The Dark Knight

First things first: Scott, if you're reading this stop now and go buy your movie tickets.

Second: Marcus Theatres is probably the worst theatre chain in history. I went to a midnight release; I'd never been to a midnight release and thought it would be fun. The management at the Coral Ridge Mall Theatres decided to hold the start of the showing until everyone had been through the concession line (lame). The reasoning? Midnight showings always start late. Excuse me (Cedar Rapids theatres don't have this problem)? I paid $9.50 for my ticket and people know when the movie starts, which is midnight , so if theatre-goers are brain-damaged and think they need to pay $12.00 for a small soda and nasty popcorn then that's on them. Not me. I paid to see a movie that started on-time. Soooo....the previews didn't start until about 12:20am and the actual opening credits for The Dark Knight didn't roll until after 12:35am; I didn't get home until about 3:30am and I only live ten minutes from the mall. Janice swiped a pile of comment cards so guess who's getting really bad feedback.

Previews, and there were at least six:
1. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - not sure if I want to see this since Evie was re-cast with Maria Bello but Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh are in this (and I like Jet Li).
2. The Spirit - another Frank Miller film, looks visually gorgeous
3. Watchmen - the long-awaited Zach Snyder-helmed adaptation of the graphic novel; I've not read the novel but I might have to now (expected release March 2009)
4. Some movie with Leonardo di Caprio and Russell Crowe (which is how I remembered it - I had to make use of IMDB to determine that it was Body of Lies)
5. The Day The Earth Stood Still - Keanu Reeves as an alien in the remake of the 1951 classic so I'm too sure about this one, Jennifer Connelly also stars
6. Terminator Salvation - teaser trailer, since this is a summer 2009 release, starring Christian Bale, directed by McG (who has yet to direct anything I appreciate)

The movie:
Fucking awesome. Heath Ledger gave the performance of his career; even if Christopher Nolan has decided not to use "Joker" make-up, Ledger would still have been The Joker. He was unrecognizable with wonderful use of facial tics (the lip-licking was a nice touch) and it was a truly memorable performance. He deserves an Oscar. RIP. Great performances also from Gary Oldman, a long-time favorite of mine, Aaron Eckhart (props also to the SFX make-up people) and even Christian Bale, who sometimes drives me nuts. I thought the movie did drag a bit through the last 20 minutes in trying to get all the storylines tied together but not too terribly slow. I can't wait for the Filmspotting review (which should be on iTunes by this evening, they've already got the blog updated but I'm not reading it, yet).

Current book-in-progress: need to start Rebecca since that's the August book
Current knitted item: Tan linen evening bag (I will not have this done before the Kuebler Banquet, darn)
Current movie obsession: I finished In Bruges, which was great and has a funny extra on the DVD where they cut all the swear words together into a 1:50 track, but I also thought very sad in the end; I've got Secretary, Hard Candy, and Brazil lined up for the weekend
Current iTunes loop: Filmspotting and the Guardian Books podcast

And the new reason why my job is the pits...

My fellow RA went on vacation last week.

And didn't tell us.

We didn't realise this until Friday at 1pm.

My only comment: She is very, very lucky that I am not her boss.

Sunday Movie Marathon

This weekend was pretty crazy - Shakespeare Festival, picked up my glasses in Cedar Rapids, played with my nieces for a couple of hours (looked at their mom's rash, too), worked (at lot) at the bookstore, cleaned up my house (sort-of), and watched two movies.

Say Anything is one of those hold-overs from my middle-school/junior high days. Sigh. I wanted a boy to hold up his boom-box to play "In Your Eyes" for me. I hadn't watched the movie in quite a while (and the lustre has dimmed a bit) but the party scene and the boom-box scene are still the best. Lili Taylor singing these terrible, one-key songs about that creep she slept with/dated. Priceless. I'm pretty sure that Can't Hardly Wait was a total rip-off of Say Anything, now that I think about it, minus the father-going-to-jail plot.

I also watched The Savages and it's been in my queue a while (I had it on "save" once the entry was available in Netflix). What can I say about this movie? It is amazing. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are so wonderful in this picture. Phillip Bosco also gives a stand-out performace as the aging, ill father Lenny Savage who was, apparently, an abusive prick when his children were younger. The feel of this movie is so "real" that you might as well be sitting at a nursing home watching the real thing.

I have an awesome queue set up for the next few weeks: Secretary, Hard Candy, Brazil (the non-"Love Conquers All" ending, that one's down about #11 on the list), Donnie Darko, Penelope, Slings and Arrows Season 1, Withnail and I, In the Valley of Elah, and Kiss of the Spider Woman (which is FINALLY out on DV D). In the Valley of Elah might keep moving down because I keep finding other things I want to watch first.

Current book-in-progress: Agnes Grey (and associated articles), Why We Read Fiction, Bambi vs. Godzilla (by David Mamet about the film industry), and I did read another two pages of Swann's Way (which makes a grand total of 8; I probably would have gotten farther but someone on the bus interrupted to ask what I was reading - seriously people, what do you think the iPod and earbuds are for??)
Current knitted item: Tan linen evening bag (ooh, got some new yarn for a pullover)
Current movie obsession: In Bruges (has a great short scene with an obese American chasing around Colin Farrell because Farrell's character hinted that the trip up the church tower might be difficult because, of well, you know....); The Dark Knight comes out THIS WEEK
Current iTunes loop: Filmspotting (I keep forgetting to rip the Sigur Ros CD to my computer)

I hate the dentist

Here's a random thought: Why do I think there are extra teeth in my mouth once my face is numbed with Novocaine? I feel like my mouth doesn't fit together right because there are too many teeth and none of those teeth belong to me because I can't feel them.

In all seriousness, that was the fastest dental appointment I ever attended. Apparently, I had a chip out of the back of one of my front teeth (the dentist initally thought it was a chipped filling until I pointed out that I'd never had a filling there). The whole appointment took about 25 minutes, start to finish. Even my six month check-ups take longer than that because of X-rays, etc. I traditionally loathe the dentist because I can't stand having someone mess with my teeth, even to clean and polish them. It makes me cringe but I put up with it because I'd like to have my own teeth when I get old.

Books, Books, Books

Ufda! I spent two-and-a-half hours this evening helping to reshelve the storage items (i.e. books still stuck on the Dewey Decimal system that aren't requested more than once every quarter century or so) at the UI Main Library. The library officially reopened today and the staff are trying to get everything put back where it goes as quickly as humanly possible. They put out a call for volunteers today so I went over around 6pm ... I was the only volunteer but I got to exercise my OCD tendencies and help put the theses in order.

I don't have much money to donate, but I do have time.

I don't have a lot of money because I tend to buy books. I acquired yet another two tonight (and those are the ones I'm telling about). One, A Beginner's Guide to Critical Reading, is for my poor brain for when I get into a grad program; the literature used covers a number of years of English Literature (no Jane Austen but Charlotte Perkins Gilman gets a nod) and the Theory is wide-ranging. The second I bought because of Ilana - her weekly posting in the "Literature and Life" board at BNBC muses over Lisa Zunshine's "theory of mind" as used in her book Why We Read Fiction.

I did finally finish The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups. There weren't many "palace coups" but there were a number of "clashing scholars" throughout. I found the book very accessible, Rosenbaum being a former Yale grad student, and also very thorough in the attempt to cover as many competing/conflicting veiws of Shakespeare in a non-"I'm going to bore you to death" type of way. More on this later - I'm pooped and I have to go to the dentist tomorrow. Yuck.

Current book-in-progress: Blindness (goes back to the public library Saturday so I'd rather not have to renew it)
Current knitted item: Tan linen evening bag
Current movie obsession: Empire Records (love, love, love)
Current iTunes loop: I got the new Sigur Ros CD (don't even make me pronounce the Icelandic title) - which I heard on NPR's All Songs Considered - and it is AWESOME

I have an interview!

I have an interview set up for July 28th - excellent (I found out that another candidate's interview for the position is scheduled for August 15 - gee, let's stretch this out).

Problem: I need to bring a writing sample of about one page.

Ack!! Does anyone know how long it's been since I wrote something that consisted only of one page? A very long time. And I haven't got anything epidemiology-related that's under ten or at least of anything I wrote all on my little lonesome (I'm not going to use an article I co-wrote). I think I'll photocopy a chapter out of my thesis. At least it's all my own work.

In other fun news, I and a number of my BN buddies are volunteering to usher at the Shakespeare Festival performance of The Winter's Tale on Friday. Originally, the Festival is held outdoors at a period-ish recontruction of a Elizabethan theatre in City Park. Um, yeah, the whole park is (was) underwater and the Festival moved to City High. I need to re-read The Winter's Tale before Friday (or at least crib a bit).

I finished ideas last night! Whoo, hoo. All 746 pages of it. I also polished off 10 Bad Dates with de Niro and I have to say that I really should watch more foreign/non-American Hollywood films.

Current book-in-progress: Agnes Grey, Blindness, and The Dead Father
Current knitted item: Tan linen evening bag
Current movie obsession: Gosford Park (I've watched it three times back to back just for all the commentary)
Current iTunes loop: NPR "All Songs Considered" and "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" along with a little bit of Janet Jackson

Nick Hornby has a blog!

Nick Hornby of About a Boy and Fever Pitch fame (and also the "Stuff I've Been Reading/Watching" column for Believer magazine) has a blog and he's soooo funny. Actually, he's funny all the time. Today he has a great post about the Borders e-reader "Iliad" and how e-readers in general will not work amongst the average reading population. None of whom seem to read. Sad.

Current book-in-progress: 10 Bad Dates With de Niro and Agnes Grey
Current knitted item: Tan linen evening bag (ha!, you thought I was going to say gray neckwarmer)
Current movie obsession: The History Boys
Current iTunes loop: Filmspotting Episode #216

It's dry again, but something smells fishy

Actually, it smells more like sewer. That's the lovely thing about floods in Iowa. When the water goes away you're left with this nasty sludge full of mud, farm chemicals, pig/cow poop, and sewage, among other things. It smells nasty and breeds god-knows-what...yuck.

That said, I only have to smell it. I don't live in a flooded area so my house was high and dry. I didn't have internet service for a week but that's a very, very minor inconvenience. There's a lot of damage to personal property, businesses, and the University of Iowa campus. Billions of dollars. I can't really complain about a noxious smell since I don't have to replace my entire life.

Now that television is back to normal, and it's summer so the line-up is dull as dishwater, I finally managed to watch Foul Play. A Goldie Hawn-Chevy Chase comedy/suspense/parody/police procedural/espionage film released in 1978. IT IS HYSTERICAL. There are a number of hints paying homage to other iconic films, most notably the scene in Goldie Hawn's bathroom where there might be something behind the shower curtain and the camera slowly moves in on the shower curtain a la Psycho; the soundtrack perfectly mimics earlier thrillers with plenty of "duh-duh-dum" moments (and a theme song "Ready to Take a Chance Again" by Barry Manilow). You must watch this movie, if only for the following excellent moments:
1. The "bachelor pad" scene with the hapless Stanley (played by Dudley Moore) set to "Staying Alive" by the Bee-Gees. Every single tasteless '70s sex cliche is in this scene.
2. The little old women playing Scrabble - they spell "motherf*cker" incorrectly then quibble over whether a hyphenated word was played.
3. Billy Barty as a bible salesman (yes, this is the same man who played the High Aldwyn in Willow). Goldie Hawn chases him out of her apartment with a broom. I would tell you why she does that but it would ruin part of the plot.
4. Chevy Chase's dog is named Chaucer in the movie. (ha!)
5. The "massage parlor" sequence, again with Dudley Moore. Binoculars again.
6. Mr. Hennessey (played by the wonderful Burgess Meredith) and his black-belt karate training vs. the crazy assassin lady; this is very obviously pre-Matrix fighting and it wins for campiest fight scene ever.
7. Mr. Hennessey's curious boa constrictor, Esme.
8. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado plays through the entire last twenty minutes of the movie (the overture is used extensively in the soundtrack); the production is conducted by, yes, Dudley Moore, who does actually manage to look like he is conducting.
9. The "car chase" across town which really isn't a car chase but there isn't a better word for it.
10. The elderly Japanese couple and "Kojak bang-bang."
11. The credits - the opera singers are listed by their Mikado character so not only do you have to know the opera to figure out who played what (and you have to do it by ear), you can't recognize any of the New York City Opera performers by sight because they are all wearing traditional Japanese stage make-up.
12. Best line ever: "You're a light bulb waiting to be screwed."

Go! Watch!

A group of us watched No Country for Old Men at Kat's place; holy god, is that movie awesome - creepy but awesome. The Coen brothers are geniuses (I don't think you can separate them into single entities) and I added yet another movie to my all-time-favorites list. Aside from a great script adaptation (I think Cormac McCarthy translates well to the screen because so much can be said with the camera in his novels) there was a phenomenal cast as well - Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly Macdonald. All perfect (dude, Kelly Macdonald is so awesome that if you didn't already know she was Scottish you wouldn't believe it).

Current book-in-progress: I polished off The Gun Seller which is also hysterical, mostly because it is written by Hugh Laurie (this book is James Bond on acid doing international espionage); still finishing ideas and The Shakespeare Wars (got sidetracked by an unfinished copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel)
Current knitted item: Back to the gray neckwarmer
Current movie obsession: Foul Play! But I need to send that back to Netflix. Got a great queue set up - The Savages, The History Boys, In Bruges.....excellent viewing. I've kind of developed a film obsession lately and purchased 10 Bad Dates with de Niro: A Book of Alternate Movie Lists (let's watch to see the Netflix queue expand even further)
Current iTunes loop: I have discovered that podcasts are free on iTunes, therefore, I have started obsessing over Filmspotting with Adam and Matty

UI Flood Blog

In case anyone needs specific UI information concerning the flooding (lots of things are moving to different performance venues), the UI has created a blog - on Blogger - to keep everyone in the loop.

Water, water, everywhere...

Once again, fifteen years after the last flood, we are having severe flooding in the Midwest. We had a ton of rain, on top of a ton of snow, and all the rivers are expected to crest at higher levels than 1993. It's only going to get worse, too, because we have more heavy rain on the schedule for later this week. I'm fine, my parents are fine, my brothers and sisters-in-law are fine, and the worst any of us are going to have are some pretty insane pictures of high water. However, there are many people who aren't fine and who are losing their homes. New Hartford, which was leveled by an F5 tornado on Memorial Day weekend, has now been evacuated because what was left is all underwater. My brother (the paramedic one) just came in from shift and they closed US218 south behind him because the Cedar River is rising (he works in Waverly and the river runs through the middle of town). I'm in Iowa City and the Coralville Resirvoir is close to running over the spillway at the top (the only other time that happened was in 1993). Pretty much any low-lying area near the river is flooding. This link is to a picture of Lower City Park on the Iowa River; in undergrad I lived in the building (Mayflower Hall) in the lower left hand corner, the little concrete island is a skateboard park which is normally across a two-lane divided road from the 'Flower, the tree-less stripe down the middle is where the Iowa River normally lives, and everything else until you get to the funny round building (Riverside Shakespeare Theatre) at the top of the picture is floodwater. More pictures are available at either the Iowa City Press-Citizen or the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

I might meet the bus downtown so I can see the river looks like today. I'm thinking about bringing my camera and getting some pictures tomorrow morning.

Current book-in-progress: definitely working on finished ideas (because there are only 200 pages left) and The Shakespeare Wars (only 100 pages left)
Current knitted item: Wool smells funny when wet, boo
Current movie obsession: Movies? What movies? I've been glued to the weather report for a week
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday"

Muppets!!!!

Muppet Show Season 3 is finally out on DVD!! It has Fozzie on the cover. Ooohh....must have.

Random acts of life

In the last few weeks, I finished several books, watched almost no television, didn't knit anything, played a lot of Packrat, put together a porch swing, and contemplated revenge on a fellow RA. I've been busy.

I finished The Story of Mankind (1921) edition. I've got about 70 pages to read in the 1972 update and I peeked through the 1995 edition. None of the language has been updated nor have citations been added in any of the later editions, so there goes my hopes (I was really hoping for citations, at the very least, in the 1995 edition). I think if I had a child reading this there would be some supplemental reading and research going on especially if interest was sparked in a particular topic. It was just too much of a storybook and not so much a history book, in my opinion. Next up on the Newbery list is The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, the 1923 winner. I've got an Illustrated Junior Library edition checked out from the Coralville Public Library so I'm ready to go. Here's a list of the vocabulary from the last half of The Story of Mankind:
sturgeon
cipher
serf (which is not defined nearly as well as it should be in the text)
thither
commodity
unscrupulous
parallelopiped
heresy/heresies
mulcted (which I had to look up because NONE of us had heard of it, ever)
Zwingli
abjured
predestination
remonstrance
timorous
Sinn Fein(er)
buncombe
demagogues
tercentenary
obdurate
bumptious
ambiguous
Putsch

I polished off The Host (finally) and was surprised that it took me nearly a month. Each of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books only took a couple of hours. I didn't read them, I inhaled them. However, with The Host I started seeing too many similarities with Twilight and that had me a little disturbed and worried that somehow Stephenie Meyer was a bit of a one-note. The Host does have an interesting premise - a sort of body-snatchers setting with a love triangle/quadrangle (depending on how you count souls and bodies) - but I stalled about 200 pages from the end due to a soccer game (there's a baseball game in Twilight). A slightly predictable ending (never intimate that the narrator is going to die in a first person narrative with nearly 20 pages left in the book) but I really appreciated how SM wrote the necessary exposition into the storyline of the book (i.e. Wanda's "stories") rather than devote pages and pages to it separately.

I also finished Songs for the Missing, an advance copy of the next Stewart O'Nan novel. Never having read O'Nan (Kat staff rec'd Last Night at the Lobster) I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Lurid? Simple? Absurd? Strangely enough, the situation seemed almost mundane, aside from an eighteen-year-old gone missing. It wasn't mundane as in "I'm so bored I can't finish this" but mundane like "this is LIFE, this is what happens when a child goes missing." Other readers compared Songs for the Missing to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which is a phenomenal novel simply for the power of the author's descriptions. There are some parallels, but what was striking to me was that after Kim went missing in the first chapter that was it. No following her until she's grabbed, no struggle, or what the perpetrator did with the car; instead, we stay with the family and friends as they try to find her. The Lovely Bones, being a first-person narrative followed Susie's thoughts as she watched her family and that provided a completely different sense of the action. One thing I really noticed and appreciated throughout Songs for the Missing was the choice of third-person narrative; the narration wasn't truly omniscient and tended to follow one specific character for each chapter (Fran, Ed, Lindsay, JP, Nina). A very thoughtful novel about how time continues to push us forward even when something terrible happens. Eventually you have to go back to work, to school.

In other random life events, I bought a porch swing - yay, evenings on the porch, reading, napping, etc (must get more citronella to ward off the mosquitoes). It was a pain to assemble because apparently it was "requires two adults for assembly" - phoo on them. I did eventually get the assembly done all by my little self.

And we had an RA bugger off last week and not do what the boss told him to do before he left. So I had a panic and a cold sweat on Monday. Turns out he threw his project at a different (new) RA and left her to do the surveillance cultures instead of me, like the boss said he should. I was supposed to take everything over and then train the new RA. Luckily, the new RA is a lab person so figured out pretty quickly what the project was and got Monday and Tuesday finished before I found out that she was on the project. Whew, but the little bastard didn't mention several key things like how to order more product, how to use the spreadsheet on the shared drive so all of us can stay current on the surveillance, or that other units do surveillance, too, and so you should check the patient's records so we don't duplicate testing. FYI, this is the same little bastard I complained about several months ago (he was just up here talking to one of the secretaries - I guess he needs employment for the summer? I vote "no" and think we should just hire someone else who is responsible and doesn't act like the sun shines out his posterior). I've been thinking of very painful things and I hope he comes back in his next lifetime as a roach or something.

And the weather has been really, really crappy lately.

Current book-in-progress: Persuasion, The Gunseller, Lord of the Flies, The Spirit of the Place, ideas (only 270 pages left), The Shakespeare Wars (only 150 pages left) and The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle
Current knitted item: I've been a very lazy knitter....
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine (I haven't watched any TV/movies lately except for the news and weather (strange) so LMS is just sitting in my DVD player, ready to go)
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday" (concert album with a kick-ass riff in the middle of "Gravity")