The reverse Hitchcock

90% of Texas is in a drought and no rain was expected in the coming days. We had very little in March and none so far in April. There was a 12% chance of precipitation today, which seems paltry given that we’ve had days with over 50% chance when none materialized. It just started raining. Not a soaker by any stretch of the imagination, but it is raining.

Getting my new (old) iPad configured and enjoying it. I would say that the iPad is the iPod Touch for the older generation, i.e., those who aren’t quite up to reading off a tiny screen. The iPad display is large, clear, crisp, bright. I loaded my first video onto it yesterday and watched a 1-hour movie. Great picture, excellent sound and it only used about 5% of the battery charge. Quite impressed. I like the iPad-specific apps, though a few (I’m looking at you Facebook) haven’t quite caught up to the new technology yet. Don’t miss the fact that it doesn’t have a camera like an iPhone or an iPad 2, and who cares if it’s a tad thicker or heavier than the next generation. I like it — and I like that I can use iBooks to transfer a PDF file the same way I can transfer an MP3. That means I can put the short story I might be reading from at World Horror on the iPad. Tested it out this morning and it looks fine.

Finished reading The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, the new No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel by Alexander McCall Smith, this weekend. Still plowing through Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens. Started reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare: A Novel of Ireland by Frank Delaney to my wife. I think I’ve been in or through Kenmare. I’ll have to look it up in my travel journal from my trip through Ireland nearly 20 years ago. It’s at the end (or the beginning) of the ring of Kerry on the Atlantic side.

A fairly routine episode of The Amazing Race, though the host live-tweeted. Just like Probst, he didn’t answer any of my questions. The cowboys made a bad mistake in booking a flight an hour after everyone else, but they caught up and didn’t get eliminated. Ron made his mistake—wandering aimlessly for too long during the detour—later in the day and that cost them the race.

We watched The Tourist on Friday night. One of its most fascinating aspects is the fact that Johnny Depp plays a completely normal everyman. He has no quirks or tics or oddities. Very unusual. I think they could have gone one step further and sheared off his hair and shaved off his scruff, because visually he still looked very much like Johnny Depp. They could have rendered him nearly unrecognizable, but maybe that’s not a good thing.

Spoilers I came away from the film thinking of it as a reverse-Hitchcock. Instead of having a character who has been mistaken for someone else or suspected of being involved in a crime, and having that character spend the entire movie trying to prove his innocence, it turned out in the end that the character was exactly who everyone thought he was. It was only the audience who was misled by his subterfuge. I’d like to go back and watch the first 45 minutes some day knowing how it turned out to see if I can rationalize some of the character’s actions, which to me know seemed inconsistent. Was he so deep into this cover story that he was willing to bring in the police, for example, when the bad guys were shooting through his door? Not sure it holds together entirely. Much of the film was devoted to long, slow shots of Angelina Jolie. At moments late in the film she looks very much like Audrey Hepburn. Maybe that was meant to keep us from paying too much attention to the film’s logic, or lack thereof. Loved the way it turned out, though, with the check to Inland Revnue. I think the movie says one thing without actually saying it: I believe that Angelina Jolie’s character recognized Depp’s character without realizing it. She chose him on the train not just because he fit the bill but because she was subconsciously drawn to her lover. End spoilers

On Saturday, we watched Get Low, starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. It’s set in 1930s Tennessee and Duvall is a hermit who lives in a log cabin, posts Do Not Disturb signs and chases people away with his shotgun. He’s the crazy old coot about whom local legends are spun, especially among the children who dare each other to knock on this door or throw rocks at his windows. He has a long beard and rides a mule-drawn cart. He’s every bit of a cliché. However, once he hears that one of his few remaining contemporaries has died, he decides it’s time to organize his funeral—except he wants to attend. He wants everyone to come and tell stories they know about him, even if they’re the kind of stories that might get them shot. Bill Murray is the local funeral director, fallen on hard times because there’s been a dearth of dying lately, and he takes to the project with open arms. He’s wants to throw a great party, and he does, except it turns out that Duvall doesn’t really want others to tell stories about him—he wants to tell a story that he’s kept in for over forty years. A confession. Bill Murray keeps this film hopping along with his barely concealed grin, and Duvall is so earnest that you just want to see how it all turns out.