It was supposed to rain a lot this weekend. It didn’t. We did have a couple of good showers, but nothing near what I was expecting. Instead, it was hot and very humid. The humidex added 20° to the mercury temperature at times, making it feel like it was over 110.
So, as you might imagine, a great portion of the weekend was spent in air conditioning, except for a round of yard work yesterday morning and a carpentry project with my daughter that is finally getting off the ground.
My summaries of Season 1 and Season 2 of Haven are now up. I’m working my way through the seasons as a way of catching up before Season 5 premieres in just over a week.
We went to see The 100 Foot Journey on Saturday. Originally we planned to see Calvary, but it turned out that movie wasn’t showing anywhere within 40 miles of us. The Mirren film was good, though. Charming and quaint. It’s about a family from India who move to Europe after a tragedy. They start out in England, but it’s not to their liking, so they strike out for the continent trying to find a new place to set up a restaurant and settle on a village in the southwest of France mostly because of serendipity. The place the patriarch chooses is directly across the street from a Michelin-rated French restaurant run by Mirren. Thus begins a clash of cultures and palates, with some romance thrown in for good measure. Light entertainment, but it sure did leave me craving a good Indian meal. One scene struck us in particular: the young Indian chef makes Mirren an omelet (her test of a chef’s merits). Filmed from behind, we see a slouching Mirren straighten her neck and then her back as she tastes the unexpected concoction. No words at that moment: it’s all in body language.
Then we watched The Railway Man starring Colin Furth and Nicole Kidman. It’s about a man obsessed with railways who was part of the POW group that were forced to build the Burma railway line by the Japanese during WWII—an event that was fictionalized in The Bridge on the River Kwai. This story is based on a memoir, so was presumably closer to the truth. Furth’s character suffers terrible PTSD. His greatest venom is reserved for a Japanese translator who oversaw his torture. When he finds out that the man is not only still alive all these years later (1980) but running a museum at the prison camp, he decides it’s time to return to Burma and confront and perhaps kill the man. The Japanese officer is played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who was recently in Spiral is currently plays on Extant. A powerful story with a redeeming finale.
Speaking of Extant, we did a five-episode binge on Sunday afternoon to get caught up. We also watched the first episodes of Doctor Who and Intruders, based on the Michael Marshall Smith novel and starring Mira Sorvina and John Simm. The latter has a 10-year-old actress playing a nine-year-old character, and she is astonishingly good. She is both herself and a previous personality, so she gets to switch between little girl and menacing mystery man. I’m impressed.
Our last viewing of the weekend was Darby’s Rangers, the next installment in our gradual James Garner marathon. This, too, is based on a real WWII event about the formation of an elite group of Army Rangers who were trained by British officers and sent into battle in North Africa and Anzio. It’s funny and campy until it gets deadly serious. The second half is far superior to the first, but there are some interesting moments along the way, including the impact billeting soldiers had on some British families.
