rinsed dishes, ran dishwasher
Alita: Battle Angel 12:40 at Alamo Drafthouse
boneless pork ribs bagged with marinade
lake walk and grocery run eclipsed by nap
leftovers from yesterday's visit to Old Time BBQ
Prime movie pick: Rob the Mob + an ep of Monk (s5e10)
Recent movie picks included "Six Degrees of Separation" and "The Time Traveler's Wife". We liked them both, but it makes you wonder a bit when you try to remember "so what movie did we watch last night" and can't remember without racking your brain a minute. Time Traveler's Wife was certainly more emotionally engaging and deep than our VDay viewing of Fifty Shades Freed.
Another recent pick was "Along Came Polly", which basically took Ben Stiller's "Something ABout Mary" character and threw him with minor cosmetic changes at Jennifer Aniston instead of Cameron Diaz. Boy with pathetic childhood grows up and is no longer pathetic? Oops, ok you got me, he really is still kind of pathetic after all. Wishy-washy to the point of faking and lying without hesitation to seem compatible with Polly's appetite for adventure. I didn't get the sense that Stiller's Ruben "grew" into someone who discovered a joy in adventure for its own sake; he's just neurotically driven to try to rewrite his emotional trauma, proving to the ghost of Lisa in his head that he's as exciting and confident as Hank Azaria's Claude. This drama is realized explicitly in the closing scene where he and Polly actually encounter Claude, apparently by design, only to take off with the even more adventurous Australian tycoon. Polly doesn't grow at all; Ruben calls her out repeatedly as commitment-phobic and in the end, she has sacrificed nothing, compromised nothing, while he has thrown even his value on commitment under the bus.