Moot Point

This is my last NaBloPoMo post, meaning I have blogged every single day for the month of November. This is good, because it definitely rekindled my love of blogging, and willingness to post about movies I watched, because people actually respond to those posts.

Here is my November in review:

1) I had to boil my drinking water for the first time ever. I know I already complained about this, but THIS IS WHY I DO NOT LIVE IN THE COUNTRY. I might as well have to pump it from a frickin’ well.

2) It snowed. For two days straight. In Vancouver. School closed for a day. There is still snow on the ground and I can tell you it is getting less pretty by the minute. It is starting to melt, which is much, much less awesome. They had to reroute my bus. Because, I think (?), they don’t have snowplows. 2a) Though it is apparently the law, you wouldn’t know it from the unshoveled sidewalks in my neighbourhood.

3) I have so much work to do. Grading papers, writing papers, reading papers. Then I am going home for Christmas and in Toronto for New Year’s. (FYI I will be in Calgary Dec 17-27, and then to Toronto Dec 27-Jan 4).

4) Classes are basically over starting tomorrow, but I have a little under three weeks to finish up writing papers. This is kind of good, because it means I have all my time to work on papers, but kind of bad because I don’t do well without structure. Note to self: invent a structure.

I can’t believe it’s still snowy here. I hope school doesn’t get cancelled tomorrow, it’s the last day for me to do TA evaluations with my students. I have numerical points, they get less relevant as they go on.

1) Thanks, Stephen Harper. This is so dumb. For one, it already passed. For two, the Supreme Court already said that unequal marriage laws are unconstitutional. For three, even if it would fail in a “free vote,” the reason we have a constitution is to protect minority rights. Sigh.

2) Snow makes me totally want to bake; I still have a while (and a lot of essays) before Christmas baking season starts in earnest, but my muffins puffed up much better this time. Reasons: I bought new baking powder and also, I mixed even less thoroughly. My winter baking plans include Nigella’s savoury blue cheese cooking, maybe trying to find some kind of mint chocolate brownies, and I want to try out eggnog muffins. (I may try that well before. Also, it would give me the excuse to buy eggnog. I’m like Homer Simpson: “We only get thirty sweet noggy days. Then the government takes it away again.” I will totally pour eggnog on my cereal.

3) The Fame kids are snowed in. This was totally a Baby-Sitter’s Club Super Special (it hasn’t been recapped yet at BSC Headquarters. (Those were the extra-long ones with chapters narrated by alternating girls, as opposed to the normal ones, which were from the perspective of one particular sitter.) Jessi was even stuck at her dance school! I bet Ann M. Martin watched Fame, even if she cut out the teen pregnancy storyline.

UPDATE: 4) Ugh, it’s Lucille Ball day on TCM. Lucy’s not really in any movies that are considered “classic,” except maybe Stage Door, in which she’s a pretty minor character and it is awesome because of Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and, to a lesser degree, Eve Arden. According to the website, it’s actually Lucille Ball Month. Come on TCM, you can do better than that. I could do better than that. I would be an awesome classic film network programmer.

This is kind of a boring post, but Alex and I made the best chili ever the other night and I wanted to remember what I did so we can reproduce it.

I got the idea of turkey chili with squash because Alex said he saw it in some Vancouver lifestyle magazine, and slowly became obsessed with the idea of a nice tomatillo-based chili with big hunks of squash and white beans. Every recipe online called for tomatoes, but I was convinced tomatillos were the way to go (after our great success with the Green Turkey Chili recipe card from Whole Foods last year), so we kind of improvised. This was definitely one of my better made-up recipes; chili’s hard to screw up. The creaminess of the cooked squash contrasts with the more mealy bean texture, and the corn adds a different texture and sweetness. The turkey made it heartier, but there’s enough going on that I bet one could make this vegetarian (vegan, really) without missing anything.

Also, the leftovers were pretty good wrapped in a tortilla, burrito-style, with chopped avocado, grated cheddar, more green onion, and sour cream.

I was too lazy to take a picture of it, but the squash made it all sunny yellow.

“Recipe” below: Continue Reading »

Oh man, so much snow.

Speaking of snow, Sara was mad the other day because I only wrote two sentences about The Fountain, while devoting multiple paragraphs to a product placement-laden franchise film. Which, yeah.

The thing is, I don’t really know how I felt about The Fountain. I haven’t seen Pi, so I can’t compare it to that, but I did think it was better than Requiem for a Dream. But, the things I liked about it are the same things that made people like Requiem: the writing’s not exceptional, but it’s shot with such verve and style. The actual storyline of Requiem, was, as I recall “Everyone has their own drug. Drugs are bad!”, but commercials are still using that series of quick cuts with the dilated pupils, which says something.

The present story of The Fountain is about this doctor who’s trying to find a cure for the disease (brain tumor?) his young wife is dying of; it’s all extended into this thing about how he can’t accept death. The 1500 AD story is about a conquistador who goes on the search for the secret to eternal life for the Queen of Spain. The future story is about a guy. Floating in a bubble. With a tree. In space. It is fantastically gorgeous to look at. Like, I don’t know how they did it; it didn’t all look like CGI — it looked like magic. Or at least an orb, floating through space. There were shots that were so heartbreakingly cool, like when evening stars dissolve into these floating candles in the Queen’s throne room, that you can’t help be impressed. So if you like movies that are pretty, it is a good one to see.

Also, the three different time periods could have been a mess, but it was pretty deftly handled; Aronofsky makes it clear from early on where each time period fits in. But, like I said before, Rachel Weisz isn’t so much a character as a pretty, saintly woman who’s at peace with her life. And explains the mythology at the core of the film. But yeah? Being a convincing person? Not so much. It’s kind of forgivable because a) we’re really in Hugh Jackman’s subjective position for most of the movie (and he does a really good job; I was never a fan before, but between this and The Illusionist The Prestige (duh), I’m convinced he’s at least really good at playing crazily obsessed dudes) and b) it’s kind of a parable as more than being a story about specific people living in a real world. That’s…not necessarily a bad thing: for instance, Amelie, which I love, does not take place in anything like the real world and it works. For it. Mainly because it was kind of a fairytale, and not full of pseudospiritual claptrap that first-year undergrad philosophy students will tell you is really “deep.” (It kind of combines stuff from different, apparently random religions, including Buddhism and Mayan mythology, and there’s a quote or two from the Bible thrown in? I think.)

So, in summary: I was pretty much rapt while watching it, but I don’t know if like, the big moral (semi-ironic SPOILER ALERT) that you know, people die and we have to accept that instead of fighting it with our wars and our crazy science is really saying anything new or special. I don’t normally judge movies that way — I don’t think Casino Royale said anything — but The Fountain was presented on such a grand scale, it’s hard not to feel a bit let down by the film’s big wisdom. In other words, don’t go see this Hugh Jackman movie if you want to learn the meaning of life. But…it’s pretty interesting.

Speaking of fountains: did you hear I get running water again? Huzzah!

Last night and today, I am experiencing for my first time the joy of Vancouver snow. It started yesterday afternoon, with little teeny hardly counting, melting as soon as they touched the ground flakes, which is how I assumed it would stay.

Sometime around five, when we were buying movie tickets, it started up for real. I stood at the window for like, ever, waiting for Alex to finish in the bathroom at the Metrotown Silvercity, watching snow fall on the parking lot and being so happy to see real snow that I wanted to cry. A screening of Happy Feet let out and I was suddenly surrounded by kids saying “Cool, snow!” and asking their parents if they could go tobaggoning. On the Skytrain, we overheard a cellphone conversation that went something like “Do you have four-wheel drive? Can you come pick us up?”

Things got hilarious when we headed home and the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the 11:00 news was taken up by snow-related stories: did you know people get into car accidents when it snows? Or that the first snowfall of the season means that upwards of ten people will be in line at the tire place to get winter tires put on?

Today, when we woke up and it was still snowing, we headed out for a Main Street snow walk:

Snow makes everything pretty. There are a few more where that came from.

I seriously didn’t know how much I missed snow until I realized this would all be gone in a couple days.

So we went to see Casino Royale tonight. I’m not a huge Bond fan, and I was a bit dubious about the choice of Daniel Craig (mainly because I thought Clive Owen would have been so, so perfect), but I’m a total convert. Craig is a good enough actor to sell the serious stuff, and he did the goofy pickup lines dryly enough that it worked. One of the things I liked was that they got rid of all the goofy special effects for special effects sequences that have marred the last few Brosnan ones: instead of having a lame Q sequence — no offense John Cleese — they had a wicked chase-through-a-construction-site scene.* Also? No one in it was that famous: instead of having like, the Madonna cameo and having Michael Madsen skulking around (like in the horrible Die Another Day), they hired actors. Besides Eva Green (who was pretty good), they had like, talented actors: Giancarlo Gianni was nominated for an Oscar in the 70s, and Isaach De Bankole and Jeffrey Wright have coincidentally both been the main character’s best friend in Jim Jarmusch movies (in Ghost Dog and Broken Flowers, respectively).

It was pretty long, but unlike being bloated with stupid shit like the Moneypenny fantasy scene, it was actually full of plot. It was well-directed, it was dark, and also? It didn’t objectify women nearly as much as most of the Bond movies do. There’s one short scene with a chick in a bikini, and the opening animated sequence doesn’t even have any mudflap girls. The scene where the African guys have brought a machete to Montenegro was borderline racist, but it was also pretty scary.

Obviously it’s naturally more interesting to show James Bond becoming James Bond than to show him being all unflappable, but the thing where he kept ordering drinks that weren’t martinis was knowing without being too “wink-wink.”

As a movie, I think it might be the best James Bond movie. Might.

We also saw The Fountain. It was gorgeous, and Hugh Jackman was really good, but Rachel Weisz didn’t have a lot to do besides wear a white coat and be saintly a lot.

*The dude, he jumped! On cranes! It was crazy.

Time: Nine-thirtysomething AM Place: The B-Line, at Broadway and Heather

I am sitting sideways in the “please get up if old or disabled people get on the bus” seats. My backpack is on the floor in front of me and my feet are straddling it, so the people in front of me have room to stand. This woman gets on. She looks about 47 years old and healthy. She’s holding two of those hanging strap handle things. She kind of slowly starts stepping forward; she’s in my foot’s path. I try to move ol’ lefty out of the way, but there’s no room. She steps on my toe.

“Excuse me, you’re on my foot. Ma ‘am?” I say, meekly.

Not only does she not respond, but she puts more weight on my foot. (It’s become clear that she’s leaning on my foot to pull the “Next Stop” cord, very slowly.

A bit more firmly: “You’re on my foot.”

She finally pulls the cord and returns to her original, not on my foot, stance.

I look up at her. She kind of squints at me, then won’t meet my gaze.

I look around, to see if anyone else is as shocked at this total display of rudeness. I don’t know why I’d expect them to care.

But seriously: Continue Reading »

Alex: I know you better than you know yourself. Me: Prove it. …Ask me something about myself that I don’t know and you know. Alex: How wide is your love for me? Me: How…wide? Alex: Two hundred metres. Me: Two hundred metres? Alex: That is twice the length of an Olympic sprinting track. Someone could run across it in 20 seconds. Well, an Olympic sprinter could. Me: That’s not very wide. I was going to say, like, “as wide as the seas.” Alex: As deep as the seas. Me: No, the seas are wide. You know, “the ocean wide.” Two hundred metres is nothing compared to the ocean. You couldn’t run across the ocean in 20 seconds. Alex: Well, you couldn’t run across it in 20 seconds. Me: You don’t know, that’s not that far. I can run pretty fast. Alex: But you would spill your latte!

Today I only went outside to go to the bank; it was horrible and rainy and…ugh. I rewarded myself with an eggnog latte. I got really wet, and I kept spilling coffee-flavoured eggnog on my coat, which was totally inappropriate. I really should get an umbrella.

Fame was amazing tonight: a young Janet Jackson guest-starred, Holly had a crush on the drama teacher (which she tried to get him to reciprocate via red leather mom jeans), Doris and Danny Amatulo pulled a Rachel-and-Joey (in which they tried to hook up and then realized that they were better off as friends, especially seeing as how they’d been going to high school together for about six years*), and Leroy was worried he’d gotten his off-screen girlfriend pregnant. The adults had a story too, but it was much less sexy.

*And she wore silver pajamas! On a date. Other than that, I really liked Doris’ clothes this week: she had this black dress with red tights and a big red belt that was awesome.

Also, all the kids had to dance in the streets, because they got to do location shooting that week. Sadly, I can’t find video online.

Seriously, everyone should watch Fame.

I’m sure a lot of you guys saw Alex’s post about the anti-Semite hipsters that we sat by on the bus the other day. Seriously, this is almost a direct quote:

Dude: “One thing’s for sure, they all hate Arabs. Every single one of them.” Girl: “Yeah?” Dude: “And they have to be in the Army for two years? After high school? So they all have like, military minds.” Girl: “Wow….so are you going to see akron/family?”

They were the grossest people ever. Hate.

Not much else has happened in the last couple of days. I had a little Office marathon yesterday in between reading, but then I realized that that show’s actually pretty depressing. Also, I have had that “Let’s Go to the Mall” song from How I Met Your Mother in my head all day. (It was super-funny, but I didn’t get why she pronounced about a-boat. Usually USians say Canadians say a-boot, which we also don’t do. It’s doubly weird, because according to Wikipedia, Cobie Smulders (best. name. ever.), the actress who plays Robin, is actually from Canada.)