Movie Weekend

We managed to actually get outside yesterday, having to head down to Queen and Augusta to the flooring place to finally decide on a stain. Halfway through the walk, with the wind blowing in our faces and my RRHB walking a full block in front of me as I trudged along, he said, “Maybe we should have gone another day.”

By the time we got home we were both exhausted, and every couple of hours or so, one of us would go to the window and exclaim, “it’s still coming down!” We were supposed to go and see Zesty’s play last night but a) we couldn’t have got the car out, b) the transit was wholly unpredictable, and c) the weather made it impossible to even walk a few steps without being in utter agony. After spending close to 2.5 hours walking a few blocks that would have normally taken half that time, we gave up on doing anything social, had a glass of wine or two, and watched a crap load of movies:

Beowulf: Not impressed at all by how they changed the story, how they sexed it up completely, but the special effects were really quite something and man was it gory.

Dan in Real Life: What an utterly charming film, from the envious huge family that gathers at the incredible summer house on Rhode Island to the sweet love story at the centre of it all, I have to admit that I cried, a lot. I can forgive the cliches, and even Dane Cook, who seemed woefully out of place, and even the dance scene didn’t make me cringe as it once would, so thumbs up.

The Darjeeling Limited: Good grief I loved everything about this film, the whimsical storytelling, the delicious colour palette, the utterly truthful way the three brothers related to each other, the utterly unbelievable circumstances they find themselves in, the excellent performances, Wes Anderson’s deft comedy, all of it.

The Things I Lost in the Fire: Both Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro give impressive performances and I didn’t even mind the story that EW called “mawkish” (what a great word; a widow takes in the drug addicted best friend of her late husband and they both try to heal). It’s sad, but I like that sometimes, but I would have liked maybe just a bit less of the heavy-handedness of the direction (how many eyeball close-ups are necessary? Really? How many? Yawn).

I Could Never Be Your Woman: I always wish that Michelle Pfieffer would make more movies. She’s lovely, sweet, gorgeous, determined and a whole host of other adjectives in this film. But I have to say that it’s far more Loser than Clueless, so I was a little disappointed. And man, was Paul Rudd a hambone, and I thought he was actually quite unbelievable and kind of miscast, which is hard for me to admit because I usually think he saves just about every movie he’s in… Anyway. Saoirse Ronan plays Pfieffer’s daughter and she’s deliciously precocious in just the way teenagers on TV can be, and there are really quite a few cute moments, but certainly not enough to bridge the gap between glaring cliches.

So, yeah, lots of movies. And now just to punish me, I think my iTunes shuffle is stuck in the early 90s, so far this afternoon I’ve heard “Linger,” “Dirty Boots,” some old U2, and UB40. I’ve reshuffled to mix it up a bit, and now it’s landed on “Bang,” so at least we’re moving in the right direction.