be the grasping tyrant he’s so suited for, utterly lacks any civility or decency. And meanwhile giving lip service to the members of a religion that worships him. Were we not already all too familiar with a real-world example of this, I’d say the character is more caricature than person. But we sadly know better, don’t we?

It was a small relief to see that it wasn’t a ticket K. had gotten, but more of a joy:  an honest, thoughtful note, a note from a kind stranger who, like most people, wants to do the right thing, and who on some level knows that we’re all connected and we’re all in this together and he’s better if we’re civil and decent.

I don’t want to tell you the ending of “Mickey 17.” I want you to see it. Its message will remind you that we only lose all if we give up, if we surrender to our base instincts, to the terrible examples set by the worst among us. Eventually, the film seems to say, no matter how impossible it seems or how far away to consider, self-serving sociopaths lose and the considerate people prevail.

In a paradox worthy of Schrodinger and his cat, I’ve now seen the film “Eno” twice — except really I have seen, once each, two films named “Eno.” 

That’s because “Eno,” a documentary about the brilliant music producer and musician of sorts Brian Eno, is constructed anew on every viewing. Yes, every single time it is screened, a computer with the name Brain One (you’ll easily figure out the anagram) pulls from 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive to assemble this latest version of the movie. 

(For more about all this, click here.) 

Meaning that what two friends and I saw in Glendale in March and what I saw with one of those friends, plus my fiancée and my son, two weeks ago here in Los Angeles, are related but different. They’re cousins of the same film.

They were also both fascinating, enjoyable… and uplifting. Because while most of the press has been about the process, the true star is Eno himself:  his disruptive creative process, his interest in both nature and electronics, and his pragmatic optimism. 

My friend Trey and I are decades-long fans of Brian Eno and his work, as a founding member of Roxy Music, as a solo artist, as a collaborator with David Byrne, John Cale and others, and as a producer for Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Ultravox, and countless others. We also, some years ago, went to see Eno’s installation at California State University Long Beach  of “77 Million Paintings,” which featured endlessly randomly generated paintings with endlessly randomly generated music by Eno himself. We also caught his talk about that and other things (like his Long Now movement).

So we are fans. Big fans.

After seeing “Eno” a second time, we both walked out saying we’d like to see it again. Unfortunately, it usually involves getting to the right place at the right time — because Brain One has to be onsite to work its magic.

Until now.

Now we, and you, and everyone, can see “Eno” thanks to this special showing:

On January 24^th, there will be a global streaming event, “Eno 24.”  Anyone, anywhere in the world, including viewers in any time zone on the planet will be able to watch multiple iterations of the film and much more.

Here’s the link:  https://www.ohyouprettythings.com/new-products/eno24

Back in my college days, we had a drinking game called “Hi, Bob.” You would turn on The Bob Newhart Show, and every time a character said, “Hi, Bob!” you’d have to do a shot. Given the number of entrances on that show, I don’t recommend this if you’re no longer college age.

Today being the day that Bob Newhart died, today is yet another time I wish I did a better job of keeping a journal.

Oh, I keep a journal. But I don’t write in it every day, and so I frequently miss the days and details of when something noteworthy happens. 

Like: the evening I met Bob Newhart and had a little conversation with him.

Wish I could remember more of what it was about.

Twenty years ago this October, I was a guest at the 10^th anniversary event for the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. Bob Newhart opened with a 20-minute set in which he was pretty damn funny, and then Richard Carpenter played and sometimes sang, accompanied by a 15-piece band, and different singers from the extended Carpenter family, doing lots of Carpenters songs.

Afterward, everybody lined up onstage for food, served buffet-style. I wound up right behind Mr. Newhart. The line was long and slow, so I think we actually talked for 15 minutes or so as we crept along, plates in hand. As I recall, we mostly talked about the food on the buffet line, with him eyeing the ham steaks with appreciation.

So, I can say I met him. Which is the sort of thing that happens a lot in Los Angeles and environs:  You just meet people. Some of them you just run into and wind up talking to, like Keanu Reeves and Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston (in line at plays), others you’re doing something with (Giancarlo Esposito, Tim Robbins, William H. Macy). Sometimes you’re at the supermarket and you realize you’re talking to James Karen, who appeared in Samuel Beckett’s only movie but who people living on the East Coast from the 1970s through 1990s remember as “the Pathmark Shopping guy.” 

While my association with Bob Newhart was obviously fleeting and unremarkable, in another way my association was longer, that is, about 10 years. That’s because there was another standup comic from that era whom I knew better:  Shelley Berman. Shelley and I both taught in the master’s program in writing at USC. In the late 1950s, Shelley’s standup routine caught fire with a telephone routine:  Just him, on a stool, engaged in a telephone conversation, with us hearing only his side of it. Some years later, Bob Newhart did a bit like that, just him on a stool with a one-sided telephone conversation, but Newhart got more famous for it — and, to be fair, for records that were built out of quite different routines, and for two sitcoms that had nothing to do with that. But for years, Shelley would say, “He stole that from me.” Mentioning Newhart was not a good idea.

I don’t have any opinion about whether or not one can “own” an act with a one-sided telephone, and I should note that I also know a gentleman who absolutely swears that the idea for “The Terminator” was stolen from him by James Cameron. It’s that kind of town.

I just know that Bob Newhart made me laugh a lot for many years, with his standup routines, with his two sitcoms, with his brilliantly funny role in “Elf” and, for 20 minutes, at the Carpenter Center. Even when we were picking up our dinners, he made me laugh. I just wish I could remember in what way.

I had dinner last night with my good friend Shanna at a place with amazing Thai cuisine. (And that’s the restaurant’s name:  Amazing Thai Cuisine. So, yes, there sometimes is truth in advertising.) I had last been to Amazing Thai Cuisine just days before, with my fiancée, bringing a bottle of chardonnay for myself and ordering spicy duck salad with brown rice on the side. Tonight, feeling adventurous, I ordered the spicy duck salad with brown rice on the side, but brought a different label of chardonnay.

Discussion with Shanna turned to Martin Mull, who had died earlier that day, breaking my heart.

I loved Martin Mull. As a kid in the 1970s, I watched him on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Fernwood 2Night,” America 2Night,” and in various television or film appearances over the years, and bought all his records. One year, for Chistmas, I bought myself his album “Normal,” which remains my favorite, and then unwrapped my presents and found that my sister had bought me the same album. No doubt we both bought this because my love for Martin Mull was well-known in the family and because the album was available as a discounted cutout at the local Two Guys department store for a buck-ninety-nine. “Normal” was chockful of clever sing-along-able songs told from the point-of-view of a smart, sarcastic, judgmental 30ish man forced to suffer among rubes, but who wonders if it wouldn’t be easier if he were less clever and just went along to get along, swallowing his wit and urbanity. In other words, the Martin Mull character.  As a 15-year-old desperately not wanting to live in southern New Jersey with its greenhead flies and snapper turtles and traffic circles and dirt roads, who ached to get to wherever the cool intellectuals were with their impregnable aesthetics, this was exactly how I felt. Martin Mull summed it up in the title track, which I haven’t listened to in decades but can still summon up at will:

What say you and I get normal
We don’t have to be that formal
We’ll just sit and watch TV like others do
We’ll eat meat and mashed potatoes
Cut our hair so folks don’t hate us
Life is nuts enough just livin’ here with you

Let’s see who can be most borin’
You do the dishes honey, I’ll start snorin’
Get a mower, do some mowin’
Spend all mornin’ gettin’ it goin’
We’ll show everyone in town we’re not deranged
What say you and I get normal for a change

(Here’s the rest of the song.)

I also suspected that Mull, who was good-looking and whose character dressed well in a stylish but somewhat sleazy manner that said he knew what to do with a woman, was having lots of sex. So 15-year-old me was very interested in whatever I might learn from him, or at least from what I could learn from this character he kept portraying on TV and records.

On “Fernwood 2Night,” where he was a dimestore version of a local talk show host, Mull’s character, Barth Gimble, frequently got phone calls from what you’d assume were beautiful women, with us hearing only his side, which dripped innuendo. I always was trying to figure out what the woman was saying, trying to slot into my brain her side of a quick call centered around sex.

I shared all this and more with Shanna, and then she surprised me:  Martin Mull had been her client. “He was a very nice man,” she said. Shanna works at an accounting firm, largely for the well-known and the well-off, and Martin Mull had been a client.

The first time he came in, she said, she saw him coming and went to greet him in reception. He put out his arm and she thought, Wow, really nice, he wants to hug me! So she went in for the hug and he hugged her, and it was very nice, and then when they parted she realized that he’d actually been reaching for the door. Mortified, she ducked away and went and hid in the file room until he’d left.

But for years after, whenever he came in, he’d hug her. Now it had become a thing. And he’d add a kiss on her cheek.

I’m not 15 any more, but I still love Martin Mull’s act from then and in all the years since — but 46 years later, I also love this story about him, which was not an act… except of kindness.

Every year, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof shares the good news in what seems otherwise to have been a bad year. 

“[Even with Gaza, Darfur, Trump, and climate change], something else is also true: In some ways, 2023 may still have been the best year in the history of humanity.”

Two factors he lists: In 2023, global child mortality reached a record low, and extreme poverty also reached a record low (about 8% of people worldwide). 

It’s easy to overlook the positive, as Kristof notes:

“None of this eases the pain of those who have lost their children in 2023, nor is it a balm for those caught in war or climate catastrophes. Yet at year-end, it’s worth acknowledging this backdrop of progress — not to distract anyone from all that is going wrong, but to offer a reminder that when we try hard enough, we can accomplish amazing things. Right now, looking at the anguish worldwide, I’d say we’re not trying hard enough.”

In that spirit, and in recognition of the good luck I’ve been blessed with, and also with recognition that many people haven’t, both among my circle and elsewhere in the world, I have to acknowledge that I’ve had a good year. Maybe it also helps to be older, and wiser, and to recognize good happenings when they happen to you. 

Here are just some of the highlights.

Romance

In May, I met and fell in love with my girlfriend. Instantly. I don’t understand how this happened, but when she showed up at the restaurant where we’d agreed to meet, I was struck by a thunderbolt that told me, “This is it. This is the woman.” I’d had many dates, and two previous actual girlfriends, over the course of two-and-a-half years, but this was instantly different, because she was and is instantly different. I’ve been in love before, and vividly recall how I felt when at age 20 I met my now ex-wife, but I don’t know if I ever before knew what romantic “butterflies in my stomach” meant. And every day since then, I ask myself what I can do to do even better, to keep this going, and if possible to keep it going for, oh, the next three decades. She tells me that she loves me too. I can’t believe my good fortune.

So, right there, that has made for a damn good seven months. Long may it last.

Music

2023 was a terrific year for music, with spectacular new albums from old-timers like Yo La Tengo, Peter Gabriel, Blur, John Cale, and Pere Ubu. Even the Rolling Stones put out a new album that I think is pretty good — and I don’t generally care for the Rolling Stones.

Lots of great concerts in 2023, too, most memorably Yo La Tengo (!!!) at the Teragram Ballroom, and Devo (even more exclamation marks) at the YouTube Theatre, at which I got so excited that my girlfriend caught me on video pogoing along to the music.

It was an honor to host two members of Pere Ubu at my house this summer (!), and for my sons and I to help the band load in and load out for their fine show here in Los Angeles. And I enjoyed meeting up with other longtime Pere Ubu fans for drinks after the show in New York, which I flew in to see.

Theatre

Let’s be honest:  It’s always a dice roll going to see a new play. Jukebox musicals may be idiot-proof (enlist some great singers to do classic songs you love against the backdrop of a thinly concocted narrative), but the successful production of a compelling new play is a true highwire act. Forty years of attendance has taught me that if you expect a 90% failure rate, you’ll never be disappointed. There were other plays I enjoyed, but these were the two standout productions this year:

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” at Rogue Machine, an intellectually honest look at extreme-right-wing evangelicals and their worldview, brilliantly written, acted and directed, was a production I doubt I’ll ever forget. I don’t go to the theatre to be entertained, I go to delve; one way I can be sure I’m in the right place is if a few disgruntled fellow attendees leave mid-scene. In this particular case, success! Those of us who stayed were riveted.

“Kill Shelter” at Theatre of NOTE, about a struggling single mom who also has to daily euthanize dogs who have no future, was both heartbreaking and uplifting — and, somehow, occasionally comic. When each puppet-dog was put down, I cried, even though it was a thing of wire and felt; to someone who has spent 45 years in the theatre, that was epic suspension of disbelief. The play also offered an even-handed defense of kill shelters, a subject I’m sure most people would rather not hear about. Ashley Rose Wellman is a young playwright of talent. I wish I’d seen this earlier in the run, because I would have gone to see it again.

Life and Death

My mother died. That might not seem like a good thing, but it was. She was 98, she figured her time had come, so she lay down, slept for a few days, and passed away. Making her, right to the end, an inspiration. If you pray to a god, you should pray to that god that some day you’re so strong and wise as to be able to do the same. Almost none of us will get this kind of death. Will I miss her? Absolutely. My father died 31 years ago, and I still miss him. But they both left me a lifetime of instruction, so I’m grateful.

Family and friends

I took my son to London for 10 days, my other son came to join us for Thanksgiving, those two plus my daughter and I were all together for my mother’s services, my great-nephew has come to stay with me twice, and I got to spend five days with my whole extended family back East both in September and earlier this month. It’s been a good year for family.

It’s also been a great year for friends, both new friends, and friends of 40 years. 

If you’re lucky, your romantic partner will have quality family and friends of her own, and mine sure does. We’ve been having dinner and playing cards with her sisters and her brother-in-law (and at some point, I will win). We’ve gone to lots of events with her circle of friends — what I’ve started calling her Legion of BFFs — and always had a great time, whether it was the Pops in the LA County Arboretum, the holiday light show, a country-club fundraiser, dinner and drinks, or seeing the Barbie movie. Good people attract other good people. 

As for my own friends, the level of caring some of them dropped on me when my mother died, as well as the heartfelt way they embraced my new love, said everything about their friendship. Friends I hadn’t seen in decades showed up at my mother’s viewing to pay their respects. Others called me more than once just to make sure I was doing okay. My friend Ski single-handedly cooked and catered an entire evening for all attendees at my sister’s house the night before my mother’s funeral service. True friends show up for you even when it isn’t fun.

2023 and 2024

If you haven’t had a good 2023, I’m sorry.

I’m sharing all these successes because I know I’ve been lucky. And because I know luck runs out. Not every year will have as many bright spots. More people will die, you will meet with misfortune, your health will fail, some despicable figure might make a comeback.

But when you have this much love dropped on you in a year, you must acknowledge it. Both to get through the bad times, and because you want to do right. Only a churl would let good times go unrecognized.

My best to you in the new year. Even when trouble befalls – and it will — pick up on the positive.

“Suspense is cheap,” my writing professor told me when I was an undergrad. But he was a poet who for some reason was teaching fiction writing to a fledgling playwright, so what did we know? If your literary sensibilities are informed by the short stories showing up every week in The New Yorker, then no, there’s no suspense, no plot, and probably no conflict, just theme. Most of those stories end with a tiny “ah-hah” moment, only slightly a twist, and only barely ironic.

(I say this as an admirer of many of those stories.)

Movies, most of them, operate differently of course. There, suspense is the principal factor: How will our hero Tom Cruise get out of it this time? The answer:  with CGI. Ditto comic books, which is where most movies now take their cue.

Theme without plot as we generally understand it is principally the province of literary work, either on the page or in the theatre, whereas plays that flow primarily from plot are old-fashioned. We now view plays that operate mostly from plot as melodramas; literary plays as exemplified by Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill and Ionesco or Beckett may have some element of plot, but they mostly investigate and express themes. Audiences get less caught up in asking what’s going to happen than in trying to understand what they’re watching and what to make of it. The real whodunit is a whatisthis.

What brings this to mind is a weekend of seeing two of these thematic and ostensibly plotless pieces:  “Playtime,” the Jacques Tati film, and a dynamic production of “Love and Information” at the Antaeus Theatre.

“Playtime” presents a fascinating case. Its two-hour runtime is occupied mostly by the bumbling of our hero, Monsieur Hulot, as he is waylaid while trying to meet for a job interview, and later as he’s the unfortunate participant in the very bad opening of a new Parisian restaurant. Add in a young American tourist who wanders into and out of scenes and occasionally encounters him and you have just about the entirety of the story. But the story is beside the point. The point here is that the then-new age of 1964 presents a confusion of ill-conceived modern technology that alienates and flummoxes everyone who comes into contact with it. Useless gadgets fill our lives, and constant intrusions by the latest things and ideas drain our attention. While we’re all individuals, we may have one or two or three doppelgangers in any crowd, making us easily mistaken for someone else. The theme? The creators are at the mercy of the systems and services they’ve created. In an AI age, that’s compelling.

It should also be said that “Playtime” is riveting and funny. While bereft of plot, it’s full of action — and also tightly choreographed sight gags that fill every scene. What makes the movie so watchable is the fear it creates that one might miss something by looking the wrong way. Tati abjures closeups; the entire film is told through master shots, forcing us to choose where to look. Sometimes there’s too much to see, while other times potential distractions are stripped away to present us simply with a chair to be sat upon or a portfolio to be unzipped loudly.

That this abstract film lured more than 400 attendees out to see it and then resulted in raucous laughter and applause is a testament to its achievement. That it does it without much in the way of what we ordinarily consider a story puts paid the myth that Aristotle must be obeyed.

After seeing “Playtime” on Friday night, I caught “Love and Information” on Saturday night at the Antaeus in Glendale. I will go anywhere I can, any time I can, to see a play by Caryl Churchill, a brilliant playwright who tears off the shackles of conventional storytelling norms but nevertheless produces completely absorbing tales. In this particular play, 49 separate short scenes ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes set about immersing us in the reality of modern human life:  quests for information, conflicts and debates about misinformation, people coming together and breaking apart. 

Further credit where it’s due:  The script comes with no stage directions, no character names, not even any character descriptions, so every choice must be made by the production cast and crew. In this case, director Emily Chase and the cast have made decisions to situate each of the varied scenes in various places and to cast them as they saw appropriate. We may be watching what’s clearly staged as a couple, but listening to the text reveals that that has been designated by the production, not the playwright. Some scenes now take place on iPhone screens we see projected on the walls. The dominatrix in one scene isn’t referenced in the text; neither the raucous music behind the wall or the evident interrogation going on aren’t clearly demanded by the writer. But every choice made by the cast and the director pulls it all together with the text to result in something completely entertaining, and riveting, and astonishing. I only wish it were running longer so I could go see it again.

Almost everyone know how to tell a story. We all know the rudiments:  beginning, middle, and end. But there are other sorts of stories, stories that don’t have all those elements, and don’t have things like rising conflict, and opposition, and denouement, and more.  Plot is by nature mechanical; theme is emotional. The advantage the theatre presents us with is the presence of the actors and of each other — the sense that we are all of us in this room at this time for this one time and that we’re all going to share in a feeling larger than ourselves. 

You can engage in plot. But in the theatre, you must pursue theme.

Yesterday, rooting around in the refrigerator after my playwriting workshop, I laid eyes on a wrapped offering purchased the night before from our local supermarket.

“Hey,” I said to my son. “Tomorrow night, we can cook this roast and eat it while we don’t watch the Oscars.”

“Sounds good,” he said. Then he added, “I don’t think I’ve ever watched the Oscars.”

He already knows I don’t watch them either.

So that’s our Oscars tradition: not watching the Oscars. It’s somewhat related to not seeing almost any of the nominated films. I did see “The Woman King,” and thought it was flat-out terrific, a great old-fashioned kind of heart-tugging action movie the sort of which Hollywood made regularly in its Golden Age. So of course it wasn’t nominated for anything.

While the Academy Awards are on tonight, we’ll probably play a game and then we’re definitely going to watching “The Last of Us.” .A few weeks ago was our not-Super-Bowl-Sunday. I think he played “League of Legends” while I did some writing and read a book.

If you enjoy the Oscars, or the Super Bowl, cheers to you. They seem like nice things to get into with friends; I’m just not into them. My rule of thumb: I don’t care about any awards that I’m not up for. Which, when you think about it, leaves me nearly unlimited time to celebrate not-celebrating.

1. I can attest to this: The movie “Cocaine Bear” is loads of fun if you’re seeing it for cheap on a Tuesday night with a friend who is sitting next to you in the movie theatre howling with laughter. But I can’t imagine watching it at home alone, or as anything other than a goof — which it is 100% intended to be.
2. It has been raining in Los Angeles pretty much every day since December. This being the eve of March, enough is enough. Whoever schedules these things needs to do a better job. On Sunday night, I went to see a concert and thought, “Wow! It isn’t raining!” But when I left the concert, it was pouring while I scurried off to my car, having left the umbrella in the car because, well, it hadn’t been raining. This morning when I woke up the day was bright and blue and the air crisp. Over the course of the day, the sky darkened and I thought, “Oh, fuck, it’s coming again.” And it did.
3. Over the course of all this, I’ve had a team of roofers out to my house eight times. Eight times. At some point, either they’ll get it right, or maybe they’ll just outlast the rain.
4. I had assumed that the excellent noisy indie band Yo La Tengo would tour with additional musicians, being a three-piece band with a dense and complicated sound, especially on their excellent new album, “This Stupid World.” Nope. Sunday’s show revealed that the three of them are multi-instrumentalists who sample some of their sounds live and then set them to repeat while they go off to play other things, and that they generally move into different stations of the stage throughout. Don’t be surprised if the drummer takes center stage to sing, and the bassist is now also playing keyboards, and the “drums” are being handled by the guitarist on what sounds like a Casio. My first thought, watching this: Hats off to them for saving all that money on adding a touring musician or two!
5. By the way, structurally the hero of that cocaine-sniffing bear movie is the bear. I’m not kidding. In the late parts of the movie, it’s the bear that’s the protagonist.
6. Eight months ago for my birthday, a friend gave me a $60 gift certificate to a used bookstore in Pasadena. My current lady agreed to accompany me even though I warned her what I could be like in bookstores: relentless. I was rewarded by learning how remarkably patient she can be. Something else I learned: Sixty bucks can get you a big whopping bag of books, including three novels by Thomas McGuane, a favorite of mine, that I’d never read, plus two business books, novels by Joyce Carol Oates and Kim Stanley Robinson I’d been meaning to get to for some time, and assorted other things, including a Marvel comics giant I had as a kid, and was now able to get in near mint condition 45 years later for the bold price of $4.50. I wasn’t in any danger of running out of books to read around the house, but now I’m even better armed.
7. I’ve been thinking lately of two writers in particular, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. Because each of them wrote a science-fictional short story about rain that wouldn’t end. Right now, outside my window, I can hear Noah pounding nails into his big new boat. I like London enormously. I just never expected to be living there in Los Angeles.

I saw guitar hero Jeff Beck, who died today, play live in 2013 here in LA. He opened for Brian Wilson — and, um… I thought he was kinda dull. I didn’t wish him dead, though!

He might have wished some harm to Brian Wilson & Co., though, given what he later said about that tour, in an interview that may provide a clue about Mr. Beck’s underwhelming performance.

Brian Wilson, by the way, sang off-key. I am second to none in my love and admiration for Brian Wilson and his music, but when Mr. Brian Wilson (!) sings flat, that’s the night I call it quits in seeing him “perform.” And that’s exactly what I did: told my friend who’d accompanied me that I loved Brian Wilson so much that, no, I could never again go see him perform because I’d never forget the sound of Brian Wilson ruining his catalog for me.

On a happier note, Roger Daltrey of the Who remains in fine fettle, and is somehow still a dynamic singer at age 78. You may feel reassured and ready to enjoy his live shows with abandon. Ditto Micky Dolenz, a mere 77, who still has the pipes, and is on a never-ending tour where he now sings “Hey, hey I’m the Monkee…”

If there’s a rock n’ roller you want to see play live, especially an elderly one, I wouldn’t wait. And given the rock n’ roll lifestyle, it’s amazing that some of them are still around.