couchblogging

Somehow today I managed to injure my "good" (or at least non-"bad") ankle -- feels like a mild sprain, something I'm familiar with from the afore-mentioned "bad" one. So I'm on the couch trying to keep it elevated and iced so that I can return to normal routine in a day or so. But my blog addiction needed feeding, so I borrowed my gf's old laptop...despite the slow wireless connection and its weird Mac keyboard. I only have a desk machine right now. Ergonomically it just works better for me, and most of what I do works better on a large monitor anyway. But this lazy couch thing does have some appeal.

I have a longish thoughtful post in the works based on an article I read on Thursday. But for now there's just the slush in my head.

Last night we double-dipped at the multiplex: a "boy" movie (horror/thriller: Hide and Seek) and a "girl" movie (romantic comedy: Wedding Date). In that order, thankfully. I am not a big horror fan, though I'd agreed to see this one largely because of Dakota Fanning who is wonderfully creepy. And psychological thrillers appeal to me much more than, say, serial killer movies. This one was good up until the last 30 minutes or so. De Niro was sort of wasted on this role, I think. But it was OK for what it was. (though it gave me horrible dreams last night--this is why I don't see such movies very often)

Now, if you are an aficionado of romantic comedies (a genre I realise not everyone appreciates the way I do -- I've only ever had one friend who liked them as much as I did) Wedding Date is quite satisfying. It's sort of a reverse Pretty Woman: Dermott Mulroney as the male escort who turns out to be a good guy after all. Debra Messing looked way better on big screen (with film-quality lighting etc) than she does on the TV, and I actually didn't spend the movie thinking I was watching Grace, so that seemed successful. Anyway, it's sweet and fun if you like that sort of thing. The theatre was packed -- about one-third couples on dates, and the rest groups of women aged 13-80. My gf kept snorting, but it was fun to see it in a room full of women who sigh or laugh appropriately in the right places. (in case it wasn't obvious, I'm the "girl" in our household, at least as regards popular entertainment)

A couple of nights ago I watched a much more complicated movie on DVD that's probably shelved in the romantic comedy category, but it doesn't quite fit the usual mold: Seeing Other People. Which features one of my new favorite actresses, Julianne Nicholson. She's great in this. And as someone who's always been partial to freckles, it's a rare treat to see an actress who doesn't try to cover them up. Anyway, the movie follows a couple who are engaged to be married when the woman says she thinks they should have sex with other people before marrying each other. Although there are some things in the movie that are perhaps conventionally represented (i.e., she winds up in two quasi relationships, whereas her fiance "just" sleeps with a bunch of women), I thought it dealt much more frankly with questions about opening a relationship than most films do. The secondary characters are bittersweet, and the movie as a whole seemed like a thoughtful look at the difficult complexity of relationships in general, for men and women.

ergh, my wrists are already bothering me from just a few minutes on the laptop. Time to read blogs for a while.