At the office on three hours’ sleep. Too much after-dinner caffeine last night. Plus I stayed up too late trying to finish The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a book I started reading while waiting for more acting books to arrive in the mail. I woke at 3 a.m. with Glenn Miller’s “Little Brown Jug” running through my head – specifically the trumpet riff that comes in somewhere in the middle. I credit my father for my love of music popular before I was born, but sometimes it intrudes. Fell asleep ten minutes before the alarm went off at 5. Tried parking under a tree at lunch time and closing my eyes for a few minutes, but still groggy.

I was thinking while that trumpet was blaring away of all the remarkably bad movies this summer. The Wall Street Journal had a piece on that very topic last week – “The Worst Year Ever for Movies” – or something like that. So much money spent. So much talent wasted. Even Inception failed to do anything for me. I got lost in the tangled plot 30 minutes in and there weren't any characters to care about. Marion Cotillard, who was so terrific in La Vie en Rose, was little more than a lovely prop. Michael Caine’s reassuring presence didn’t get enough screen time. You have to care about at least one character for a film to be successful. Gimmickry alone won't carry a picture. My husband and I watch 4-5 films a week - old ones and new ones. This summer there have been many weekends when none of the new ones felt worthy of the price of a ticket. Let's hope this is just a temporary condition.

I love films. I've seen several thousand and have favorites that I watch five or six times each year. I don't understand people who want to work as an actor or director, but have no interest in studying great old films and the actors and directors who made them great. The art form didn't begin with CGI.

I hope to pack in as many leading roles as I can over the next 6-10 months and move into films with bigger budgets. So far my booking/audition ratio is about 8 in 10, in part because I try to choose carefully.

Just before I drifted off to sleep I was thinking how much fun it would be to work with Tom Selleck on a Jesse Stone mystery. My fantasy. I like the series; it's very well done. He looks terrific too. The one flaw is the Stone character's ex-wife. Her babykins voice on the phone has got to go.

I'm babbling. Time to get back to work.