What I Watched -- Annie Hall

A friend of mine has been telling me for years that I need to see Annie Hall.  "It's my favorite movie!"  So she finally lent it to me (a month ago), and I finally watched it (last night).

And it's good!  I definitely wouldn't say it's my favorite movie, but I imagine there is some element of nostalgia tied up with it if, like S, you saw it when it first came out.

In case anyone doesn't know the story, it is, quite simply, the story of a relationship shared in retrospect, with amusing commentary added for color.  Woody Allen and Diane Keaton play Alvy Singer and the eponymous Annie Hall.

Bottom line: a true-to-life tale of two people.  Sometimes that can be a little uncomfortable.

Random Links

Fear of flying?  Don't read this.  Want to develop a fear of flying?  Go ahead and give it a look.

An ode to hunting on The Splendid Table.

Great photos.

Who knew glass was the solution to all the problems we didn't know we had?

Moby Dick - the Big Read.

You tell 'em, girl!

Potbelly's!

Oh my god, I can't believe it - there is a Potbelly's in St. Louis!  All my dreams have come true!

Okay, maybe not all my dreams, but still, it's pretty exciting.

Goal #41

Goal #41: pick an apartment (or some apartments)

For those of you who don't know, I'm moving.  This week, I'm looking at what I believe to be the last of the apartments that are in the running for my new residence.  Tuesday, in fact.  So I'm going to narrow it down to a few and put in some applications!

Recap of Goal #40: progress was made, only a little bit of it by me.  It's hard to pack when you still need to live somewhere.  I finally started doing the hard stuff - packing the kitchen.  How am I going to prepare my food?

What I'm Reading Now -- Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen, is another of the many books on my list that was wildly popular with book clubs when it was first released.  The limits of my current knowledge about it: circus, elephants, a clandestine love affair, and a movie with Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon (which I have not seen).

I hope it's not just dumb chick lit, but if it is, so what?  Everyone needs a little brain candy now and again.

What I Watched -- The Grey

Liam Neeson does his tough guy act again in The Grey.  But I'm okay with it, because he does it well enough.  With this character at least, it's not that he's so much into being a tough guy as that he just is a tough guy.  You learn a bit about his past and the nature of his "job at the end of the world," and you can see that he's just a guy who's been made that way.  Neeson's opportunities to show off his acting chops are spare here, but he manages to hang in there as the strong, silent type.

The aforementioned job of his is as a wolf hunter at a drilling rig in Alaska.  The wolves are relentless, and it's Ottway's (Neeson's) job to keep them at bay.  When they venture too close to the workers at the rig, "men unfit for mankind" as he describes them, it's Ottway's job to take them out.  Until, that is, a plane filled with men heading back to Anchorage goes down in the middle of nowhere.  The handful of survivors find themselves even farther from civilization than they had been in the oil fields, and surrounded by - you guessed it - hungry wolves.  This time Ottway is without his rifle.  Let your imagination take it from there.

This is a seriously macho film: man vs. man, man vs. animal, man vs. the elements.  It doesn't always end well, and it's rarely pretty in the process.  But somehow it also manages to be contemplative - perhaps it's all that snow quieting things down a bit.

Bottom line: bleak, bleak, bleak.  Literally grey most of the time.  But somehow, despite the fact that this is - let me say it again just so we're clear on the plot - a movie in which Liam Neeson fights with wolves, it's not terrible.  I'm not sure how that works.

What I Watched -- The Interrupters

I don't remember where I heard about The Interrupters, which is both a hopeless and hopeful story of a community group in Chicago; they call themselves violence interrupters.  (They are a division of a group called Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire.)  The group members, most of them former criminals themselves, come together to try to stop crime in one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city.  (They work in a few places besides Chicago as well.)

The film primarily follows three interrupters - Ameena, Eddie, and Cobe - in 2009 and 2010.  What you get are amazing stories of people willing to risk their own lives in an effort to improve their communities, with some small measure of success to show for it.

Bottom line: as I said, hopeless and hopeful.  Where are these kids' parents?  How did they get so off track?  (In one case, we know where the mom is - hiding from her own kids.)  But even when there are no parents, there is someone, even if it is an ex-con, willing to step up and make a change.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) -- Take 2

I think the version I had of this audiobook must have been abridged because it was only four CDs long.  Truthfully, I'm glad it was.  While it was certainly funny and even had some laugh-out-loud moments, I generally have limited tolerance for humor/biography books.  They get repetitive.  And even though the audio was abridged, I'm really glad it was read by the author.  Since much of it seemed to be train-of-thought type writing, and some of it not even that connected, it was nice to get the proper inflection to make otherwise unwieldy sentences (like this one) come out right.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I think I'm in Mindy Kaling's target demographic.  If you're not, you'll probably just think it's inane and kind of annoying.  True, there's not much in her life story that I can relate to other than being a chubby kid, but her general experiences are totally relatable and understandable. 

What I'm Reading Now -- American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design

I like architecture.  I was never math-y enough to actually be an architect and work on the projects while in the works, but I appreciate the final products.

The other day at my bookstore, I noticed this book: American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design.  I picked it up because, well, it seemed awesome: snippets of building and city history along with lovely pictures of some of the buildings which will soon be in my neighborhood, among others.

What I Watched -- Carnage

Wowzers, this movie is painful to watch.  In it, two sets of spouses meet to discuss an altercation between their sons - one hit the other in the face with a stick.  The parents begin in an awkwardly uncomfortable but civil meeting which develops into a festival of accusations, name-calling, and hurt feelings.  It's all a brilliant parallel to the fight between the boys, and also a study of the dynamics between spouses and the conditions of marriage, and an analysis of the evolution of arguments.

It's actually a fascinating portrayal of the shifting alliances which take place during an argument, the way points of view morph and move, and eventually it seems like the argument is running away with itself.

It helps that they all start drinking; that makes things really fun.  It also helps that the movie's short, because there's only so much of the intense breakdown that you can tolerate in one sitting.

Bottom line: it's a fascinating study of behavior and a train wreck of a collision between highbrow language and ideas and lowbrow actions.