Reviews

Movies:
I recently reactivated my Netflix account and received the first two movies on my queue. One was a Finnish movie I have seen a few times called The Man Without a Past. The other was The Rage in Placid Lake, which was leftover from my brief excursion into Australian cinema before my trip down under in October. It was an ok movie, nothing to write home about (or blog about, incidentally), but included on the DVD was a short film called At Dawning. In this short film, we see a woman wake up in bed with a man who remains asleep. It quickly becomes apparent that this was a one-night stand and she would prefer to vanish while he sleeps, leaving this indiscretion behind her. As she is leaving his apartment, however, she sees a man fall from above and get caught in the tree outside the bedroom window. It's a lovely little glimpse at a realistically absurd situation (I mean, just today I nearly locked myself in the loading dock at the bakery) that winds up happily.

TV:
So I finally gave in and started watching LOST. (Seasons 1-3 are available free on abc.com.) It's not that great, but it gets me through some boring nights of being too exhausted to get up from the couch. I'm about midway through season 2. I far prefer episodes where they are pretty much ignoring all the insane things that are going on on the island over the episodes with "Others" and "hatches" and "monsters" and "polar bears".

Books:
I just finished reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel (warning, the link pretty much gives away the whole book), and am now reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I was not as impressed by Life of Pi as I expected to be. For one thing, it is extremely gory in parts, frequently describing in detail the way one animal tears another animal apart for food. Also, I am rather put off by the sea in general, and the thought of being lost at sea on a small lifeboat with no food is especially distressing to me. These things would have been fine, however, if the whole chain of events wasn't thrown into doubt in the last 50 pages of narrative. I'm not a fan of ambiguity. I guess it was worth reading, though.