As Time Goes By

Had a terrific birthday (don't worry, there'll be no meditations on growing older and/or wiser here). Last night we had dinner at Casablanca, one of our favorites. It's a Mexican restaurant, but the décor is based on the movie. So there are pictures of Bogart and Bergman everywhere, and a life-size painted mural of Claude Rains as Louis that looks like there's a guy just hanging around watching you eat.

Rebekah took me there the first time I visited her in L.A., two years and three days before. The food is great; I had the carne asada steak, she had the cheese enchiladas she always gets. They have a Spanish guitarist/singer that plays every night. And she wore my favorite pink sweater.

My wife is super-cute.

Feeling inspired by the ambience, I suggested we watch 'Casablanca' when we got home. I bought the 2-disc special edition a while back, but hadn't watched it until last night. You must own this. The picture quality is incredible. It looks like it's stuffed with interesting bonus material. But mostly you should own it because it's the best movie ever made.

The AFI did a list of the 100 best movie quotes of all time, and six of them were from 'Casablanca.' And that's probably a fourth of the great lines in the flick. But what I noticed this time around is not just how witty the screenplay is, but how it moves. The pace of it is completely different that most of the films of that era. After the introduction, there's the first sequence in Rick's Café which probably lasts 20 minutes or more. But it's so swift as it moves from the bar to the show floor to the casino and back, there's never a moment where it lags. There are three songs, maybe six storylines, over a dozen characters, yet you're never confused and never bored. It's a movie you watch with awe and reverence and just a hint of anguish, because you know you'll never write anything close to it.

If I thought I could, I certainly wouldn't be spending my time writing this.