We had a brief cold spell last week where the temperatures dropped to below freezing. So, when it suddenly went back up to the eighties again, the flora and fauna in the area became understandably confused. The azalea bush in front of our house produced a single flower over the past couple of days. Presumably it thinks spring is here. Who knows—maybe it is? The unseasonably warm temperatures show no signs of abating any time soon. We sat on the patio of a nearby restaurant for a mid-afternoon dinner on Christmas Eve and again last night at our local pizzeria. I had to switch the climate control back from heating to cooling. I guess it’s better than snow.
We saw Passengers last week, the space odyssey starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, with Michael Sheen and Lawrence Fishburn. It was pretty good. I certainly understand the controversy surrounding the movie, but I’m having a hard time condemning it in as strong words as some have done. There’s an assumption in movies that if someone does something bad or wrong or ill-considered that he must pay for it at some point, but the real world doesn’t operate that way, so I don’t always expect that divine justice will be meted out for all cinematic transgressions. I know that the hand-waving explanations (“yes, but later in the movie he…”) won’t satisfy everyone, but they did me. And my wife, as well, who hadn’t read about the complaints about the film. On an unrelated note, every time I saw Michael Sheen, I thought of Lloyd the bartender from The Shining. We were standing at the food counter when I realized that the millennial working the ticket booth had given me the senior discount. It must have been the bad light outside the multiplex that led her to believe I looked over 62, right?
On Christmas Eve we went to the local church to watch the pageant and sing carols, something that always takes me back to my childhood, when I was involved in such productions. Then we watched Love, Actually, which was on a round-the-clock loop up against A Christmas Story. However, we soon discovered that the movie had been edited (most notably during Nighy’s early colorful rant), so I pulled it up on Amazon Prime and we watched it uncensored. We’d seen it on VHS, probably, when it first came out, so I remembered some but not all of it. I tend to agree that the movie doesn’t get falling in love right in most of the stories, where the prime ingredient seems to be physical attraction (other than the Martin Freeman storyline where the characters actually fall in love while talking to each other). The Liam Neeson storyline is just a ton of fun, especially in the way that this step-dad relates to the boy, very direct, honest and coarse. I didn’t care for the way the Laura Linney story petered out, either. It’s easy to watch, but the movie doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny.
On Christmas Day, I put an iPod loaded with every Christmas song we own (about 400 of them, with a total running time of nearly 24 hours) on random shuffle and we listened to the music while we read and relaxed. I don’t normally like shuffle—I’m an album kinda guy—but it was fun to hear Sarah McLaughlin one minute and Trans Siberian Orchestra the next and Twisted Sister the next. We also watched Southside With You, the movie about Barack Obama’s first date with Michelle Robinson, who was his supervisor at a Chicago law firm and very reluctant to get involved with him. Parker Sawyers looks a lot like Obama from certain angles, and he certainly mastered his rhythms and styles. I had a harder time seeing Michelle Obama in Tika Sumpter, but it’s a nice story, mostly based on fact, although the meeting they attend might not have happened on their first date.
Last night we saw Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. It’s based on the true story of a little boy (4-5 years old), who lives in rural India in abject poverty. Through a series of misadventures, he ends up trapped on an out-of-service train that takes him over a thousand kilometers from home, to Calcutta. Not only can he not convey the name of the village where he comes from, he can’t speak Bengali, the local language, only Hindi. After some Oliver Twist-esque experiences, he ends up being adopted by a family in Tasmania, where he grows up to be Dev Patel. It’s about 2008 and he’s introduced to Google Earth, which sends him on a years-long quest to try to figure out where he came from based on only his geographic memories. It’s a feel-good movie, probably Patel’s best work. We liked it a lot. Interestingly, you don’t find out why the movie has that title until the text updates just before the closing credits. It’s a funny reveal.
