A Girl With a Sword

too much popcorn

I just got back from seeing The Squid and the Whale and I just want to say: I'm sorry, I didn't know I was doing that. The movie for me was like those films that they show Adam in Clockwork Orange that make him feel sick when he does something wrong. Now whenever I start b.s.-ing in a falsely intellectual way I will immediately be reminded of this film, and then have to run to the bathroom.

The movie is about a family and a divorce. There is the father, the mother, and their sons, Walt and Frank. The father is a snobbish intellectual who is training up his sons to know that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens, not as dense as Great Expectations or David Copperfield. "Minor" is a curse word and "dense" is the word of ultimate praise. Walt is the most receptive to his father's training and is continually asking for advice about what to think about books and films and people. An interchange that really sums this up is when the father and Walt are going out to a movie. Walt says, "We were thinking of Short Circuit." The father looks doubtful, then, in a correcting voice says, "Blue Velvet is supposed to be good."

And I've done that so many times. All I kept thinking while I was watching the movie was, "This is us, and we are horrible people." It was good, masochistic maybe, but good.

Hope and I went to the Kendall Square Cinema tonight and for the first time in my life I wanted to see every movie that was playing there. We went to see Casanova and we saw it and it was a lot of fun. Talk about hijinks ensuing. A costume drama complete with love, mistaken identity, and a deus ex machina. In Venice! But then when that movie got over we still had popcorn left, and we are "waste not want not" kind of girls, you know, so we had to go see another movie. Darn Hope and her exorbitant popcorn buying habits.