Good morning, y’all. Well the temperatures are such that we are routinely frying lizards on rocks who were just looking for a little sun time. We haven’t had any bad storms to speak of. I’m seeing on the news that Tornado Alley has now been extended as far north as Boston where they had a sighting last week. I don’t remember Boston being in the Alley before. Of course we’re getting more tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia too, so I’m guessing climate change has something to do with it. I’ll just mention it now before science gets outlawed by the oil companies.
Well, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”, so Mulva and I headed off to Walmart for our weekly/daily visit. I say weekly/daily because weekly is all I can handle, while Mulva goes daily. Sometimes Mulva will go twice a day if she forgets something, or if someone asks her to pick up something for them. Only,”if it’s convenient”, of course. One thing Mulva truly loves to do is shop for others. She could be one of those professional shoppers for people who can’t go for themselves, or don’t have the inclination to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. She’d do it for free, which is about all folks around here can afford to pay. “Service to others” is high on Mulva’s list of Christian attributes, I just wish it paid better.
Anyway, we got to Walmart and headed off in different directions, as usual. In addition to our Date night movie, I wanted to see if there were any documentaries on music worth seeing. I’m still feeling a little stung about my ignorance of Link Wray, and I’m curious as to what else I’ve missed. I picked up a documentary called, “A Drummer’s Dream”. I don’t know any of the people in it, so that’s a good sign, I guess. I need to learn more about people that real musicians think are cool, instead of just sticking to my own narrow spectrum. I’ll give it a shot and report back. For $1.99 I’m bound to learn something.
I had to dig a little deeper in my pocket, and the movie bin, to come up with this week’s selection. It’s called, “Things We Lost In The Fire”. It stars Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro. Benicio del Toro is also appearing in a popular commercial now where he gets confused by some fans with Antonio Banderas. Big difference, one can act, the other, not so much. As it turns out, the one that can act was in this flick. Good thing too. Halle Berry needed all the help she could get from a professional to keep the story on track. Halle plays the very happily married mother of two whose only gripe in life is that her husband’s friend is a junkie. The husband dies and then we watch how Halle responds to her loss. Not well at times, and not believable most times.
I guess that’s the director’s job, to keep it “real”. In my humble opinion, the director seemed to lose control at different times. For one, the run length. It was two hours long, and felt it. For another, the relationship between the characters. They go from abject hatred to “sleep with me platonically”. Sure, happens all of the time. But then after Benicio’s character sleeps with Halle, she gets all bent out of shape because her kids are responding to him. She kicks Benicio out, and surprise surprise, he returns to heroin. More flotsam and jetsam that we have to swim through until the director ties it all up with a big bow. Not “happily ever after”, just “functional ever after”.
The film won no Academy nominations, and shouldn’t have. It appears to have lost a lot of money for the investors. Maybe the disconnect was between the female director and female lead. Who knows. It’s for sure Benicio Del Toro played his heart out. It’s a shame all of the other pieces of the puzzle weren’t there.
I woke up Mulva and sent her back over to Number Two. I needed to watch a Zombie movie or two to get this one out of my head. Maybe the thing that should have been lost in the fire was the master for this movie.
