When Chris stayed over on Tuesday night, we indulged our shared love for bad movies. I get to slum, in a strictly cinematic sense, with Alasdair from time to time, but poor Chris has pretty much nobody in Boston who will join him in a steaming bowl of mediocre film.
On Tuesday, then, we rented both The Two Towers and Cradle 2 The Grave. Yes, of course, one of these things isn’t at all like the other, don’t belabour the obvious. When we got back to the house we decided that we should watch C2tG rather than TTT precisely because it was the worse movie, and that meant that Chris would never be able to see it back in Boston.
The music had me pretty convinced, early on, that X was in fact going to give it to me, and I am disappointed to report that I did not notice if said giving actually took place. If you watch C2TG, and you have much more sensitive instruments than were available to Chris and myself, you may possibly detect trace elements of entertainment. I cannot recommend this movie.
Chris then went to take my wife off into the depths of Algonquin Park, but because he’d set me down the path of mediocre entertainment, I learned that I also cannot recommend the first 75 minutes of A Man Apart, which was at least darkly lit enough that I couldn’t always see the movie I should really never have rented. The rest of the movie might have been frigging fantastic, but I’m never going to find out.
I tried to watch Dark Blue, but fell asleep before the freaking DVD menu came up. I don’t think that I can conclusively correlate that to the quality of the movie itself.
Collateral Damage got two thumbs up, and I can only presume that they were awarded by Arthur Ebert and Samatha Roeper.
After those movies, The Fast and the Furious was pretty good. Michelle Rodriguez wasn’t as good as she was in Girlfight or even S.W.A.T., but she was still fun to watch. (I didn’t know she was in Blue Crush. Hmm.)
Oh, I also saw Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Matchstick Men this week, though that was in the actual out-of-the-house theatre. They were both fun. Johnny Depp uber alles, I tell ya.
I’d been meaning for quite some time to pick up American Gods, probably since dan_b recommended it to me back at some forgotten conference. I never seemed to remember when I was actually in a book store — and for all my hip-and-wiredness, I don’t actually buy books online hardly at all ever not really; book purchases are visceral and instantly-gratifying, and must be for all time — so until today I still hadn’t read it.
Today, though, I was reminded to purchase it, when Mr Gaiman himself sat down at the next table while I was eating a lovely Japan Sushi meal. He was being interviewed pretty poorly, IMO — the interviewer asked the same question three times, for example — but he did manage to trigger some piddly royalty on a trade paperback, and I bet he wasn’t buying his own sashimi.