First, let me apologize for the recent paucity of blog posts… what can I say? So many blogs*… so little time… Anywhich (as Flea would say), what a beautifully observed film we watched this week! Susanne Bier is not a director who likes to let you walk away feeling like grabbing a Felafel and calling it a day, but After The Wedding was, believe it or not, the lightest directorial offering we have experienced of hers. It would be great to show her original “Brothers” before the Hollywood remake comes out… but that would mean showing it on Thanksgiving Friday. Hmmm.
*Flea’s blog and MyOldBanana (a work in progress)
The posts that didn’t get written in a timely fashion might have been like this:
Let the Right One In (but keep the nice ones away!)
This hauntingly beautiful Swedish vampire flick was our post-Hallowe’en Hallowe’en special; post-Hallowe’en because Zofi was afflicted with ye olde (newe?) h1n1 the week before (after watching her suffer, I’d have to recommend not catching it… definitely not fun. Thankfully, I managed to ward it off, with a combination of Tamiflu, vitamins, oregano oil, cordyceps and gin!), and we thought it best not to expose our friends to that, even though she was technically not contagious by that point.
Our guests enjoyed some spicy treats and home-made brownies with Pumpkin cream cheese spread. Sadly, our projector was away for repair, and a the substitute projector really wasn’t up to the task of showing anything but a gray murk in the dark scenes. Ironically, the disc projected was Blu-ray, and would have looked so goooood… nevermind. At least the projector is fixed now, and we got a new bulb for free! Of late I have become something of a letter-of-complaint writer (emailer). There comes a time when the standard of service we’ve been lead to believe is normal just isn’t good enough, and it seems that the squeaky wheel does indeed get the oil, as the old saying goes.
Half Nelson = full house. Ryan, we have your salad bowl.
Ryan Gosling as teacher, mentor, crack smoker. Shareeka Epps as his pupil (or was she his teacher ultimately?). Half Nelson was the second in our unintentional** schoolroom drama series. We might have one or two up our sleeves, but time will tell. Now there’s a great expression if ever there was one: “Time will tell.” I digress. HN was a great, earthy flick which was somewhat unobviously set in BKNY. Did you notice?
Tangential Trivia: Director Ryan Fleck once hosted a rip-roaring, Patron-sponsored fund-raiser here, and left a wooden salad bowl that often comes out at MovieNight when the popcorn buckets are all dispensed.
**As you might have figured out by now, the MovieNight programme is spontaneously arrived at, with each week’s feature being chosen according to what takes our fancy. It’s better that way, we think.
