I’d like to tell you all about my lithotripsy procedure. I’d like to, but I can’t. Because I don’t remember a moment of it. They stuck an IV in my arm and hooked me up to some of the same stuff that killed Michael Jackson and I was out like a boxer through the entire process. I came to some time later, wondering when they were going to get started. Apparently it all went off without a hitch. I didn’t even suffer any of the bruising or aches that was a possible side effect of having my kidney zapped with sonic blasts. At least, that’s what I assume they did. for all I know it was like the picture.
One amusing anecdote. After I had the IV in, the doctor came by and asked me if I’d passed the stone since I last saw him. “I have to ask the obvious question,” he said, because he’d had one case where the guy did pass the stone but showed up for his surgery and let them start an IV before proudly holding up the stone in a little vial.
We watched a couple of movies this weekend. First, it was Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers’ tribute to the golden age of cinema. It stars Josh Brolin as a studio fixer. The guy who gets actors and directors out of trouble when they fall off the wagon or get pregnant out of wedlock, stuff like that. He’s very good at his job. When mega-star Baird Whitlock (an amiably dim-witted George Clooney) is kidnapped, he goes about getting him back in a calm, professional manner. The movie has lots of little set pieces rather than an overall plot. There are a couple of song-and-dance routines, one featuring Scarlett Johansson and another with Channing Tatum straight out of Fred Astaire, sort of. There’s a cowboy star who’s thrust into a parlor picture directed by Ralph Fiennes that leads to a Pygmalion-esque scene where the director tries to get rid of the oater’s drawl. Tilda Swinton plays twin rival gossip columnists, sort like Ann Landers and Dear Abby. It’s all very amusing and has probably more inside jokes than we could catch. I was surprised at how well it reviewed…this is one of those films that the reviewers liked significantly better than the general public.
Then we watched Blackway (previously titled Go With Me) a straight-up thriller starring Anthony Hopkins, Julia Stiles and Ray Liotta. Stiles has come back to the small Pacific northwest town where she grew up after her mother died. She crosses paths with Liotta, a by-the-numbers bad dude, and he decides to stalk her. Kill her cat, all that kind of stuff. So she turns to the cops…no help there. She’s referred to a logging camp group (Hal Holbrook seems to be the head honcho) and Hopkins agrees to help her get Liotta off her back. I didn’t find that the film had a great deal of suspense, and very little by way of character dimension. I have no idea why Liotta was behaving like he did, or why Stiles’ character was so determined to stay in town, or even why Hopkins was willing to confront this bad dude, though I suspect it was supposed to be something to do with his daughter. I kept thinking of Stiles as Lumen from Dexter and wondering when she was going to run into the serial killer, because we all know where he ended up.
