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no olympics today As long as I let myself remember that Wednesdays are the one day of the week where I don't have to do anything productive, I usually enjoy them. Sadly that didn't really happen today. Maybe it was the humid weather or not the right kind of sleep, but for most of the day I didn't quite feel like myself. Instead of letting the Olympics entertain me, I watched two very different movies. The first was a French film called Seaside on the disc, but in the opening credits it said that the name of the movie was Pebbles. Either one is fine I guess since I wasn't that impressed by what I saw. Basically the story takes place in the small village of Cayeux, where the tourists are what keeps the place alive. Inhabiting this village are people who seem to mill about here and there with Marie being the heroine and or connecting link in the story. None of these characters meant anything to me and as a result I couldn't get involved in what was happening to them. The overall impression that I came away with from the film is that living next to the English Channel is a gloomy place. Now before I saw the film, I had no idea that this place existed. Then again I have only been to France once in my life and crossed the country in the space of a day. From Dover, England I made my way to Paris and then on to Germany the following morning. During my brief time in the northern part of the country, I remember seeing fields that could have been in Wisconsin and a few markers signaling World War I battle sites, but that didn't make much of an impression on me. I certainly don't remember a beach of stones lined with beach huts. The second movie that I watched was the comedy Flirting with Disaster with Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette in the lead roles as a married couple. In the movie, Ben is adopted and wants to find his parents so that he can complete his identity. So under the advice of a woman from the adoption agency placed by Tea Leoni, Ben, Patricia and their unnamed baby son make their way across the country to meet his natural parents. Here is where the comedy was supposed to start, but I didn't laugh once during the entire movie and I was a little disappointed in Ben. In the past his stuff has been worth my time, but this one didn't click for me. The only time that I sat up and paid attention was when Patricia was walking around in a white lace bra and if I wanted to see her topless, I believe that that happens in the movie Lost Highway. ... Monday morning after work I stopped at Half Price Books to see if they had any books by Paul Theroux since that is where I got my copy of The Happy Isles of Oceania. Well, they had a few of his books, but they were his fiction books and not his travel books. I wasn't that surprised or disappointed, because trying to find something there is always hit or miss for me. However, that does not mean that I walked away empty handed. No, I can not enter a bookstore and not buy something. For some reason it just isn't possible for me. Instead of Paul Theroux, I walked out with a book about a man who spent two years in China teaching English that I had wanted to read and a novel by Margaret Atwood. Besides those novels I also purchased a stack of Gen 13 comic books and three issues of Grant Morrison's Invisibles. Being there was an hour well spent. |