Monday, June 12, 2006

Backlog

Lots of old stuff to blog about.

The fish rescue. We're now down to a single survivor, the others having succumbed to various afflictions presumably -- or at least, hopefully -- caused by their previous environment, rather than their latest one. Though Emma desperately wants to purchase a companion for him (or her), even Kristi is now in teetering on the brink of "no more fish".

My knee. It's much better, thanks. It's actually so much better that yesterday, while climbing up and down my dad's old extension ladder to repair our rain gutter, it started hurting in an entirely new place. You can't get much better than that. Seriously, I think I'll be good to go in the Classic this year. I owe it all to my physical therapist, Allison Trombley. If you're ever diagnosed with a torn meniscus, see her first.

Movies.
  • "Pride and Prejudice" -- Kristi feels it was more unabashedly romantic than the definitive A&E adaptation (and gains from it); she cites the fact that Lizzie doesn't make the sly joke to Jane that she dates her falling in love "from my first seeing [Darcy's] beautiful grounds at Pemberley." I counter that the joke clearly is a joke, that it's pure Lizzie, and that Austen wrote it that way, so who is Kristi to quibble? Her sense of humor is what makes Lizzie so appealing; her wit was plainly attractive to Darcy, and neutering her at the end this way is untrue to the character. I won't be going out of my way to see this version again, but we own the A&E version. Enough said.
  • "The Interpreter" -- nice performances by Kidman and Penn; I'd go well out of my way to watch either ("Bewitched" notwithstanding).
  • "Crash" -- some wonderful moments. The interlocking structure, though, is just impossible to accept at face value; it's like Los Angeles has a population of 25 or 30. Plus, the filmmakers seemed to work very hard to give nearly everybody a moment of unlikeability (or, in Sandra Bullock's case, a truckload of unlikeability), but managed to forget the locksmith and his daughter, who thus end up the most likeable characters in the film. I haven't yet figured out why they were left to stand out as The Good People.
  • "Max" -- I liked this more than Kristi did. Maybe it's because I like John Cusack more than Kristi does. In any event, it leaves you with a fair amount to think about, even though it's fictional.
  • "Junebug" -- you know, I enjoyed this at the time, but I'm having trouble remembering exactly why. That's never a good sign, is it?

posted by MeanMrMustard @ 6:52 AM