A Week at the Knees (part two)

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I don’t watch television in real time – not because I’m too snobby to do so, but because we never got cable in our house, and so watching television while the show is actually airing is an exercise in gymnastics.  Instead, I wait for DVD sets to be produced, and then I watch bunches of episodes at a time.  And what a golden opportunity this week presented me!

The first series up was Being Human, the British version, which I had heard about years ago but had never had an opportunity to see.  A couple of months ago, I was at Barnes and Noble during a particularly decent DVD sale and was able to pick this up (along with some other British TV series that are usually too pricey for me to buy).  This is the story of a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost who room together in a town in England.  They are trying to blend in, to be human, but fate (and other otherworldly beings) keeps making it difficult.  There was an Americanized version of the series, but I haven’t heard much about it so I don’t know how it did.  But I went on-line to see if this was still in production, and it is – it’s in its 4^th season, and unfortunately, the picture spread so proudly over the home page gave away way too much of what’s going to happen.  Series two is on its way to me as I write this, but I’m hoping not to wait for my next surgery to see it.

While Being Human was my upstairs TV series, Portlandia was my downstairs series.  Portlandia is a series of short sketches set in Portland, Oregon, and plays with the premise that Portland never made it out of the 1990s.  It’s quirky and funny.  A few misses mixed among the hits – but worth the time.  I will aim to see the second season when I can.

I’d always loved The Big Bang Theory, but because of the whole “don’t watch television in real time” thing, only caught an episode here and there when my daughter had it on.  These are MY people.  I grew up with these men; they were my friends.  Had I been male, I would have been one of them.  Not as smart, for sure, but the same interests – Star Trek and science fiction in general, collecting odd nerd memorabilia, knowledge of useless facts (though not at all as science-driven as these men).  Never got the video game bug, but that’s okay, I can live without it.  The Big Bang Theory, season one, was my next upstairs series.  I love this show.  I can definitely see continuing to watch, and I hear they really didn’t come into their own until the second and third seasons, so it’ll be fun to see how that happens.  While I think Jim Parsons has definitely earned his Emmy nominations, Johnny Galecki carries more than his fair share of the comedy and I think needs his own nomination.

Several years ago, WonderFalls came on the air and was gone within a millisecond.  Of course it was:  if I like a show and can actually watch it, it gets cancelled.  Thirteen episodes were produced, but only 4 of them aired, and of those, I think I saw one or two – but I knew I loved the show.  So when the DVD set was released, of course I picked it up – and then let it sit on my shelf for a few years until first, I gave it to my daughter to watch (and she loved it), and then this week, a friend pointed me in its direction.  I was sad to see the thirteen episodes pass – and angry to see a plot development that I did not like, that didn’t look it could resolve itself by the end of the brief series.  I sent my friend a threatening email, telling her she would come to harm if the situation didn’t get fixed – and it did, thank goodness for her health and safety.  I would love to know if the last episode was made after the series was cancelled and the story resolution done intentionally because it was cancelled.  Everything looked like the plot was heading in another direction and then it swung right around.  Whew.

You see how involved one can get in one’s media entertainment when one is limited in environmental scope?

I actually did read too.  At the end of 2011 as I contemplated my own best of books list, I wondered what YA books had done well, and considered getting them for my classroom collection.  The first of these was Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev.  I have to say up front:  I wasn’t swept into the writing style.  But it was the first of a trilogy, and I’d already purchased the second book, and, well, I felt I needed to make a commitment.  Eyes Like Stars is an interesting story about a theater in which all the players are characters from plays – mostly Shakespeare – and they cannot leave the theater.  Their existence is limited to that particular theater, and what they say happens on stage.  Into this environment is brought a young girl who appears to have an unusual ability to control – to direct – the happenings of the theater.  There’s a love triangle set up (at least it isn’t among a human, a werewolf, and a vampire [see Twilight comments, above] – oh, and Being Human does not set its characters in a love triangle either, thank goodness) and we end the book with an unresolved mystery that should take us into book two.  I’m not overly eager to get there, but I suppose in for the penny, in for the pound.

The other book I finished was David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, a collection of humorous essays that claim to be stories from his life – although Sedaris is the first to tell you how what he writes is in no way factual, but is, instead, truthful.  He has been the subject of several literary explorations into fact versus truth, especially since James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the confrontation that set up with Oprah Winfrey.  Sedaris has a remarkable voice, and I got used to his storytelling abilities on This American Life, which I used to listen to obsessively while driving back and forth to visit my son at school.  This is why when I read a Sedaris book, I prefer to listen to it.  I’ve spent the last month or so listening to Sedaris reading this book to me in my car (blast that 45-second commute of mine!), and I was able to finish it off while convalescing in my living room.

While I am extolling the wonders of media entertainment, I suppose I should mention that I spent a lot of time playing PathPix on my iPad.  It’s a puzzle that asks you to connect numbers of corresponding colors with one another in lines of spaces that add up to those numbers.  For instance, two red 13s would be connected by a line of 13 spaces – but rarely a straight line.  These puzzles have been getting harder and harder in recent days as I solve through the Advanced levels.  I have only 20 to go before I use up all the puzzles and have to go back and clear them all (which I have promised to do for my daughter, as she is equally taken with the game).

So to tally, that would be 7 movies, 4 TV series (6 1-hour episodes, 6 ½-hour episodes, 13 1-hour episodes, 17 ½-hour episodes), 2 books, 1 just-one-more-till-20-have-been-solved game.  Not bad for a week with my feet up.

I returned to work today, but it was too soon – I regret that decision.  I have decided to take tomorrow off to recover, and I hope to be back to work on the following day.  But that leaves tomorrow completely open…what shall I do?

A Week at the Knees (part one)

I am on the far end of recovering from knee surgery and am planning a return to work tomorrow morning.  I’ve had a lot of down time this week – with my knee up and iced, and my mind on various forms of media.  It may not have been the kind of fun vacation from school most of us think about when we think about February break, but it was certainly restful for me.  I had no choice but to stay still and let others help.

And boy, that was hard – letting others help.  I’m not good at asking for help, first of all, and so when people offer, my initial impulse is to wave them off, to say I am fine and have no needs.  This week, I learned to say thank you with grace, if not complete comfort.  I am grateful for the company, for the food, for the phone calls, for the offered support.  Friends both local and distant rallied to offer me comfort and friendship; I am truly fortunate.

And I am grateful that in our modern times, there are so many ways to divert me from boredom.  I would have gone stir crazy without movies and TV shows and books and iPad games and magazines and email and Facebook at my fingertips.  Shall we see how I amused myself?

Movies
Is it terribly embarrassing to say that I started my recovery by watching the second half of Breaking Dawn Part One?  I needed something simple, something that could pass the time without requiring a great deal of brain energy.  This certainly did fill the need.  I had seen it before in the theater – on Thanksgiving night while I was on the run from a behavioral episode that had taken place earlier in the evening, and hadn’t really paid a whole lot of attention to it then.  I have developed more of a distaste for the Twilight series as the books and movies have progressed – certainly the first book, while not wonderfully written, told an engaging story and held my attention, and the subsequent books deteriorated as they progressed.  Anyone familiar enough with me to discuss the Twilight books has already heard my rant about Stephenie Meyers and her eye rolling so I won’t explore that here – but I do note that the characters in the movies don’t do a whole lot of eye rolling so perhaps someone, somewhere, got the message.  I think at this point, I watch the movies for the same reason I continued to read the books – an impulse to just finish the damn things.

What a difference to move on to the next movie:  The Ides of March.  I like George Clooney, I like Ryan Gosling, what’s not to like in a movie starring both Clooney and Gosling?  Not a whole lot – I thought it was an excellent movie, a wonderful character study of a man (Gosling) at a distinct point in his career when he had to make a choice about where his life was going to go, knowing that the choice was being made and what its repercussions would be.  Many of us make these choices not knowing they will be critical and life-changing until we look back upon them, but this movie dealt with the conscious, intentional choice one man had to make at a specific time, with specific circumstances, and no backpedalling permitted.  I found the story engaging, though surely they could have thrown a few more important and intelligent women into the story.  I do believe women participate in politics these days, don’t they?

I watched Let It Be, not always able to follow the dialogue (heavy accents, no subtitles) but certainly able to recognize the music.  I had seen only small snippets of the concert on the roof and I was pleased to see more of it here.  This was a very Paul-centric exploration of the Beatles, but there was one particular moment – a George moment – that I adored:  Paul and George are discussing how George should play his part in a song, and George says, “Look, tell me what to play, and I’ll play it.  If you don’t want me to play anything, I won’t.  Just tell me and I’ll do what you want.”  One can see the struggle involved with keeping that kind of conversation civil – there’s a lot behind those words that we did not get to see.

Fish Tank was a splendid movie, a Bildungsroman about a young English girl in a poor section of town, trying to find out who she is in the midst of circumstances that don’t make it easy.  She has a relationship of sorts with an older man, her mother’s boyfriend, and though their relationship does culminate in a physical coupling, it’s the development of his influence over her, and hers over him, that informs the bulk of the movie.

I had heard Super 8 was a fun movie, and indeed it was – clearly involving Steven Spielberg (many echoes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind here).  The story traced the stereotypical hero path of its protagonist, a 12-year-old boy, through his quest – featuring such elements as uncommon family situation (his mother has died), traumatic experience that begins the quest (a train wreck), magical weapon (the camera, the unusual Rubik’s Cube-like pieces spilled at the train wreck), older sage-like guidance (the science teacher), descent into hell (going underground to locate his friend and the monster who took her), and ultimately, reconciliation with father figure (he and his dad ultimately bond and Get Through This Thing Together).  It’s rather fun to see literary constructs in action in popular culture.  Joseph Campbell would be proud.

I’ve been a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s for more than 20 years – going back to his Henry V days – and so when he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar, I wanted him to win it.  Then I started hearing about this wonderful performance Christopher Plummer gave in Beginners, and I had to see it.  I hate to admit it, but Plummer deserved the award, which he won last night, over Branagh.  Well, Plummer’s 82, and now the oldest winner of an Academy Award ever, and Branagh is a little older than me and still has time, so fair’s fair.  Beginners is the story of a man and his father – Ewan McGregor and Plummer – told in three timelines:  when McGregor’s character was a boy, as he dealt with his father’s illness and death, and months later as he tried to find love with a woman as commitment-phobic as he was.  The complication of this movie lies in Plummer’s character’s decision to come out as a gay man at the age of 75 – knowing he was gay all his life and remaining married and faithful to his wife, it was only when she died that he was able to turn to the lifestyle he’d dreamed of all his life.  There is no judgment involved in this decision – it is supported and welcomed by all characters – it’s not an issue whether or not he was right to stay married as a gay man, or how wholeheartedly to turn to a gay lifestyle once freed to do so.  The issue here is:  what do we owe ourselves in our search for identity and connection?  That’s a tough question we ask ourselves as we come to terms with our limited lifespans when we age away from the delusional immortality of our adolescent and young adult beliefs.

What an abrupt shift, then, from Beginners to Fight Club.  I had read Chuck Palahniuk’s book ages ago, probably when it was first published, and was not terribly impressed with the violence, or even the writing style.  But the movie has attained cultural touchstone status, and I had been meaning to see it for some time.  Here was my chance.  And, bearing in mind I’m not a fan of Brad Pitt’s in most of his movies, I tried to go into the movie as fairly as I could.  I still didn’t like it.  Dark and violent, sometimes confusing – even knowing the “secret” I found it baffling at times – I wasn’t pleased by the way it glorified terrorism.  Check that goal off my to-see list, thank goodness.

That’s it for the movies.  I believe I’ll save the TV series for part two.