Two Weekends and a Sick Day, Part One

It's been busy lately, and the level of busy-ness has apparently caught up with me. I took a sick day from work today due to a cough and sore throat incident, and so now I'm on some pretty powerful antibiotics and a narcotic cough syrup.

Whether I'll be back at work tomorrow is an open question; all I wanted to do today was sleep.

But that's following two eventful weekends. Weekend-before-last I saw, and was terribly disappointed in and offended by, The Village. It's quite simply one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Its dialogue was pretentious, its acting workmanlike and uninspired, its script and story so dull and predictable that reading the side of a cereal box holds more shock and surprise. I say the movie offended me because its secret surprise ending was as silly and trite a thing as could be imagined. Someone said about something, there's no there there. That's how I feel about The Village.

Seeing that movie made it incumbent on me to see another, to cleanse the movie palate. I saw Before Sunset that same weekend, on Sunday night. The difference between a good movie and a bad one has never been so apparent to me as when seeing those two movies back-to-back. In Before Sunset, you see good acting combined with intelligent writing and un-showy directing, and the cumulative effect is one of making you forget that you're watching a movie. Which, of course, the best movies always do. Before Sunset is small and confined, but that allows it to probe and prod in a way few movies do anymore.

In between the two movies, I went to the Botanical Gardens for another concert — this time, Lyle Lovett. Worth every penny. Lyle is not only a great performer, he's a great songwriter, and some of the songs he performed I'd not heard before. I was struck by the quality of the Large Band as musicians, and equally struck by the economy of word and phrase in many of those songs. It was a good show on a beautiful night — worth the trip.

I can't say the same for Antiques Roadshow, which was also on that Saturday. That was hours of standing in line as part of a huge crowd, all of us carrying heavy boxes of stuff, not enough of it on wheels. The two-and-a-half hour wait in line was capped by about ten minutes of what seemed like perfunctory and dismissive appraising. It wasn't an experience that I'd want to miss, but I'm not sure I'd do it again.

So that was weekend-before-last. Next up, a week of work, followed by last weekend's events.