A post in which it is movie night

Work was work. I hit the gym afterwards.

I was excited because a new movie called In the Loop was opening this weekend. It sounds really good. I called Anna to see if she wanted to go, and she said she’d like to; but when I looked into actual times, it wasn’t opening here. Of course. I guess there’s not a big market for British political satire in South Carolina - go figure. But we decided to go to dinner anyway.

By the time I got off work, I was in an odd mood. I was weary of trying to throw off the chains of conformity. I wanted to give up and revel in the mediocrity of American society. So we went to Golden Corral for dinner. Can’t get much more mediocre than that. I had to talk Anna in to going, because she apparently had some trauma there with an ex in the past, but Lordamercy - can you really assign painful memories to a cheap buffet? Anyway, she went after persuasion, and apparently suffered no trauma while we were there. We ate basically until we couldn’t move. They had surprisingly good calamari, among other tasty, formerly-packeted dishes.

After we ate, we talked while we tried to decide what to do. I was kind of in the mood to go fry my brain with a typical cinematic abomination – specifically G-Force, a movie in which an elite team of guinea pigs is trained as secret agents. Yeah, I know, completely dildonic. But even in my mood of wanting to revel in mediocrity, I just couldn’t bring myself to shell out $20 to go see CGI guinea pigs.

We ended up going to Anna’s house and just hanging out with her mom, Kathy. She was watching a movie called Danika, in which Marisa Tormei is given the chance to go crazy after winning the Oscar for My Cousin Vinnie. Unfortunately, the movie completely sucked. After the unsatisfactory conclusion (in which we are left to wonder how much of the movie actually occurred, and how much of it was the product of her unbalanced mind as we are treated to a close up of her very dirty, homeless feet), Kathy turned to another odd movie called simply Bug, in which Ashley Judd and her co-star Michael Shannon get to go crazy, line their apartment with aluminum foil, light it with bug zappers, and despair over the fact that Judd has become the ‘super mother bug’ (yes, gentle reader, that is a direct quote) before immolating themselves. Yeah, that was a pick-me-up. Rotten Tomatoes gives this movie a 58% fresh rating, so I guess other people saw a whole lot more in it than I did, musta not been my kind of thing. I thought it completely sucked.

We finally discovered and put the object of our quest in the DVD player. Anna had a copy of La Vie En Rose, which I had really wanted to see. It was a very good movie, but exceedingly grim. OK, so I know that Edith Piaf didn’t lead a charmed life, OK? But it is pretty unremitting until she falls in love with Marcel Cerdan. Still, it was excellent. Marion Cotillard was stunning. She totally deserved the Oscar she won for best actress. She plays Piaf from 20 to 47 (when she died) brilliantly. I understand that they used Jil Aigrot for three of the songs, of which they didn’t have good Piaf recordings, but frankly, I didn’t even notice. She was wonderful. Cotillard lip-synched so well that I forgot she wasn’t singing. And I’ve watched a lotta lip-synch in my day.

It was a long movie. When it was over, Anna and I hung out for a bit and talked about weird music we like. Surprisingly, Anna likes some of the same odd things I do - we had several CDs in common (among them specifically, a quirky little compilation CD called 'Divas Exotica'). I would have expected her to have much stranger taste than I do. Admittedly, she mentioned several artists I had never heard of, but we ended up singing snatches of odd songs we both enjoy.

It was a nice evening.