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Jul. 24th, 2006 09:17 pm* It’s hot. Hot, hot, hot, sweaty all over after the slightest movement hot, with no hope for lower temperatures anytime soon. ::sigh::
* Managed a morning run Friday & today regardless, since at barely 7 am it’s still quite tolerable.
* Stomach has improved a bit, as has the mental balance.
* I’ve actually been rather energetic/busy, at least for my standards – yesterday I picked up Ch. (who’s had an accident with her bike last week and is still kind of invalid) at 8:15 and we drove out to the horse, brushed, petted, fed & generally pampered her, Ch. rode around a bit, that is I led her around; returned home, did the laundry, watered the parents’ plants, watered the bushes in the yard, cleaned my bike, since it needs to be repaired (sort-of broken pedal, weird noises while pedalling, and while we’re at it, the light and brakes need to be fixed too) and frankly I was ashamed to bring it to the shop in the state it was in. Looked at my watch at 4 pm & thought that it’d been a long day already & for once was satisfied that I’d actually accomplished something, rather than wonder at the end of the weekend where it’d gone.
However, on the side of annoying computer woes, my ancient iMac (::pets::), which had been occasionally hiccupping for quite some time, has either suffered a heat-stroke, or simply decided it wants to be retired, crashed my browser yesterday and has refused to open IE and Outlook since.
* Hence, today, after I’d been thinking & talking about it for a year or so, I left work early, walked into the Mac store, and in almost less time than it takes to type this ordered a new iMac, which I’m going to bring home when I have the car on Wednesday. I still can’t quite believe I actually did this. So, yay! for new, not-Bronze Age computer & being able to download photos without it freezing ever 20-40 pictures & all kinds of nifty features.
Also phoned the bike shop and fixed a date to bring my bike in for repair next Monday; it’ll be (hopefully, supposedly) done by Tuesday, so that’s another thing to strike off the to-do list before I leave for Maishofen. One less item to take care of when I return.
* In an effort to catch up with the dvds I keep buying, but for one reason or the other (or none) never get around to actually watch (lack of attention span? I do well enough with tv shows…), I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on Saturday and Dogma yesterday, and yes, these are the movies I mentioned buying months ago. ::sigh::
Tiger and Dragon is certainly a good movie, I liked it, but somehow it failed to have a real emotional impact on me. Beautiful images, good actors, Michelle Yeoh especially is lovely, good enough story, great, almost poetic fight sequences (and I’m usually the first person to be bored by any kind of drawn-out fight/action scene), but I feel like I’m missing something, and wonder if there may be something lost due to cultural context. Speaking of which, it’s rather interesting how western main-stream movie tradition conditions us to expect happy endings. If this had been a Hollywood movie, there’d been at least one happy couple in the end…
Which brings me to Dogma, which is… cute on the surface, but slightly odd underneath, and in the end a little unsatisfactory to me. After the first half hour or so I thought it was an absolutely awesome movie, but as it progressed, something didn’t quite come together, the dark and the humorous parts became more and more incongruent. I’m not well versed in theology (make that not versed at all), but the tale of the angels, their dissatisfaction with God and their own state as opposed to humanity, that is kind of profound-ish theological material, and IMO the movie shied away from really exploring that by turning them more and more into the ‘bad guys’ who simply need to be stopped, and even more so by providing an incontestably ‘good’ God as a counterpart. The more erratic Loki and Bartleby’s killing becomes, the more their and Azrael’s motivations, the cause of their frustration, fades to the background until it can be conveniently forgotten when Alanis Morisette appears on the scene.
To me the end feels glossed over and artificially comforting and conciliatory. Very American. God exists, and (s)he is a good God (or at least is a good God now, never mind his/her Old Testament incarnation that used to employ Loki and proceeded to banish him when he refused to do the fire & brimstone job any longer), beautiful, unthreatening and also oh-so-very daringly played by (gasp) a woman, smells flowers, does hand-stands and plays mini-golf, and everyone can go home and be happy and no one’s world-view is too much shaken. The End.
Not that Alanis Morisette doesn’t make a great God, because she does. It’s just the context that irks me.
The movie had potential for greater subversiveness, or fucked-upness, whichever you prefer.
Also, the Da Vinci Code has managed to sabotage whatever interest in Bethany’s story I might have had otherwise, because when something like ‘last scion’ is mentioned in the context of Christ, there’s the very distinct urge to roll my eyes, and to tell her to get over it, because it’s not as if she’s the direct descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus himself. Great, great etc. niece of Jesus has become just a little anticlimactic these days.
Still, many good parts, and great performances by everyone,
