two new obsessions

1. my brand spanking new Dan McCarthy poster.
IT GLOWS IN THE DARK.
if i had the scratch lying around, there are at least a dozen of his posters i would buy and coat my apartment walls in mccarthy love. his work deals with cycles of life and death, detail and big picture, dinosaurs and roots, skeletons and love. There are also ghost buddies.

2. a huge crush on Javier Bardem, star of 2004's The Sea Inside.
The Sea Inside is a depressing but sublime film about a man who has a diving accident (i think he's 19 when it happens?); basically the character shows off for a girl and breaks his neck diving. we enter the story later, while he's fighting for the right to end his own life. you would think that would be all to the plot, but it's only a vehicle for the actual meat of the story. there's no predicting it.

knowing the power of the actor - javier is not in any way a feeble guy - to watch him play an aging quadriplegic / former athlete is disturbing and beautiful in just the right way. there's an underlying delicacy to the movie that keeps it all together, it's like you might try to imagine writing a scene in which a sister-in-law feeds her husband's brother lunch, but what do you even say? i can't even picture what my relationship would be like if i were tied to someone like that for years, and they succeed in making it live. below is a picture of his character painting with the character's nephew:


other reasons i'm obsessed: he's going to star in Love in the Time of Cholera, a book by my favorite author Gabriel Garcia Marquez; he's also going to be in Guerilla, with Benecio del Toro playing Che. between Che, Benecio, and Javier, i might just lose it. i might be outside in a sleeping bag the night before the movie opens, i'm just suggesting that as a possibility. i doubt i'll have much company, but any is welcome :)

this also makes me laugh because i've had this picture torn out of a Vanity Fair magazine and in a binder called "design stuff i like" for years:
and never realized it's the same guy until i googled him for a picture to include here. in my "stuff" binder, this picture is in a spread facing a new york playright who has a strikingly similar pose and a similarly annoyed / cynical expression, but the playright is standing on a bed and wearing a sweater. basically looks like the same person, but with antithetical backgrounds. just thought it was a funny juxtaposition, and today learn that old picture is one of my new favorites.